On Saturday 25. February 2017 15.43.54 you wrote:
On 25-02-2017 14:44, Paul Boddie wrote:
...this is almost like asking for business advice
Don't get me wrong. It is not my goal to make money. My goal is to make free software libraries.
But it is still like asking for business advice, because many of the issues are exactly like structuring the interests in a business. I mentioned the matter of assessing shares in a project, and this is the kind of thing that platforms like Gratipay explicitly avoid because it is a difficult problem:
"Gratipay does not determine how payments are allocated and is not responsible for how Project Owners distribute payments. Any agreement between the Project's Owner and other Collaborators regarding the allocation of payments is solely between those parties."
https://gratipay.com/about/policies/terms-of-service
Just about any incentive scheme in any kind of organisation causes problems in this regard.
[...]
Where a scheme advocates putting proprietary software in front of users, it is not going to get the support of the FSF, because even the LGPL is effectively a barely palatable concession to the idea that Free Software might be used in proprietary software under certain circumstances. I don't think you should expect the FSFE to take a different position.
That's the nature of a software library. It can be used in many different contexts - free as well as proprietary. If a company wants to make a piece of proprietary software for a specific purpose then they will do so no matter what. If they can't use my GPL library they will find another way. It is not realistic that we can coerce them to make their software free if their business is to sell software. But we can make them contribute to funding free software if this is cheaper for them than making their own library from scratch. My project doesn't need any funding, so the money can go to some other free software projects (which might ultimately outcompete some proprietary software).
But think of the effect that facilitating proprietary software has, too! It might be much cheaper for a company to spend small amounts on licensing what is otherwise Free Software so that they can sell their own products for substantial amounts, undermining the development of Free Software alternatives to their products. That's precisely the situation one sees when people complain about the lack of equivalent Free Software applications in a market where people routinely choose proprietary software applications.
Of course they can develop their own form of your library's functionality. There is an argument that they do not do so because they do not have to. If you charged such companies a lot more money, maybe they would. I would argue that this would be a way of quantifying the damage done to Free Software efforts to develop similar applications or functionality: what those companies save by licensing software from you at its current pricing levels is perhaps the minimum amount of money lost to Free Software projects.
The dual license system for software libraries that I am proposing will serve two purposes:
- It gives open source projects that use the library an advantage over
proprietary projects using the same library. 2. It generates a revenue that may be used for funding other free software projects.
If a library uses GPL only, it will make an incentive for somebody else to make a proprietary alternative to the library (which will possibly be so similar to the free code that we would have a nasty battle over possible copyright violation).
Surely that would only happen for works that are either trivial or cannot be expressed in more than one way. But either way, the GPL is a guarantor of end- user freedom, so you have to decide whether that is important to you or not. It is clearly important to the FSF.
If we use a more permissive license (Apache or BSD) then we will allow proprietary code makers to free ride and make money on our open source work without contributing anything in return.
Right. Not that this is potentially so different from your situation, though, because projects like PostgreSQL are permissively licensed, but they do have companies operating in their community that do fund the development of such projects. The issue here is whether those companies contribute enough back to the project or not. However, PostgreSQL and FreeBSD, amongst others, do at least seem to be sustained by contributions of different kinds.
I think that more attention should be given to funding mechanisms for Free Software.
This is indeed what I am proposing. The problem is that we need an organization to handle the money.
I think this is an unresolved issue in the open source movement. How do we deal with software libraries and other pieces of code that can be reused in proprietary software (and is so valuable that private companies will pay for it).
I can't talk about "open source" motivations, but in the Free Software movement the issue of reusing code in proprietary software is not unresolved: it is just not of any real interest or concern; indeed, it is seen as an undesirable thing prevented as much as possible by Free Software licences.
For what it's worth, you could look at what existing businesses have done in this area already. There have been several companies that have offered dual- licensing schemes, and some of them may even have offered something resembling what you are trying to achieve.
But I don't want to make a company - I just want to make code :-)
Sure, but what you are asking for is effectively a licensing model that is rather like what such companies have already done. Maybe someone could set up an organisation that employs software licences that may or may not be Free Software to handle the administrative aspects of this, but I don't see why the FSF or FSFE would be suitable hosts for such activities.
Paul
On 25-02-2017 18:49, Paul Boddie wrote:
On Saturday 25. February 2017 15.43.54 you wrote:
Don't get me wrong. It is not my goal to make money. My goal is to make free software libraries.
But it is still like asking for business advice, because many of the issues are exactly like structuring the interests in a business. I mentioned the matter of assessing shares in a project, and this is the kind of thing that platforms like Gratipay explicitly avoid because it is a difficult problem
I certainly want to avoid that too. Distributing money among contributers to a project would be a nightmare.
Again: I don't want to make money. I want companies that make profit from an open source library to contribute something back to the free/open software movement. The money could go to some other project that needs it or to FSF or some other non-profit organization.
If we don't make a way for private companies to pay for GPL software libraries then we are forcing them to develop a proprietary alternative to the library. This would not be good for the promotion of open software.
projects like PostgreSQL are permissively licensed, but they do have companies operating in their community that do fund the development of such projects. The issue here is whether those companies contribute enough back to the project or not.
Intel is contributing a lot of work to the Gnu project. But their motivation is to serve their own interests, making sure Gnu software works optimally on Intel processors. Intel's competitors cannot afford to contribute as much, so the result is that Gnu software might perform less optimally on AMD and VIA processors. I think this kind of industry contribution is problematic.
Allow me to repeat my initial idea:
I have also thought about a scheme that requires no administration. You would get a commercial license automatically by donating a certain amount of money to some non-profit organization and posting proof of payment to some repository. Would that work?
Any suggestions for worthy organizations that would be happy to receive this money? It has to be organizations or projects that somehow contribute to free software or digital freedom. Anything else would probably be too controversial.
Ahoy hoy,
first of all, I understand your desire to engage with proprietary vendors in a more nuanced way than to just tell them "If you don't like the GPL, just go away." However, such an approach does come with certain problems and controversies. Most importantly, you create a conflict of interest for the receiving organization where their financial success is at odds with strengthening Copyleft software. Bradley Kuhn puts it very good in his recent Keynote[0] at FOSDEM, where he says „At this point, we would get paid to just look the other way.“ The whole presentation is a very good listen regarding copyleft, copyleft defense and freedom VS popularity of your code.
Agner Fog agner@agner.org wrote:
I have asked the FSF, but they are not willing to sell licenses, and frankly they are quite difficult to communicate with. That's why I am now taking the discussion to FSFE. Is there any other suitable non-profit organization who could be the copyright owner and sell licenses?
Honestly, I don't think you'll find one, for the reasons I mentioned earlier. For any NPO with the main goal to protect and strengthen Free Software, buying yourself out of the need to comply with the GPL would just be inherently at odds with their core mission.
I understand that telling proprietary vendors to either "deal with" the GPL or go away feels like a waste of ressources and opportunity, but I honestly believe that any other position leads us down a very very slippery slope that in the end will not lead to more free software, but a weaker, watered-down version of copyleft that I personally wouldn't want.
Best, Simon
On 02/26/2017 10:09 AM, Simon Hornbachner wrote:
Honestly, I don't think you'll find one, for the reasons I mentioned earlier. For any NPO with the main goal to protect and strengthen Free Software, buying yourself out of the need to comply with the GPL would just be inherently at odds with their core mission.
I understand that telling proprietary vendors to either "deal with" the GPL or go away feels like a waste of ressources and opportunity, but I honestly believe that any other position leads us down a very very slippery slope that in the end will not lead to more free software, but a weaker, watered-down version of copyleft that I personally wouldn't want.
IANAL and I'm unaware of the finer legal intricacies that might apply.
But maybe Agner might consider using the Mozilla Public License 2.0? It differs from the GPL and LGPL in that
* it is a strong copyleft * it applies on a per file basis, meaning that only files that you actually changed are affected by the copyleft.
Thus it's permitted to build a proprietary application (a derived work, I believe it would be) which uses the MPL library - any changes to the library itself, indeed to any files covered by the MPL, need to be distributed under the MPL.
So changes to Agner's library would remain free software, but people can use it to build proprietary application which they supply in other files.
Best Carsten
Hi,
Carsten Agger agger@modspil.dk writes:
But maybe Agner might consider using the Mozilla Public License 2.0? It differs from the GPL and LGPL in that
- it is a strong copyleft
I would argue that the MPL is weak copyleft because of its file-based nature.
Happy hacking! Florian
On 26-02-2017 10:50, Carsten Agger wrote:
But maybe Agner might consider using the Mozilla Public License 2.0? It differs from the GPL and LGPL in that
...
So changes to Agner's library would remain free software, but people can use it to build proprietary application which they supply in other files.
This is the best proposal so far. But it still nags me that this gives proprietary software vendors a free lunch when they are actually quite willing to pay, while the open source movement has so many financing problems. Here are some low-hanging fruits that we are not picking because we cannot agree how to organize it.
Florian Snow wrote:
What you might want to consider is setting up a CLA that gives you the right to sell exceptions as long as all the money from those sales goes to some defined Free Software organization. That way, you don't need to set up your own organization, contributors have a guarantee that you won't do random other stuff with their contributions and if you do, you lose their contributions
This would in reality be a one man organization doing all the administration work, and everybody would have to trust me. And what would happen if I die or become unable to continue? It would also get me into tax problems.
On 02/26/2017 05:40 PM, Agner Fog wrote:
This is the best proposal so far. But it still nags me that this gives proprietary software vendors a free lunch when they are actually quite willing to pay, while the open source movement has so many financing problems. Here are some low-hanging fruits that we are not picking because we cannot agree how to organize it.
Business models is an interesting topic. Many companies use some sort of proprietary licensing to finance free software development. E.g. Collabora, who sell their support packages for LibreOffice with a proprietary binary so they can charge per seat. I'm not sure I think that practice is very compelling, I think they should rather call the support agreement a support agreement and charge per seat or however they want, and stuff the redundand concept of a proprietary binary consisting only of free software.
Honestly, I think we should focus speculations on business model on providing software under free licenses. For that reason, I'm personally against the selling of exceptions.
If our business models never involve releasing under a proprietary license, we're not contributing to the proprietary software economy, and that's that.
Another thing: As a developer, I think the GPL is too restrictive a license for libraries. If I write a very small, nearly trivial, application based on a given library, I like having the option of placing it in the public domain or releasing it under the two-clause BSD license or any other free license that's not the GPL. For that reason, I believe I'd always place any library I write myself under the LGPL or similar.
On 26-02-2017 19:48, Carsten Agger wrote:
If our business models never involve releasing under a proprietary license, we're not contributing to the proprietary software economy, and that's that.
Acturally, we are contributing indirectly if an open source library is used in proprietary software.
Honestly, I think we should focus speculations on business model on providing software under free licenses. For that reason, I'm personally against the selling of exceptions.
Yes, we need to focus on how to finance open software. But to me, the word "business model" is at odds with the ideal of free software.
Whether an open source project needs funding, and whether a project is able to attract funding, is two different things. For example, some projects might raise money by selling support or custom features while other projects are unable to do so. Software libraries can make money by selling license exceptions, but have no need for the money. That's why I want to redirect these money to some other projects that need them, but apparently we can't agree on how to do this.
Another thing: As a developer, I think the GPL is too restrictive a license for libraries. If I write a very small, nearly trivial, application based on a given library, I like having the option of placing it in the public domain or releasing it under the two-clause BSD license or any other free license that's not the GPL. For that reason, I believe I'd always place any library I write myself under the LGPL or similar.
I agree. But the LGPL works only for dynamic libraries (.dll or .so) because it has a requirement that the library can be relinked.
On 02/26/2017 08:26 PM, Agner Fog wrote:
If our business models never involve releasing under a proprietary license, we're not contributing to the proprietary software economy, and that's that.
Acturally, we are contributing indirectly if an open source library is used in proprietary software.
I just re-read Stallman's essay on selling exceptions. The gist of his argument is that selling exceptions to a copyleft program or library is no worse than releasing the same program or library under a permissive license, which is not wrong in itself. As so often, he nails it. Selling exceptions may be undesirable, but it's not an unethical thing to do as long as we're not talking about proprietary extensions etc.
On the other hand, free software is so ubiquitous as to be present in practically all larger proprietary systems. The Windows networking protocols are, for example, built on the Berkeley socket implementation IIRC. Free software is inevitable these days as it's present everywhere in our infrastructure, and in that way it's contributing to proprietary software all the time (as well as to all other software-supported human activity).
Honestly, I think we should focus speculations on business model on providing software under free licenses. For that reason, I'm personally against the selling of exceptions.
Yes, we need to focus on how to finance open software. But to me, the word "business model" is at odds with the ideal of free software.
Not at all! The ultimate goal of the free software movement is that *all* software should provide its users the four freedoms. Proprietary software should become a thing of the past. This is a lot to do with the wish for a free society - Stallman's analysis of the problem indicates that *iff* we choose to build our society and infrastructure on software, software freedom is a necessary (but nor sufficient) condition for society to remain free. A *necessary* condition, to repeat myself.
Now, if all software is to be free software, it obviously needs to come from somewhere. Large organisations need suppliers they can rely on to supply support and to develop custom software. From the very moment (2005) I took a serious interest in free software and understood that the state of GNU/Linux was such that it can conceivably be used everywhere and there's no need at all for Windows or other proprietary systems, I realized that for this to become true, political lobbying is not enough - we need companies to produce and support the software that everybody is going to need. Public ("open source") projects manned (more or less) by volunteers and funded (more or less) by NGO's can do a lot, but municipalities, goverment agencies, ministries, huge companies etc. need business levels of support and development of free software.
Thus, business models for co-op's and companies and NGO's supplying free software is sorely needed. Living off the charity of advertising companies and proprietary software vendors such as Google, IBM and Facebook (as many large projects do) is *not* going to be enough. So, business models are important, are needed and are *in no way* at odds with the ideals of free software.
Stallman also has an essay on this, on "Selling Free Software": http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
Best Carsten
Disclaimer: As previously noted on this list, I work as a developer in Denmark's largest free-license-only "open source" company. So I'm looking at this as someone who's been selling free software for a living the last 5+ years. However, as I said, the need for such companies to exist was one of the first issues I noted when I started my free software activism.
On 28-02-2017 13:22, Carsten Agger wrote:
The ultimate goal of the free software movement is that *all* software should provide its users the four freedoms. Proprietary software should become a thing of the past. This is a lot to do with the wish for a free society - Stallman's analysis of the problem indicates that *iff* we choose to build our society and infrastructure on software, software freedom is a necessary (but nor sufficient) condition for society to remain free. A *necessary* condition, to repeat myself.
Yes, we would all like to live in such an utopia. Unfortunately, this is not the way the world works today. Most of the companies who pay for my software library are making proprietary software tailor made to fit some hardware produced by the same company for some very specific application. They may make their software freely downloadable or they may charge money for it, but they will not make it open source because this would give their competitors an advantage. I don't think we are benefiting any idealistic goal by turning these companies down and insisting on GPL only. On the contrary, this would open a market for a proprietary alternative to my library.
Now, if all software is to be free software, it obviously needs to come from somewhere. Large organisations need suppliers they can rely on to supply support and to develop custom software. From the very moment (2005) I took a serious interest in free software and understood that the state of GNU/Linux was such that it can conceivably be used everywhere and there's no need at all for Windows or other proprietary systems, I realized that for this to become true, political lobbying is not enough - we need companies to produce and support the software that everybody is going to need. Public ("open source") projects manned (more or less) by volunteers and funded (more or less) by NGO's can do a lot, but municipalities, goverment agencies, ministries, huge companies etc. need business levels of support and development of free software.
Thus, business models for co-op's and companies and NGO's supplying free software is sorely needed. Living off the charity of advertising companies and proprietary software vendors such as Google, IBM and Facebook (as many large projects do) is *not* going to be enough. So, business models are important, are needed and are *in no way* at odds with the ideals of free software.
I agree.
If free software projects that are capable of generating a surplus (like mine) could be used for supporting other projects that need money, this would benefit the general goal of free software. If only we could agree on a way to organize this.
On Sunday 26. February 2017 08.01.00 Agner Fog wrote:
If we don't make a way for private companies to pay for GPL software libraries then we are forcing them to develop a proprietary alternative to the library. This would not be good for the promotion of open software.
We are not forcing them to do anything. And I believe that RMS made a few reasonable points on the broader topic in the following essay:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html
Stallman even mentions Trolltech, who were a pertinent example of how you could have a model where proprietary software vendors pay for permission to use what would otherwise be Free Software in those vendors' own proprietary software. As far as I remember, those vendors lost any privileges they might have had to modify the software under the Free Software terms accepted by everyone else. (Even if they didn't, they weren't getting something they could do absolutely anything with, as if they had bought permission to completely ignore the normal licensing.)
This could be tolerated because the company selling the licences held the copyright exclusively and because most of the developers worked for the company. Bring in other people and you *do* start to have the issue of what their contributions are worth. (You can say that those people can commit to not getting paid themselves because the money would go to a non-profit or a "good cause", but those people may still have an opinion about whether the pricing is appropriate or not and whether the actual recipients of the money are getting paid enough.)
[...]
Allow me to repeat my initial idea:
I have also thought about a scheme that requires no administration. You would get a commercial license automatically by donating a certain amount of money to some non-profit organization and posting proof of payment to some repository. Would that work?
I imagine that many people contributing to a copyleft-licensed project would not be too happy with this, if the licensing itself were one of the factors that motivated them to choose that project to contribute to, instead of choosing to contribute to a permissively-licensed project of a similar nature instead.
I wouldn't be happy about it at all. It would be like someone being able to claim that the rules don't apply to them because they have money. That the little people who choose the terms of their contributions and who ask that those terms be respected can simply be "bought". I know that this is how things tend to go on in the wider world, but I don't see why Free Software developers should choose to encourage it.
I suggest that you read (or familiarise yourself again with) discussions about contributor licensing agreements and what people don't tend to like about them.
Paul