I know this is a controversial opinion and I know it won’t directly solve the issue at hand, but it’s related and it addresses some of the concerns raised by many people in this thread: how do we get open source the funding it needs?
Consider a world where the norm is not MIT/BSD but GPL dual licensed with MIT for a fee. This would give back control to maintainers of a library, and it would allow people without funds to use the software freely by contributing back to the community any changes they wish to further publish.
It puts the incentives in the right place, which is very important for a scalable, sustainable solution and to avoid tragedy of the commons!
It’s controversial because licensing has become a tribal issue, frustrating level headed debate. But I would argue that many people choose MIT without really thinking it through, “because it’s how everyone else does it”. You can see this in complaints from maintainers of code released under MIT, abuse which would never have been possible with the GPL.
I really think there is value in evaluating the community’s obsession with MIT, before we jump to pointing fingers at “companies”. Remember: if you get burned by the tragedy of the commons, ask yourself why did we set ourselves up to fail? It’s the hardest possible fight to win.
Again I’m not trying to derail this into MIT v GPL, I’m just saying: IF we all choose MIT, can we really complain now? This is what happens: people profit off your work and don’t contribute. If you feel so frustrated by that that you’re adding ads to your lib, maybe MIT wasn’t the right choice?
(MIT has merit and there are people out there using it for the right reasons. But they’re not the ones putting ads in their repos.)
> Consider a world where the norm is not MIT/BSD but GPL dual licensed with MIT for a fee
Note that the MIT license allows redistribution: anyone who bought a single MIT license could legally distribute MIT-licensed copies without continuing to pay the original author for additional licenses.
I'm not sure that would actually be that big of an issue.
Let's say you have some sort of model where a monthly subscription gives you an MIT license for all commits made that month. Who is actually going to go to the trouble of mirroring every commit or release from upstream to their own public repository? If somebody actually did that gratuitously, the copyright owner could just decline to renew their subscription the following month.
I'm sure there's some issues with this that I'm not thinking of, but I think generally if somebody is willing to pay you for a license, they're not going to be a jerk and try to undermine your business.
I agree with the parent post, and the sibling. MIT doesn't make much sense in your scenario. Dual-licensing is usually a copy left license, and some sort of private/commercial license agreement to protect against the case the parent comment mentions.
The people who want to support you are not the problem. They'd probably donate too if they would buy a license in this thought experiment. The people who don't want to support you are. One of them could buy a license, relicense as MIT. And either they'd get updates with their paid license, in which case they'd just release those as MIT too, or wait for your next stable version and buy again and so on. Or they would just fork the project, and start their own business around it, without having had any more cost than a single license....
Yes, Oracle does this with MySQL. If you want to use MySQL in a way that the GPL doesn’t permit, then you are supposed to buy a license. I have no idea if they are making a lot of money from this.
Has anyone considered that open source / free software is just fundamentally incompatible with capitalism? Society already has plenty of ways to fund projects -- we even created entire legal constructs, like copyright, to facilitate this very thing.
The zero-cost ability to copy software and mutate it (if you have the source) is at the heart of the movement. As is the realization that we can collectively build something that benefits everyone. Money doesn't have to figure into this.
Of course, plenty of developers have tried (and succeeded) at using free software for capitalistic ends. But I don't think it follows that free software should, or needs to be, funded the way that we purchase other software or how Google or Facebook funds their software.
I understand that Free Software is not concerned with capitalism but that doesn't address the question.
Free Software can still be incompatible with capitalism even if it doesn't address it directly. If you release your software with a Free Software license do you really "own" it in a capitalistic sense? I'm thinking no. As a consequence it's actually hard to make money with Free Software. But that difficulty and lack of ownership hasn't prevented Free Software from thriving, in fact, just the opposite.
Depends on one's definition of "capitalism" when applied to software I think.
Whereas I would not "own" the software, I would own the hours I'm willing to write software. As things are I can't freely sell those hours because of a monopoly on many programs, that is, no user can hire me to improve their proprietary software. I can only sell my hours to users of Free Software.
Now we have software "ownership" against the workings of a free market. Both of these are generally considered "capitalist", so it depends on your definition which is "more capitalist", but I hope it's clear that neither of them is strictly capitalist where the other is not.
At issue here is that the developer is not selling their time. They're putting in that time for free. And then they want to recover that income after the fact. This is traditionally how any kind of product is developed. You put in time and resources into a product and you sell that product to recoup that cost and hopefully make a profit as well.
If you don't own/control the software, due to it being Free Software, then that whole avenue of income generation is not available or very difficult. Time and again, we see individuals and companies trying to find a way to sell Free Software like traditional software.
Consider a world where the norm is not MIT/BSD but GPL dual licensed with MIT for a fee. This would give back control to maintainers of a library, and it would allow people without funds to use the software freely by contributing back to the community any changes they wish to further publish.
It puts the incentives in the right place, which is very important for a scalable, sustainable solution and to avoid tragedy of the commons!
It’s controversial because licensing has become a tribal issue, frustrating level headed debate. But I would argue that many people choose MIT without really thinking it through, “because it’s how everyone else does it”. You can see this in complaints from maintainers of code released under MIT, abuse which would never have been possible with the GPL.
I really think there is value in evaluating the community’s obsession with MIT, before we jump to pointing fingers at “companies”. Remember: if you get burned by the tragedy of the commons, ask yourself why did we set ourselves up to fail? It’s the hardest possible fight to win.
Again I’m not trying to derail this into MIT v GPL, I’m just saying: IF we all choose MIT, can we really complain now? This is what happens: people profit off your work and don’t contribute. If you feel so frustrated by that that you’re adding ads to your lib, maybe MIT wasn’t the right choice?
(MIT has merit and there are people out there using it for the right reasons. But they’re not the ones putting ads in their repos.)