Recently, I finished working on a software project that I’m especially proud of. It took months of effort to complete, and the final result was something that perfectly fit my needs. It was a labor of love.
It’s not important to reveal the purpose of the software here, or the technical details of its inner workings. Simply allow me to say that it’s something that I will use right away, and that other programmers may find useful as well.
When the project was complete, there were a few important decisions that I needed to make. How do I share what I’ve created? How can I get fair compensation for my efforts? And how do I protect what I’ve created from unscrupulous profiteers?
Getting fair compensation for our individual efforts is part of the equation here. Yes, I’m aware that GPL licensing makes a distinction between “Free as in Speech” and “Free as in Beer”. Yes, I know that I can charge a fee for my efforts.
I’m curious to know what other software developers are doing about this. What considerations go into the decision-making process? What works and what doesn’t?
Lately I’ve begun to wonder if open-source licensing has failed to keep up with technology. The first version of GPL debuted in 1989, and was updated soon after in 1991. The most recent revision of GPL was in 2007. That was 14 years ago!
I've explored this topic more fully in this JavaScript Fanboi article.
I haven’t figured out where to go from here, but it feels like something needs to change.
Top comments (2)
No one-size-fits-all licensing model exists that works for all purposes. Classic foss licensing is a model that can work well for shrink-wrapped software where one wants to form a cooperative relationship with downstream users, and so does still work well for things that need to be delivered as part of an OS, for example. It has been much harder to equitably adapt for the purposes intended in cloud models where the end user really only has access to and uses "output" rather than also to the "compute".
A key presumption in classic foss licensing is that end users will "run" the code. But if they do not have the compute, they cannot run it. If they cannot really run it themselves, they often cannot and won't participate, either. The actual value of the source to real users then becomes minimal and effectively read-only. Things like the AGPL do not really fix this problem at all, but they do benefit your few commercial scale competitors who also do have the means to run it, too.
Somewhere in between there are those end users who were intended to be liberated. But as the total user base of software has grown, the active participation of users has not. Software complexity and specialization has lead to a form of exclusion. This has created a priesthood of those capable of working with your code, and a large mass of users who are not and do not care to.
I think if software had evolved differently, we would have been far better off. I love the vision of Alan Kay's dynabook, where everything is open, interactive, and inspectable in place in easy to explore ways. But we did not get that world, we do not have masses of people educated about software that way, and so we have end users who do not understand and so simply do not care.
However, as my interjection of the dynabook suggests, I think the thesis of this article should be inverted. Rather than licensing failing to keep up with technology, it is technology that failed us by failing to keep up with licensing.
There is a distinction between the license to attribute to your code/project and any commercialization of efforts around building software. Open source is NOT a business model, so I guess I would ask a different question - how could you make money from the problems you are trying to solve, and how does open source help enable that?
Open source licensing has been working great for the past 20+ years and I do not believe it needs changing. That said, the OSI welcomes dialog and discussion on this topic, so if you feel strongly that is where perhaps you can engage.