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I've listened to only 2/3 of it, but: he promotes Crystal+Lucky (crystal is compiled) as good replacements for Ruby and Rails. The second part of his talk is a

I've listened to only 2/3 of it, but: he promotes Crystal+Lucky (crystal is compiled) as good replacements for Ruby and Rails. The second part of his talk is about promoting a new variant of open license called PostOpen, which will require commercial users of Post Open software to pay 1% for using, 1.5% for using without sharing modifications. There is a 10% fee for worse offense. All percentages are percentages of revenue. This is partly aimed at large companies that host open source software with few modifications as a service and charge for it. Money goes to PostOpen and possibly conventional Open Source developers.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bawolff 5y ago
Ah, so a linux system contains more than 100 packages, does that mean if it used this scheme companies would have to pay out >100% of revenue? Colour me unconvinced of the viability of this scheme.
- radarsat1 5y ago
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- jhauris 5y ago
  No, and this is expressly discussed in TFV. It's a flat 1% regardless of how many "post open source" resources are used. This is intended to encourage adoption of more POS (unfortunate acronym) once you use any.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Well if people want their ideas to be heard they need to write them down instead burying them in long videos amidst topics i dont care about. (Not blaming bruce, we're not the target audience here, but im still not watching a long form video). I still think its a weird business model. I can't imagine any propriatary software would work with that. Its very discouraging for small projects that do simple things, or for companies that want to try out software a little at first before committing to using it at a large scale.
prepend 5y ago
I think any license that requires a percentage of revenue is DOA. First because involving all the chicanery of accounting to figure out my fee is asking for lots of resources just to calculate and audit fees. Second, unpredictable costs are bad. If my company’s revenue doubles in a year, that doesn’t mean that my department’s budget doubles. Or that I even have enough earnings to cover licenses. Finally, this is hard enough with a single product. My org uses thousands of products. If they all charge 1%, where does that leave me. PS- morally this just seems dumb. If my grocery store charged me more or less depending on my income or the value I derive from a tomato, I won’t shop there. Just publish a price and let people decide to buy or not.
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago
  That's not correct. It's a flat 1% of revenue regardless of the number of Post-Open software packages used. (From the slide at 13:30 "The same fee whether you use 1 Post Open program or 1000.") The organization that receives the payment is supposed to handle splitting up the revenue among software package authors, so it does require auditing of all usage.
  - prepend 5y ago
    That helps with my final point but #1 and #2 are deal killers as well. This also places an undue burden on the payment receiver as they have to get into the business of running enterprise audits to find out who is using what.
- toast0 5y ago
  Yeah, I don't know what corporation would be happy with a license where the cost is nebulous like this. I would suspect lots of Hollywood Accounting is likely; putting all the PostOpen software in a subsidiary that has no revenue, or developing your own software under PostOpen but not distributing it outside, so that the majority of the usage is apportioned to affiliated companies. Plus, apportioning by usage is a negative incentive for optimization. If your DB reduces query runtime by 10% in the next version, it reduces its revenue, assuming other PostOpen software is in use and doesn't optimize.
- 5y ago
johnebgd 5y ago
I see a low probability that anything licensed "post open" will see adoption if there is a royalty owed for it.
- dbcurtis 5y ago
  Imagine the business decision of selecting between a post-open licensed ware and BSD licensed similar functionality. In return for 1% of revenue and the hassle of an annual usage audit, you get what value in return, exactly? That is the key question. So as a purveyor of post-open software, you must have a business proposition that closes the deal. Not impossible, but different from the way most OSS projects operate today. Your skepticism is reasonable. To separate a customer from their money, you need to provide obvious value. It strikes me that once you take one post-open package into your stack, the incremental cost of the next N is zero. So maybe there is enough virality in that feature to drive adoption. One high-value post-open project could create a coat-tail effect.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bawolff 5y ago

Ah, so a linux system contains more than 100 packages, does that mean if it used this scheme companies would have to pay out >100% of revenue? Colour me unconvinced of the viability of this scheme.

radarsat1 5y ago
leftpad intensifies
jhauris 5y ago
No, and this is expressly discussed in TFV. It's a flat 1% regardless of how many "post open source" resources are used. This is intended to encourage adoption of more POS (unfortunate acronym) once you use any.
- bawolff 5y ago
  Well if people want their ideas to be heard they need to write them down instead burying them in long videos amidst topics i dont care about. (Not blaming bruce, we're not the target audience here, but im still not watching a long form video). I still think its a weird business model. I can't imagine any propriatary software would work with that. Its very discouraging for small projects that do simple things, or for companies that want to try out software a little at first before committing to using it at a large scale.

prepend 5y ago

I think any license that requires a percentage of revenue is DOA. First because involving all the chicanery of accounting to figure out my fee is asking for lots of resources just to calculate and audit fees. Second, unpredictable costs are bad. If my company’s revenue doubles in a year, that doesn’t mean that my department’s budget doubles. Or that I even have enough earnings to cover licenses. Finally, this is hard enough with a single product. My org uses thousands of products. If they all charge 1%, where does that leave me. PS- morally this just seems dumb. If my grocery store charged me more or less depending on my income or the value I derive from a tomato, I won’t shop there. Just publish a price and let people decide to buy or not.

ThrowawayR2 5y ago
That's not correct. It's a flat 1% of revenue regardless of the number of Post-Open software packages used. (From the slide at 13:30 "The same fee whether you use 1 Post Open program or 1000.") The organization that receives the payment is supposed to handle splitting up the revenue among software package authors, so it does require auditing of all usage.
- prepend 5y ago
  That helps with my final point but #1 and #2 are deal killers as well. This also places an undue burden on the payment receiver as they have to get into the business of running enterprise audits to find out who is using what.
toast0 5y ago
Yeah, I don't know what corporation would be happy with a license where the cost is nebulous like this. I would suspect lots of Hollywood Accounting is likely; putting all the PostOpen software in a subsidiary that has no revenue, or developing your own software under PostOpen but not distributing it outside, so that the majority of the usage is apportioned to affiliated companies. Plus, apportioning by usage is a negative incentive for optimization. If your DB reduces query runtime by 10% in the next version, it reduces its revenue, assuming other PostOpen software is in use and doesn't optimize.
5y ago

johnebgd 5y ago

I see a low probability that anything licensed "post open" will see adoption if there is a royalty owed for it.

dbcurtis 5y ago
Imagine the business decision of selecting between a post-open licensed ware and BSD licensed similar functionality. In return for 1% of revenue and the hassle of an annual usage audit, you get what value in return, exactly? That is the key question. So as a purveyor of post-open software, you must have a business proposition that closes the deal. Not impossible, but different from the way most OSS projects operate today. Your skepticism is reasonable. To separate a customer from their money, you need to provide obvious value. It strikes me that once you take one post-open package into your stack, the incremental cost of the next N is zero. So maybe there is enough virality in that feature to drive adoption. One high-value post-open project could create a coat-tail effect.