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People can license their software however they want, but it is worth reflecting on why almost all open source authors go with a permissive license like MIT: bec

People can license their software however they want, but it is worth reflecting on why almost all open source authors go with a permissive license like MIT: because it is basically a "buyer's market." When choosing a database, distributed queue, blogging platform, or whatever, companies usually have a choice of at least several high quality open source options. If one of those options places restrictions on the users, then those users are probably going to choose one of the other options. As a result, licensing your project GPL or the like usually means relegating it to obscurity. There are very notable exceptions, including Linux and WordPress, but they are outliers. It's hard to monetize an MIT project, but it is even harder to monetize a project without users. Whether this is "good" or "bad" is a separate debate (err, usually flame war), but I think many people gloss over that this is a coordination problem and that everyone is acting rationally. For better or worse, software does not seem to be scarce.

NoahZuniga 1y ago
Well, many developers publish their code not because they want to specifically make a successful open source project, but because they made something that was useful to themselves, and like the idea behind open source. In that case it makes more sense to do a copyleft license because it will legally require all derivatives to also follow that open source idea.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jaredklewis 1y ago
  Yea I think stuff like this is great and will have some impact around the edges. Perhaps particularly in the realm of end-user software, like a window tiling manager. But once we start talking about the kind of software large corporations (like AWS) will have an interest in, projects have to be successful to be useful. Software requires maintenance so the maintainers need to be able to devote their time to maintaining and improving the project. So this will select for projects that are successful enough that the maintainers can focus on it fully (either because some company hires them to work on their own project, they can charge high consulting fees because of their association with the project, or whatever). I think "the code" (the thing covered by copyright) in most cases is not as valuable as "the project:" the leadership, the contributors, the users, the norms and practices, the commitment to ongoing maintenance, and so on. So just lots of individuals all putting pieces of their code out there with GPL probably doesn't make a lot of impact (though there is nothing wrong with it), because most users don't want "code" they want a "project" they can rely on.
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    > once we start talking about the kind of software large corporations (like AWS) will have an interest in I'm not sure why someone who is spending their limited free time building software to give away for free would want Amazon as a downstream consumer Do you enjoy spending your nights and weekends dealing with CVE reports, while a high-6-figure BigTech engineer nags you that they need it fixed?
    - jaredklewis 1y ago
      We definitely agree on this point. Different licenses select for different things. It is an annoying problem to have, but if your goal is to be able to support yourself by working on your open source project full time (not saying this has to be or should be everyone’s goal), then having big tech engineers nagging you is probably a good problem to have.
      - swiftcoder 1y ago
        Honestly haven't seen many open-source maintainers convert a BigTech downstream into recurring revenue. I'm sure it does happen, but its far from the norm
        Aurornis 1y ago
        If your project gets adopted by Big Tech then your market rate as an engineer just went way up. It’s a huge badge of honor and a rare accomplishment. You’re thinking too directly if you can’t imagine how having your OSS project adopted by Big Tech isn’t a career boost.
        zelphirkalt 1y ago
        Maybe it can happen, but ask the people maintaining open source projects long term, how much it helped them pass silly leetcode interviews, which companies insist must be done, even if you have a golden track record.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  > In that case it makes more sense to do a copyleft license because it will legally require all derivatives to also follow that open source idea. That is a matter of opinion. I have put out some open source stuff under the form you mentioned, and it's always BSD or another permissive license. I view it as quite wrong to force my moral choices upon others, so I give others the freedom to use whatever license they like. In my case, that is what makes sense because of my own moral convictions.
landdate 1y ago
> licensing your project GPL or the like usually means relegating it to obscurity Subjective. Sure if you are talking about percent of market share, but it's a huge market, you don't need to capture even 1% of users to have a viable business. The vast majority of the GNU ecosystem is GPL. Bash, git, Apache, Gimp, Blender, Libreoffice. There are also a lot of projects that are dual licensed, allowing commercial software to be charged a fee and non-commercial software to use for free with GPL.
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  Neither Apache nor LibreOffice is GPL. Apache is permissive whereas LibreOffice is MPL (a sort of middle way between permissive and copyleft).
zelphirkalt 1y ago
I disagree. It will be harder to monetize MIT licensed projects, because any competitor can just grab and run. With AGPLv3, at least legally the competitor needs to publish their modifications as well. This in turn makes it more likely the competitor will not use your code, or if they do, in accordance with the license, which would be fine, and users of the product you build will mostly not care, because they don't even know what the licenses are about.
- madeofpalk 1y ago
  > It will be harder to monetize MIT licensed projects, because any competitor can just grab and run. Importantly - any competitor can grab it and modify it to make it easier for them to run at scale and keep those changes closed-source.
- roncesvalles 1y ago
  None of the limitations of open-source licenses apply to the authors themselves. (author = the person or organization whose name appears in the copyright notice). I.e., you can have a MIT/GPL/AGPL licensed project, but have a "premium" fork/derivation/later-version of it that's completely closed source. I actually see this as a valuable incentive to open-sourcing under MIT -- if a commercial provider of your software emerges, it will help you test/prove that a commercial market for your software exists, after which point you can completely close-source it and pivot to purely commercial competition. Open-sourcing, then, is basically baiting the waters to see if anyone sees commercial potential in your work. And the minute that's validated, you get funding and start your company.
  - zelphirkalt 1y ago
    Close-sourcing a previously open source project is like a deathwish for that project. Will meet much aversion, and if the project is important, people will fork whatever the last open source version was. Then you usually lost all cards and don't have a business at all.
- jaredklewis 1y ago
  Sure, but you're skipping the first part where if you make your project AGPLv3 most users will just choose a different project doing the same thing but with an MIT license. I agree that if you can somehow achieve widespread adoption with a copy left license (like Linux or Wordpress), then that will be better for you. But IME copyleft licenses are a major hurdle to widespread adoption, so such projects remain obscure. I'm not saying it is a good thing, but I've never worked at a company where we were allowed to bring in copyleft dependencies (even though everything invariably runs on Linux, which is GPLv2).
eadmund 1y ago
> People can license their software however they want, but it is worth reflecting on why almost all open source authors go with a permissive license like MIT: because it is basically a "buyer's market." When choosing a database, distributed queue, blogging platform, or whatever, companies usually have a choice of at least several high quality open source options. > If one of those options places restrictions on the users, then those users are probably going to choose one of the other options. First, if someone isn’t paying, he’s not buying. ‘Paying’ should be understood broadly, e.g. code as well as money counts. A company paying dollars really doesn’t care that much about the license — plenty of companies pay for proprietarily-licensed products (even ridiculously limited ones, with dongles and high seat prices). OTOH, a company ‘paying’ with code contributions should prefer the GPL, because it knows that its contributions will never be taken away from it. Second, the GPL does not restrict users; it restricts developers from restricting users. The GPL family is the right way for individuals and companies to form a software commons in which all can benefit.
aatd86 1y ago
Understand your point, but I wouldn't be so sure. People also want to ensure that the software is being supported, the inevitable bugs being worked on, and not abandoned. It is more likely that a commercial project will be supported than a MIT licensed one. So there might not be as many github stars for such project, but on the other hand, as long as it feeds people, it will not disappear. A MIT licensed project on the other hand, I personally consider like a potential liability more often than not. Not different from any piece of code I could find on stackoverflow. Not something that is serious. Even if it were tied to a big corpo, that would probably become fast unsupported.

NoahZuniga 1y ago

Well, many developers publish their code not because they want to specifically make a successful open source project, but because they made something that was useful to themselves, and like the idea behind open source. In that case it makes more sense to do a copyleft license because it will legally require all derivatives to also follow that open source idea.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jaredklewis 1y ago
Yea I think stuff like this is great and will have some impact around the edges. Perhaps particularly in the realm of end-user software, like a window tiling manager. But once we start talking about the kind of software large corporations (like AWS) will have an interest in, projects have to be successful to be useful. Software requires maintenance so the maintainers need to be able to devote their time to maintaining and improving the project. So this will select for projects that are successful enough that the maintainers can focus on it fully (either because some company hires them to work on their own project, they can charge high consulting fees because of their association with the project, or whatever). I think "the code" (the thing covered by copyright) in most cases is not as valuable as "the project:" the leadership, the contributors, the users, the norms and practices, the commitment to ongoing maintenance, and so on. So just lots of individuals all putting pieces of their code out there with GPL probably doesn't make a lot of impact (though there is nothing wrong with it), because most users don't want "code" they want a "project" they can rely on.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  > once we start talking about the kind of software large corporations (like AWS) will have an interest in I'm not sure why someone who is spending their limited free time building software to give away for free would want Amazon as a downstream consumer Do you enjoy spending your nights and weekends dealing with CVE reports, while a high-6-figure BigTech engineer nags you that they need it fixed?
  - jaredklewis 1y ago
    We definitely agree on this point. Different licenses select for different things. It is an annoying problem to have, but if your goal is to be able to support yourself by working on your open source project full time (not saying this has to be or should be everyone’s goal), then having big tech engineers nagging you is probably a good problem to have.
    - swiftcoder 1y ago
      Honestly haven't seen many open-source maintainers convert a BigTech downstream into recurring revenue. I'm sure it does happen, but its far from the norm
      - Aurornis 1y ago
        If your project gets adopted by Big Tech then your market rate as an engineer just went way up. It’s a huge badge of honor and a rare accomplishment. You’re thinking too directly if you can’t imagine how having your OSS project adopted by Big Tech isn’t a career boost.
        zelphirkalt 1y ago
        Maybe it can happen, but ask the people maintaining open source projects long term, how much it helped them pass silly leetcode interviews, which companies insist must be done, even if you have a golden track record.
bigstrat2003 1y ago
> In that case it makes more sense to do a copyleft license because it will legally require all derivatives to also follow that open source idea. That is a matter of opinion. I have put out some open source stuff under the form you mentioned, and it's always BSD or another permissive license. I view it as quite wrong to force my moral choices upon others, so I give others the freedom to use whatever license they like. In my case, that is what makes sense because of my own moral convictions.

landdate 1y ago

> licensing your project GPL or the like usually means relegating it to obscurity Subjective. Sure if you are talking about percent of market share, but it's a huge market, you don't need to capture even 1% of users to have a viable business. The vast majority of the GNU ecosystem is GPL. Bash, git, Apache, Gimp, Blender, Libreoffice. There are also a lot of projects that are dual licensed, allowing commercial software to be charged a fee and non-commercial software to use for free with GPL.

School-Cotton 1y ago
Neither Apache nor LibreOffice is GPL. Apache is permissive whereas LibreOffice is MPL (a sort of middle way between permissive and copyleft).

zelphirkalt 1y ago

I disagree. It will be harder to monetize MIT licensed projects, because any competitor can just grab and run. With AGPLv3, at least legally the competitor needs to publish their modifications as well. This in turn makes it more likely the competitor will not use your code, or if they do, in accordance with the license, which would be fine, and users of the product you build will mostly not care, because they don't even know what the licenses are about.

madeofpalk 1y ago
> It will be harder to monetize MIT licensed projects, because any competitor can just grab and run. Importantly - any competitor can grab it and modify it to make it easier for them to run at scale and keep those changes closed-source.
roncesvalles 1y ago
None of the limitations of open-source licenses apply to the authors themselves. (author = the person or organization whose name appears in the copyright notice). I.e., you can have a MIT/GPL/AGPL licensed project, but have a "premium" fork/derivation/later-version of it that's completely closed source. I actually see this as a valuable incentive to open-sourcing under MIT -- if a commercial provider of your software emerges, it will help you test/prove that a commercial market for your software exists, after which point you can completely close-source it and pivot to purely commercial competition. Open-sourcing, then, is basically baiting the waters to see if anyone sees commercial potential in your work. And the minute that's validated, you get funding and start your company.
- zelphirkalt 1y ago
  Close-sourcing a previously open source project is like a deathwish for that project. Will meet much aversion, and if the project is important, people will fork whatever the last open source version was. Then you usually lost all cards and don't have a business at all.
jaredklewis 1y ago
Sure, but you're skipping the first part where if you make your project AGPLv3 most users will just choose a different project doing the same thing but with an MIT license. I agree that if you can somehow achieve widespread adoption with a copy left license (like Linux or Wordpress), then that will be better for you. But IME copyleft licenses are a major hurdle to widespread adoption, so such projects remain obscure. I'm not saying it is a good thing, but I've never worked at a company where we were allowed to bring in copyleft dependencies (even though everything invariably runs on Linux, which is GPLv2).

eadmund 1y ago

> People can license their software however they want, but it is worth reflecting on why almost all open source authors go with a permissive license like MIT: because it is basically a "buyer's market." When choosing a database, distributed queue, blogging platform, or whatever, companies usually have a choice of at least several high quality open source options. > If one of those options places restrictions on the users, then those users are probably going to choose one of the other options. First, if someone isn’t paying, he’s not buying. ‘Paying’ should be understood broadly, e.g. code as well as money counts. A company paying dollars really doesn’t care that much about the license — plenty of companies pay for proprietarily-licensed products (even ridiculously limited ones, with dongles and high seat prices). OTOH, a company ‘paying’ with code contributions should prefer the GPL, because it knows that its contributions will never be taken away from it. Second, the GPL does not restrict users; it restricts developers from restricting users. The GPL family is the right way for individuals and companies to form a software commons in which all can benefit.

aatd86 1y ago

Understand your point, but I wouldn't be so sure. People also want to ensure that the software is being supported, the inevitable bugs being worked on, and not abandoned. It is more likely that a commercial project will be supported than a MIT licensed one. So there might not be as many github stars for such project, but on the other hand, as long as it feeds people, it will not disappear. A MIT licensed project on the other hand, I personally consider like a potential liability more often than not. Not different from any piece of code I could find on stackoverflow. Not something that is serious. Even if it were tied to a big corpo, that would probably become fast unsupported.