I disagree with the author. If you give something away for free you cannot be upset when the world doesn’t give you back money. If you want to make money off companies using your software, you need to license it appropriately. I think it would be great if companies give money back and I encourage it in organisations I have worked for, but it’s a kindness and not something that one should be expected or guilted into. If that means there is less OSS to be made, then so be it.
As a side, I see parallels between what OSS and the music industry is going through. The music industry is realizing that there simply isn’t enough money to sustain a living wage for all of the musicians that want to create music. OSS is going in the opposite direction where people have, historically, not expected to make a living wage based off their sotware but, maybe it’s the valuations in Valley, now people are starting to think they should be rewarded with some of that money. I don’t think that is going to end with more random developers making money directly off their work.
Eh, I don’t have much problem with “guilting”, which just boils down to trying to make people feel like they ought to donate. It’s just a persuasion strategy; whether it’s the right one to use depends on whether it’s likely to work in a given situation, mostly. And people can always decide that they disagree, and don’t feel any obligation to donate.
OpenBSD used that strategy successfully last year, saying: we make a lot of stuff people find useful, but most of them aren’t supporting us, so we don’t have enough money to pay our expenses. So we’re going to have to stop making this useful stuff unless donations start coming in. And it worked: donations came in at a much faster rate than before.
I think OpenBSD did it right, and didn’t guilt people. They laid out the facts and asked for assistance and said it would be appreciated. In the email you linked, the author did not say the project was entitled to anything. What I’m seeing is a number of people saying that they entitled to be making money off their project (and I am aware the entitlement problem cuts both ways). I think these are distinctly different.
This is one reason I went with AGPL + commercial dual licensing for a recent project and plan to for future libraries and tools. I could also see offering the commercial license cheap or free to individuals. But companies… no, companies can pay. They can pay in source or they can pay in dollars, but they don’t get my labor for free.
I don’t want my code to be used so desperately that I’ll give it away without obligation. There’s an economic rivalry, though, in that if any substitutable project has a license with fewer obligations to a business (MIT, Apache, BSD, etc.) they’ll get more adoption and attention. O'Reilly’s early work derailing Free Software with “more free” open source software was a brilliant early strategy, it bought businesses 20 years of software and a technical culture that thinks getting exploited is “more free”.
This is one component of my stance on software licenses: I’m not here to be taken advantage of (willingly), and the only way that releasing my code (if it’s useful) doesn’t cause exploitation is to use AGPL3. If I write code, release it publicly, and it makes a company 10 million dollars, I argue that compensation should exist. I’d like a few of those bucks; if that isn’t acceptable, then the company can libre source its software and let other actors gain.
Stallman has been right far too many times not to consider him an astute observer of the technological paths we’re on.
He hasn’t oriented towards commercial success; he’s chosen the well-trodden “kinda broke activist” path. However, emacs & the other GNU software was sold via physical media in the 80s and early 90s.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.en.html is what I often use to guide my thinking on licenses. You might disagree with them, but they have spent time analyzing them and it’s a digested guide.
I disagree with the author. If you give something away for free you cannot be upset when the world doesn’t give you back money. If you want to make money off companies using your software, you need to license it appropriately. I think it would be great if companies give money back and I encourage it in organisations I have worked for, but it’s a kindness and not something that one should be expected or guilted into. If that means there is less OSS to be made, then so be it.
As a side, I see parallels between what OSS and the music industry is going through. The music industry is realizing that there simply isn’t enough money to sustain a living wage for all of the musicians that want to create music. OSS is going in the opposite direction where people have, historically, not expected to make a living wage based off their sotware but, maybe it’s the valuations in Valley, now people are starting to think they should be rewarded with some of that money. I don’t think that is going to end with more random developers making money directly off their work.
Eh, I don’t have much problem with “guilting”, which just boils down to trying to make people feel like they ought to donate. It’s just a persuasion strategy; whether it’s the right one to use depends on whether it’s likely to work in a given situation, mostly. And people can always decide that they disagree, and don’t feel any obligation to donate.
OpenBSD used that strategy successfully last year, saying: we make a lot of stuff people find useful, but most of them aren’t supporting us, so we don’t have enough money to pay our expenses. So we’re going to have to stop making this useful stuff unless donations start coming in. And it worked: donations came in at a much faster rate than before.
I think OpenBSD did it right, and didn’t guilt people. They laid out the facts and asked for assistance and said it would be appreciated. In the email you linked, the author did not say the project was entitled to anything. What I’m seeing is a number of people saying that they entitled to be making money off their project (and I am aware the entitlement problem cuts both ways). I think these are distinctly different.
This is one reason I went with AGPL + commercial dual licensing for a recent project and plan to for future libraries and tools. I could also see offering the commercial license cheap or free to individuals. But companies… no, companies can pay. They can pay in source or they can pay in dollars, but they don’t get my labor for free.
I don’t want my code to be used so desperately that I’ll give it away without obligation. There’s an economic rivalry, though, in that if any substitutable project has a license with fewer obligations to a business (MIT, Apache, BSD, etc.) they’ll get more adoption and attention. O'Reilly’s early work derailing Free Software with “more free” open source software was a brilliant early strategy, it bought businesses 20 years of software and a technical culture that thinks getting exploited is “more free”.
This is one component of my stance on software licenses: I’m not here to be taken advantage of (willingly), and the only way that releasing my code (if it’s useful) doesn’t cause exploitation is to use AGPL3. If I write code, release it publicly, and it makes a company 10 million dollars, I argue that compensation should exist. I’d like a few of those bucks; if that isn’t acceptable, then the company can libre source its software and let other actors gain.
Stallman has been right far too many times not to consider him an astute observer of the technological paths we’re on.
By that logic, shouldn’t Stallman be a millionaire with all the software he’s written and released with GPL licenses?
He hasn’t oriented towards commercial success; he’s chosen the well-trodden “kinda broke activist” path. However, emacs & the other GNU software was sold via physical media in the 80s and early 90s.
Is therr any good reading on how to approach licensing? Which ones to choose based on what I want? Cc @pushcx
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.en.html is what I often use to guide my thinking on licenses. You might disagree with them, but they have spent time analyzing them and it’s a digested guide.
Good lord that’s a long article.
Previous discussion in a similar vein:
https://lobste.rs/s/kwgnew/funding_foss