Can I coin the term ‘pay per pull’ (not that I think that’s the best approach)? Perhaps you could pay with a freshly minted CommitCoin?
There was https://tea.xyz/ that does something like this, kind of, to a point, using a blockchain approach to see which packages are used. An extension of the same concept to gits would be interesting?
You charge 20 bucks for month, and from this you pay 10 straight to OSS developers and with the other 10 you hire a team to offer a N1 level of support to your customers. You could also provide a repository of "vetted software" to prevent scenarios like the xz attack.
Yeah, a central authority could potentially be beneficial if/while it's run by benevolent people.
But if it gets taken over by (say) political activism types, or just MBA types determined to treat it like a profit center, then it's going to turn to crap right about then. :(
It's crazy where we're calling "I made this thing that was useful for me and I'm giving it away so that it might be useful to others" corporate welfare like they're the ones betraying the spirit of OSS. But the companies that release OSS as a growth hack for their VC funded startups and are happy to take it away when it benefits them, those guys are the real spirit of OSS.
There has never been a time that selling OSS has ever worked and it seems like business are wising up to the fact that there's no first party advantage in OSS. If your plan is make some software and charge for <something else> you better be damn good at the something else. RedHat made it work with a truly ungodly amount of effort on support, documentation, compliance, and security channels.
He's proposing what sounds like Qt but instead of an app framework led by one company it'd be a huge collection of anything useful from a variety of parties, and developers would be compensated in proportion to usage, somehow.
We (the dev team) were suggesting the AGPL but when we got advice from outside counsel[1] they strongly recommended Apache 2 or MIT because of technical legal stuff to do with how the license is drafted. The concern wasn't due to any sort of GPL "virality" type concerns it was to do with the wording of all the linking and "conveying"/distribution stuff which they felt wasn't drafted very well and might be weak if we later tried to pursue someone who was violating the license.
[1] From one of the most reputable big law firms in the US specializing in IP issues
I do agree that the state of open source is poor, despite it being basically the reason internet exists as it does. I really think we need a modern model that accounts for how masses of people behave in our current work environment.
(EDIT: to clarify, all this is mostly around other contractual issues)
(1) Proprietary license with annual term, annual mandatory customer audits, and customer revenue-based payment,
(2) Massive bundling so it would all be under one license and payment,
(3) Automated, “git depository”-based determination of revenue sharing to contributors,
(4) Despite #2, multiple different companies involved in actually taking and redistributing payment.
Whose problems is this solving? It’s not solving real user problems (except maybe for some large enterprises, where the added annual fee might be worth the supposedly simplified compliance, though I don’t actually see that this offers necessarily offers simplified compliance.) It’s not solving the problems of the VC-funded startups that have been complaining about not being able to make money off open source. I don’t think its really solving individual developer payment issues better than users with substantial interest paying developers directly for work that those users are interested in and/or supporting foundations backing projects of interest.
the music industry is a bad model to emulate because the incentives are even worse than FOSS to rob creators. Streaming platforms paying out fractions of a cent for thousands of uses would be the example software would likely converge on. what free software did phenomenally well is establish merit and signal capability in a culture that produced the most wealth of any other era.
who is it broken for? maybe people who want to use tech as a proxy to govern people without adding value, but i'd argue that's a feature not a bug.
How sure about that are you?
Asking because there seem to have been plenty of posts over the years from people working on OSS stuff, who are or have faced financial difficulties.
Closed source is worse; it's much harder to find backdoors or accidental bugs when you don't even have source code to work from.
I can only recall two incidents: the other being the JS event-stream cryptothing and that was five years ago. Perhaps there are others I'm not aware of, but by and large, it seems very rare that projects that see real-world usage get compromised.
(and don't give me any of that "but we don't know how often it happens!"-bollocks – you can always say that about almost anything; go find evidence).
I am not sure why you describe that as bollocks. The most surprising part of the xz backdoor is that it was discovered by sheer luck. Imagine what would've happened if the backdoor hadn't caused a noticeable slowdown. It is not a stretch to imagine that there might be other backdoors in OSS that are not (yet) found.
Some projects may be more important to some and less important to the others, does it mean they need to pay a subscription plus a donation to support that a specific project?
And it feels like this will become a paywall, like those academic publishers, with most of the money going to 'administrative fees' as well as legal fees.
The recent moves by the EU and the DoJ to regulate companies like Google and Apple fill me with hope that we can fix the problems that these monoliths create.
We shouldn't have to destroy something like open source to stop them from taking advantage of us.
We should just regulate away their ability to take advantage of us.
But that's incorrect, there are at least two goals: ensure that software development can continue, and provide users (whoever they may be) with some approximation of GNU's Four Freedoms (freedom to use, freedom to study, freedom to modify, freedom to distribute).
At least, those are the minimal two goals for anyone interested in FLOSS.
Open source is always part of a business strategy, typically even for individual tinkerers since they can use their own open source work/contributions as part of their portfolio and thus leverage it to get more and better contract work / jobs.
Ewww. Why do that?
The company would surely be better off if the owners buy more yachts instead.
/s
OSI has always existed to shift the conversation from talking about freedoms and rights in the digital era to about software quality.
Here, again, we see them pushing their corporate-benefactors' interests: reducing costs and meeting compliance requirements.
That seems wildly inaccurate.
If you take a look at their internal license discussion mailing list, the majority of the time the members are talking about the freedoms and rights of various licenses and proposals.
Discussion archives are here if that's useful:
http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists....
The difference between the OSI and GNU/FSF are well stated here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html
The people paying the bills don't want better products and just about anything can already be bodged together. Building better products is only desired by the engineers who have no say in the matter.
For non-commercial work you do on your own there's really no real limits on what open source you take and use, and that's great, yeah.
Most of the so-called "corporate exploitation" cases I hear about on HN happened in exact accordance to the license. It's like clockwork:
(1) Authors releases software under license which explicitly allows anyone (including AWS) to productize it
(2) All the users flock to it (people do like it when there are multiple suppliers that can drive the price down)
(3) AWS productizes it, drives the price down. Users are happy.
(4) Developers act surprised that users don't want to pay more money when they can pay less.
(One notable exception is massive and common GPL violations by various hardware manufacturers. This is a real shame and should be enforced more... but that's not what Perens was talking about)
It is like having your cake and eating it too...
I'm not sure if there is any good solution. Maybe it is just going back to something like source available... And selling actual products or services.
I work at a big company where we both consume and contribute to open source. Our single biggest problem in open source is vendor license issues like confluent and redis, where we can't get that service from a cloud provider without hoops.
