Privacy: […] The public organization sees totals (use of a program, revenue, etc.) rather than your private data.
One of these things…
Developer identification is necessary for the security mechanism. Sorry, no anonymity.
… is not like the other.
The document’s audience is apparently businesses. And the writer distances themselves from developers. Huh.
Honesty, after reading this, I can’t help but think that free software needs a union. 😂 One organisation to negotiate payments. Individual developers and projects can join. Standardised terms are voted upon by the membership.
OpenCollective sort of facilitated that? But it was always a bit weird and opaque to me, and I only ever received a few single dollar donations when I listed it as a method, most of which the donators shortly thereafter reversed (??).
I pretty much agree; just mentioning my experience with something that already exists which is in a similar (idea) space. I believe some people do use them for actual salaries, and they have some reasonably sophisticated ways of managing the legal and tax sides of things through their ‘fiscal hosts’ thing.
a few single dollar donations when I listed it as a method, most of which the donators shortly thereafter reversed (??).
Sounds like carder runs: People who buy/sell lists of stolen credit cards will do batches of $1 charges against them to test which ones still work. The valid ones soon get abused, the owner will contest the charges, and they’ll be reversed. It’s a pretty common abuse pattern that comes up for anyone processing cards.
Post-Open requires a central entity that receives and apportions payment, does enforcement, and operates the service entity (or three central entities, one for each purpose). Open Source developers are very independent, and have not had to deal with a central entity until now, even one that they own.
The existence of this centralized entity raises a class of issues that aren’t mentioned here – are there any restrictions on which developers are permitted to participate? What if you’re a citizen of Iran or Russia or another country the US has sanctions upon? What if you openly hold a political opinion that other Post-Open participants consider to be Nazi-equivalent (e.g. any opinion on the current Israel-Gaza conflict)? What principles will the centralized entity use to determine who will get money for their contributions even when there are powerful legal and social forces who don’t want them to?
The enumerated rights are also impossible to beat for the user.
For businesses big enough to generate revenue for your software it’s just as easy for them to band together and write their own version with an OSS License for themselves.
You can compete on service. If you offer the same base software as an OSS alternative but you provide 24/7 support and issue resolution, people might just pay some amount of money. A CEO of Valve previously has stated that their Games Shop competes with Software Piracy on terms of Service. If Steam can provide better service than the pirates, people buy games.
Amazon the typical target for this kind of thing doesn’t need your service. Their engineers are quite capable of dealing with whatever they need to by themselves.
The people who buy from Amazon are the ones who need that service and they mostly get it from Amazon instead of you. The market is much smaller than Post-Open is targetting.
This doesn’t mean Amazon to provide an hosted/managed service. Could just amount to Support and Priority Bug Fixing. You pay 2000$ a year as a business and in exchange you get to phonecall someone if there is an issue, or even have someone set up the software for you. Etc.
How does your Post-Open option compete with Amazon? Because that is who you are competing with. Amazon let’s you call, email, or use their portal already for anything they support. Why would someone use a Post-Open option instead of the OSS supported by Amazon option?
On the same principle, sell being able to call, email or use a support portal with the software, possibly even a managed hosting setup that one can buy, or even have a technician help you setup the software in a maximally supported way.
we should definitely try to make paying open source devs fairly the norm, but to me this is a very odd attempt at that.
it is very complicated (despite them calling it simple), requires a central entity, and all the other problems other commenters have already mentioned. all the while only achieving things we can already do with existing, open source licenses.
i honestly don’t know what the solution would be, but i feel this isn’t it. maybe we can set up some kind of consultancy that helps developers create a payment structure or something?
Or more accurately, most open-source devs do not want to make the trade-off where some other authority makes decisions about exactly what open-source software they need to work on, and when and how they need to work on it, in order to get paid.
That’s exactly it… with money comes obligation. While I don’t have any real open source projects of my own, I have contributed back to several over the years. I have, however, freely shared significant chunks of code that I’ve written on my own time with friends and clients and the social contract that comes along with it is basically “use it if it works for you and if not I’ll give you a refund”. If I’d have taken money in exchange for it, there’d be an expectation that I’d be available to fix bugs if there were any.
Collecting societies definitely seem like the right model. Unfortunately collecting societies need to have some blockbusters on the books to have enough leverage AND having too many societies with blockbusters reduces all of their leverage. It’s very much a natural oligopoly that really needs to come from some current winners coming together.
Infringement or breach of contract results in loss of rights regarding the entire Post-Open software collection, not just one program.
Strong anti-software-patent terms. Bring suit and you lose privileges regarding all software in the Post-Open software collection, not just one program.
A basic premise of this appears to be that large organizations would adopt post-open software, and as such under the terms would fund the development. However, I’m not sure these points would endear large organizations’ risk assessors to the idea of building business critical functionality using post-open software.
Well it’s a specific anti-patent position. There will be some organizations that choose not to use anything under this organization for that reason. And the extent of that will depend on blockbusters being under this umbrella.
I think anyone joining this movement should expect no commercial traction for a long time, and in fact the organization should be very soft in its enforcement attempts until it gets that traction. I think it’s going to be relatively difficult to appeal to greed to recruit people - something with a more ideological bent might be more successful in getting half a generation of software creators to do it for free and with a facing wind against adoption.
This bit made me take this a little more seriously:
Post-Open is being developed by Bruce Perens (the creator of the Open Source Definition, the rules for Open Source which have stood for 26 years) and public participants.
One of these things…
… is not like the other.
The document’s audience is apparently businesses. And the writer distances themselves from developers. Huh.
Honesty, after reading this, I can’t help but think that free software needs a union. 😂 One organisation to negotiate payments. Individual developers and projects can join. Standardised terms are voted upon by the membership.
So another type of collecting society, but mutually owned?
Yes! I imagine something that’s essentially as easy to use as the Patreon / ko-fis of the world.
Really makes me wonder why, say, someone from the Apache Foundation hasn’t kicked off something like that.
OpenCollective sort of facilitated that? But it was always a bit weird and opaque to me, and I only ever received a few single dollar donations when I listed it as a method, most of which the donators shortly thereafter reversed (??).
one of the problems being that this is framed as donations rather than wages.
I pretty much agree; just mentioning my experience with something that already exists which is in a similar (idea) space. I believe some people do use them for actual salaries, and they have some reasonably sophisticated ways of managing the legal and tax sides of things through their ‘fiscal hosts’ thing.
They’re wages on the society’s books, but they’re a license on the customer’s books. This is the sort of thing that wins only with scale.
Sounds like carder runs: People who buy/sell lists of stolen credit cards will do batches of $1 charges against them to test which ones still work. The valid ones soon get abused, the owner will contest the charges, and they’ll be reversed. It’s a pretty common abuse pattern that comes up for anyone processing cards.
Only a subset of companies are used to giving this data away ever.
The existence of this centralized entity raises a class of issues that aren’t mentioned here – are there any restrictions on which developers are permitted to participate? What if you’re a citizen of Iran or Russia or another country the US has sanctions upon? What if you openly hold a political opinion that other Post-Open participants consider to be Nazi-equivalent (e.g. any opinion on the current Israel-Gaza conflict)? What principles will the centralized entity use to determine who will get money for their contributions even when there are powerful legal and social forces who don’t want them to?
Who said this entity should be based or incorporated in the US?
I lost the interest after reading that, to be honest…
You can’t compete with OSS.
You can compete on service. If you offer the same base software as an OSS alternative but you provide 24/7 support and issue resolution, people might just pay some amount of money. A CEO of Valve previously has stated that their Games Shop competes with Software Piracy on terms of Service. If Steam can provide better service than the pirates, people buy games.
Amazon the typical target for this kind of thing doesn’t need your service. Their engineers are quite capable of dealing with whatever they need to by themselves.
The people who buy from Amazon are the ones who need that service and they mostly get it from Amazon instead of you. The market is much smaller than Post-Open is targetting.
This doesn’t mean Amazon to provide an hosted/managed service. Could just amount to Support and Priority Bug Fixing. You pay 2000$ a year as a business and in exchange you get to phonecall someone if there is an issue, or even have someone set up the software for you. Etc.
How does your Post-Open option compete with Amazon? Because that is who you are competing with. Amazon let’s you call, email, or use their portal already for anything they support. Why would someone use a Post-Open option instead of the OSS supported by Amazon option?
On the same principle, sell being able to call, email or use a support portal with the software, possibly even a managed hosting setup that one can buy, or even have a technician help you setup the software in a maximally supported way.
you mean like AWS renting out Elastic or Redis?
we should definitely try to make paying open source devs fairly the norm, but to me this is a very odd attempt at that.
it is very complicated (despite them calling it simple), requires a central entity, and all the other problems other commenters have already mentioned. all the while only achieving things we can already do with existing, open source licenses.
i honestly don’t know what the solution would be, but i feel this isn’t it. maybe we can set up some kind of consultancy that helps developers create a payment structure or something?
At least for the ones who want to be paid. Most do not
Or more accurately, most open-source devs do not want to make the trade-off where some other authority makes decisions about exactly what open-source software they need to work on, and when and how they need to work on it, in order to get paid.
That’s exactly it… with money comes obligation. While I don’t have any real open source projects of my own, I have contributed back to several over the years. I have, however, freely shared significant chunks of code that I’ve written on my own time with friends and clients and the social contract that comes along with it is basically “use it if it works for you and if not I’ll give you a refund”. If I’d have taken money in exchange for it, there’d be an expectation that I’d be available to fix bugs if there were any.
Previous related discussion: https://lobste.rs/s/igwikc/post_open_license_first_draft
Any central enforcement entity will ultimately be subverted and corrupted by big tech. It’s unavoidable.
Collecting societies definitely seem like the right model. Unfortunately collecting societies need to have some blockbusters on the books to have enough leverage AND having too many societies with blockbusters reduces all of their leverage. It’s very much a natural oligopoly that really needs to come from some current winners coming together.
A basic premise of this appears to be that large organizations would adopt post-open software, and as such under the terms would fund the development. However, I’m not sure these points would endear large organizations’ risk assessors to the idea of building business critical functionality using post-open software.
Well it’s a specific anti-patent position. There will be some organizations that choose not to use anything under this organization for that reason. And the extent of that will depend on blockbusters being under this umbrella.
I think anyone joining this movement should expect no commercial traction for a long time, and in fact the organization should be very soft in its enforcement attempts until it gets that traction. I think it’s going to be relatively difficult to appeal to greed to recruit people - something with a more ideological bent might be more successful in getting half a generation of software creators to do it for free and with a facing wind against adoption.
This bit made me take this a little more seriously: