6 ms·

Some startups going 'fair source' to avoid the pitfalls of open source licensing

46 points by pseudolus 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
CuriousCosmic 2y ago
I feel like fair source exists as a concept mainly because of fearmongering about free software and copyleft licenses. There is little reason projects can't dual license a copyleft license like the GPLv3 or AGPLv3 with a proprietary license. The problem clearly isn't that the source is available but rather that companies don't feel like they can monetize their products in an open source ecosystem. However frustratingly these same companies avoid copyleft licenses that would give them that exact ability to effectively monetize (via a dual license) without unduly limiting users rights to use the main version of the product.
- rdtsc 2y ago
  That’s what I think as well. They are beating around the bush, everyone inventing their own license types. If I see some unknown license, I will assume it’s a trap and stay away. I don’t have lawyers on retainer to interpret new license types for me. GPL and AGPL are already there, I know what they are and the intention is clear. And like you said, if they want to dual license it, they still can.
  - chii 2y ago
    They are indeed beating around the bush. What the end goal of these so-called opensource companies want is to have you use their "free" demo, but when you get slightly big and is somewhat locked in, or need some feature considered enterprise (coz you got bigger or have revenue), they extract a partial income stream off you. This revenue model isn't bad per se, but why not just be upfront about it? Look at unreal engine - their license explicitly states this. You give them some % of your revenue if it reaches $1 million or something like that. Why can't this be more normalized?
    - matt-p 2y ago
      Couldn't agree more, I'd love to see a range of standard licences for this business model, in a similar way to what we have with MIT, GPL etc. This business model is still massively preferable to fully closed source in my view.
      - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
        It would be nice to see a standardised set of proprietary licenses that you can easily dual license a copyleft project with. Given the way that SPDX is set up, I imagine the ideal way to do it would be to create some standard proprietary licenses and then add exceptions for "small" users that don't want to use the copyleft license and would eventually like to get big. i.e. - Commercial-Royalties-1pct - Commercial-Royalties-5pct - Commercial-Royalties-10pct - Commercial-Royalties-Negotiable - Commercial-Seats-Negotiable with the following optional exceptions - Under-100k-USD-Revenue - Under-1M-USD-Revenue - Under-5M-USD-Revenue - Under-10M-USD-Revenue There's a certain amount of inflexibility that comes from trying to standardise license terms in a way that's compatible with SPDX but maybe an extension to SPDX in the future might improve that and allow you to specify certain terms on licenses more than just basic exceptions.
        matt-p 2y ago
        Love the idea, but for unreal engine 1% royalty is fair, you've built your entire product on it. But what about 1% of revenue for a UX libary or database product from uber? I'd say that the old elastic licence is great to standardise and so is the 0.5%, 1%, 1.5% or 2%; over a Million, 5 Million or 10 Million.
        chii 2y ago
        i mean, surely you can have tweak the license (i.e., have the wording be a "variable" which is set at the point of agreement). It doesn't have to always be at 1%.
        2y ago
  - matt-p 2y ago
    AGPL or other copyleft licences don't stop amazon taking "your" product and hosting it for less than your own hosted offering as they don't have to pay the developers. "Then it shouldn't be open source" - Yes, true and I agree. But source available, with a bit of a community in github/discord and opportunity to host the code yourself free for small use cases, read the code and raise PRs is WAY BETTER than a fully closed source product. How do we standardise that in a similar way we have done with open source licenses?
    - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
      > AGPL or other copyleft licences don't stop amazon taking "your" product and hosting it for less than your own hosted offering as they don't have to pay the developers. It doesn't but I don't think I've seen Amazon being cheaper than other hosting options, especially after IO costs. What AGPL does stop is Amazon writing improvements, extensions, and integrations for your product and then refusing to make them public in a way they can be upstreamed. That's the bigger issue. Competing on hosting price or on maintenance/support contracts against Amazon generally is going to favor the smaller party because of the AWS tax. Competing against a city's worth of engineers improving a closed source downstream of your product however is going to be a losing battle. AGPL fixes that.
      - ericb 2y ago
        > Competing on hosting price or on maintenance/support contracts against Amazon generally is going to favor the smaller party because of the AWS tax. This is exactly backwards, because of how corporate procurement works. Large companies--the ones with money--have a whole process around working with new vendors. It can take months to setup. A security review, audit, and legal are likely to be involved. Or, they all already have a contract with amazon and can start using the Amazon service providing X immediately. From CTO to audit, risk, accounting, and compliance, everyone's life is easier if they use one vendor for everything, rather than 10.
        CuriousCosmic 2y ago
        That may be true but that's a very different discussion than discussion on competing over cost. Larger companies are willing to eat a higher cost for the sake of bureaucratic and logistic simplicity.
brainless 2y ago
I think there is a whole world between going all in on an open source license and allowing funded companies to simply competing with you vs not releasing source at all. We need a "fair source", or whatever we call it. We need a way for people to contribute, many ideas to gain a community of contributors, without a funded agent to simply focus on how to monetize the software. Open source or "fair source" are all distribution models. For people to see, try, adapt and maybe even contribute to your software ideas. It enables everyone to build and share. And if someone wants to compete with the stated software, they can buy a license. That is a fair business model, IMHO.
OutOfHere 2y ago
These companies take software usage and contributions for granted. "Fair source" software will lose out in usage and in contributions to open source software. It's a vain attempt at getting contributions without giving back. They might as well stop the pretense and keep it private. As I see it, if your startup's business model relies on your core code being proprietary, you don't have a business model.
- mu53 2y ago
  Permissive licenses give mega-corps (AWS,GCP,Azure) the ability to use software projects without contributing to it. This mechanic in the market is going to dramatically shorten the runway for open source projects turning into mature companies like redis and elasticsearch. Once they hit a certain marketshare, cloud companies can take away one of the primary revenue streams large enough to support teams of developers improving the project. I know big corps contribute developer time to projects, but it doesn't hurt to have more competition. This will lead to more market consolidation and less innovation in the cloud space. Taking advantage of licensing to stifle companies has turned out great for the mobile phone landscape. I love having essentially two choices for a phone. Open source is amazing, but this is one of the weaknesses that have been exploited in recent years that medium sized and newer companies are combating with server-side public license. Linux is not just kernel, but its backed by a foundation that can protect it's revenue streams with GPL licensing.
  - cmeacham98 2y ago
    > Permissive licenses give mega-corps (AWS,GCP,Azure) the ability to use software projects without contributing to it. Use a copyleft license like (A)GPL then? Look, if you want to license your software as "fair source" or whatever other non-free license that's your right, I just won't use your software. But don't pretend about the reasons for doing so - companies licensing their software this way are doing so to prevent competition, not because they want contributions.
    - mu53 2y ago
      Copyleft licensing doesn't protect against cloud hosting competition. It mostly applies to modifications to the source code, but not hosting for revenue. As long as their contributions are also open source, the license is satisfied. Young companies protecting their revenue against established competitors is an entirely valid use of open source license. These licenses won't affect you unless you are an exec level employee at a unicorn
RecycledEle 2y ago
[flagged]
M2Ys4U 2y ago
There is already a term for this type of software licence: Proprietary. I don't think we need a new class of licence that tries to extract the goodwill generated by the free and open source community, without adhering to the moral underpinnings of that community.
lacker 2y ago
I'm torn because as a user, the best license is a pure open source license. But I know that many companies that start out offering an open source product aren't going to be able to make that work. It's really frustrating when a product like Redis or Elasticsearch churns their license around. It would have been better for everyone if they had a clear "semi-open" license to pick in the first place, that gave them a business model while being "open enough" for my purposes. What concerns me about these semi-open licenses is, am I held hostage if the developer raises prices on me? If once I commit to the software I have no alternative to paying them for their managed service, it doesn't really help me that I have some access to the source code. A semi-open license like Llama uses is less troublesome. It isn't open source, but it's pretty clear that you just can't use it for certain activities. If I don't plan on using it for any of those activities, it's fine. I'm not committing to paying Facebook X dollars a month and if their companies struggles maybe they'll start charging me 2X or 3X or 10X dollars a month.
- BigParm 2y ago
  If the license changes you can still use the most recent build with the license that suits you. If you need to update it then fork it. Choose your dependencies wisely. 99.9999% of these projects will be archived one day anyways. Best you can find is a 5 year guarantee or something. Software is always changing. Everyone has the same problem.

46 points by pseudolus 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

I feel like fair source exists as a concept mainly because of fearmongering about free software and copyleft licenses. There is little reason projects can't dual license a copyleft license like the GPLv3 or AGPLv3 with a proprietary license. The problem clearly isn't that the source is available but rather that companies don't feel like they can monetize their products in an open source ecosystem. However frustratingly these same companies avoid copyleft licenses that would give them that exact ability to effectively monetize (via a dual license) without unduly limiting users rights to use the main version of the product.

rdtsc 2y ago
That’s what I think as well. They are beating around the bush, everyone inventing their own license types. If I see some unknown license, I will assume it’s a trap and stay away. I don’t have lawyers on retainer to interpret new license types for me. GPL and AGPL are already there, I know what they are and the intention is clear. And like you said, if they want to dual license it, they still can.
- chii 2y ago
  They are indeed beating around the bush. What the end goal of these so-called opensource companies want is to have you use their "free" demo, but when you get slightly big and is somewhat locked in, or need some feature considered enterprise (coz you got bigger or have revenue), they extract a partial income stream off you. This revenue model isn't bad per se, but why not just be upfront about it? Look at unreal engine - their license explicitly states this. You give them some % of your revenue if it reaches $1 million or something like that. Why can't this be more normalized?
  - matt-p 2y ago
    Couldn't agree more, I'd love to see a range of standard licences for this business model, in a similar way to what we have with MIT, GPL etc. This business model is still massively preferable to fully closed source in my view.
    - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
      It would be nice to see a standardised set of proprietary licenses that you can easily dual license a copyleft project with. Given the way that SPDX is set up, I imagine the ideal way to do it would be to create some standard proprietary licenses and then add exceptions for "small" users that don't want to use the copyleft license and would eventually like to get big. i.e. - Commercial-Royalties-1pct - Commercial-Royalties-5pct - Commercial-Royalties-10pct - Commercial-Royalties-Negotiable - Commercial-Seats-Negotiable with the following optional exceptions - Under-100k-USD-Revenue - Under-1M-USD-Revenue - Under-5M-USD-Revenue - Under-10M-USD-Revenue There's a certain amount of inflexibility that comes from trying to standardise license terms in a way that's compatible with SPDX but maybe an extension to SPDX in the future might improve that and allow you to specify certain terms on licenses more than just basic exceptions.
      - matt-p 2y ago
        Love the idea, but for unreal engine 1% royalty is fair, you've built your entire product on it. But what about 1% of revenue for a UX libary or database product from uber? I'd say that the old elastic licence is great to standardise and so is the 0.5%, 1%, 1.5% or 2%; over a Million, 5 Million or 10 Million.
        chii 2y ago
        i mean, surely you can have tweak the license (i.e., have the wording be a "variable" which is set at the point of agreement). It doesn't have to always be at 1%.
        2y ago
- matt-p 2y ago
  AGPL or other copyleft licences don't stop amazon taking "your" product and hosting it for less than your own hosted offering as they don't have to pay the developers. "Then it shouldn't be open source" - Yes, true and I agree. But source available, with a bit of a community in github/discord and opportunity to host the code yourself free for small use cases, read the code and raise PRs is WAY BETTER than a fully closed source product. How do we standardise that in a similar way we have done with open source licenses?
  - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
    > AGPL or other copyleft licences don't stop amazon taking "your" product and hosting it for less than your own hosted offering as they don't have to pay the developers. It doesn't but I don't think I've seen Amazon being cheaper than other hosting options, especially after IO costs. What AGPL does stop is Amazon writing improvements, extensions, and integrations for your product and then refusing to make them public in a way they can be upstreamed. That's the bigger issue. Competing on hosting price or on maintenance/support contracts against Amazon generally is going to favor the smaller party because of the AWS tax. Competing against a city's worth of engineers improving a closed source downstream of your product however is going to be a losing battle. AGPL fixes that.
    - ericb 2y ago
      > Competing on hosting price or on maintenance/support contracts against Amazon generally is going to favor the smaller party because of the AWS tax. This is exactly backwards, because of how corporate procurement works. Large companies--the ones with money--have a whole process around working with new vendors. It can take months to setup. A security review, audit, and legal are likely to be involved. Or, they all already have a contract with amazon and can start using the Amazon service providing X immediately. From CTO to audit, risk, accounting, and compliance, everyone's life is easier if they use one vendor for everything, rather than 10.
      - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
        That may be true but that's a very different discussion than discussion on competing over cost. Larger companies are willing to eat a higher cost for the sake of bureaucratic and logistic simplicity.

brainless 2y ago

I think there is a whole world between going all in on an open source license and allowing funded companies to simply competing with you vs not releasing source at all. We need a "fair source", or whatever we call it. We need a way for people to contribute, many ideas to gain a community of contributors, without a funded agent to simply focus on how to monetize the software. Open source or "fair source" are all distribution models. For people to see, try, adapt and maybe even contribute to your software ideas. It enables everyone to build and share. And if someone wants to compete with the stated software, they can buy a license. That is a fair business model, IMHO.

OutOfHere 2y ago

These companies take software usage and contributions for granted. "Fair source" software will lose out in usage and in contributions to open source software. It's a vain attempt at getting contributions without giving back. They might as well stop the pretense and keep it private. As I see it, if your startup's business model relies on your core code being proprietary, you don't have a business model.

mu53 2y ago
Permissive licenses give mega-corps (AWS,GCP,Azure) the ability to use software projects without contributing to it. This mechanic in the market is going to dramatically shorten the runway for open source projects turning into mature companies like redis and elasticsearch. Once they hit a certain marketshare, cloud companies can take away one of the primary revenue streams large enough to support teams of developers improving the project. I know big corps contribute developer time to projects, but it doesn't hurt to have more competition. This will lead to more market consolidation and less innovation in the cloud space. Taking advantage of licensing to stifle companies has turned out great for the mobile phone landscape. I love having essentially two choices for a phone. Open source is amazing, but this is one of the weaknesses that have been exploited in recent years that medium sized and newer companies are combating with server-side public license. Linux is not just kernel, but its backed by a foundation that can protect it's revenue streams with GPL licensing.
- cmeacham98 2y ago
  > Permissive licenses give mega-corps (AWS,GCP,Azure) the ability to use software projects without contributing to it. Use a copyleft license like (A)GPL then? Look, if you want to license your software as "fair source" or whatever other non-free license that's your right, I just won't use your software. But don't pretend about the reasons for doing so - companies licensing their software this way are doing so to prevent competition, not because they want contributions.
  - mu53 2y ago
    Copyleft licensing doesn't protect against cloud hosting competition. It mostly applies to modifications to the source code, but not hosting for revenue. As long as their contributions are also open source, the license is satisfied. Young companies protecting their revenue against established competitors is an entirely valid use of open source license. These licenses won't affect you unless you are an exec level employee at a unicorn

RecycledEle 2y ago

[flagged]

M2Ys4U 2y ago

There is already a term for this type of software licence: Proprietary. I don't think we need a new class of licence that tries to extract the goodwill generated by the free and open source community, without adhering to the moral underpinnings of that community.

lacker 2y ago

I'm torn because as a user, the best license is a pure open source license. But I know that many companies that start out offering an open source product aren't going to be able to make that work. It's really frustrating when a product like Redis or Elasticsearch churns their license around. It would have been better for everyone if they had a clear "semi-open" license to pick in the first place, that gave them a business model while being "open enough" for my purposes. What concerns me about these semi-open licenses is, am I held hostage if the developer raises prices on me? If once I commit to the software I have no alternative to paying them for their managed service, it doesn't really help me that I have some access to the source code. A semi-open license like Llama uses is less troublesome. It isn't open source, but it's pretty clear that you just can't use it for certain activities. If I don't plan on using it for any of those activities, it's fine. I'm not committing to paying Facebook X dollars a month and if their companies struggles maybe they'll start charging me 2X or 3X or 10X dollars a month.

BigParm 2y ago
If the license changes you can still use the most recent build with the license that suits you. If you need to update it then fork it. Choose your dependencies wisely. 99.9999% of these projects will be archived one day anyways. Best you can find is a 5 year guarantee or something. Software is always changing. Everyone has the same problem.