10 ms·

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 dua

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%.
        CuriousCosmic 2y ago
        Ehh that's kind of the problem with using a SPDX license tag. You could have a "negotiable" license as well but it becomes quickly non-trivial to document what the negotiated terms are in your SBOM.
        CuriousCosmic 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.

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%.
        CuriousCosmic 2y ago
        Ehh that's kind of the problem with using a SPDX license tag. You could have a "negotiable" license as well but it becomes quickly non-trivial to document what the negotiated terms are in your SBOM.
      - CuriousCosmic 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.