In a business context, I'd definitely consider paid support for an Open Source product. But I'm not interested in a proprietary version that I can't modify or get third-party support for or otherwise work with in a pinch; I'm certainly not going to make a business dependent on it. Push the proprietary version hard enough and I'll reconsider whether I even want to use the Open Source version, or if it might be on more tenuous ground that might get undermined in the future (pushing back on improvements to the Open Source version to maintain differentiation, or worse, deciding to switch to a non-FOSS license in the future).
> Push the proprietary version hard enough and I'll reconsider whether I even want to use the Open Source version
Qt is pushing hard for commercial licensing (which I heard prevents you from using the open-source version), putting L/GPL FUD on their websites, and trying to track users of their installers more.
The model of "copyleft if your project is open, pay us if your project isn't open" is one where I have no problems or concerns, and will happily use the open version and recommend that people building something proprietary purchase a paid license. Nor will I typically worry about the motives or future of the project unless I have some other reason to. And the KDE Free Qt Foundation means I never have to worry about Qt going proprietary.
Does anyone know a good license for that? Maybe the Prosperity license?
EDIT: I've just realized that I want a revenue-limited trial, rather than a time-limited one. I basically want the Prosperity license, but with the ability to say "you have to pay me if your company makes more than $100k in annual revenue". Is there a license like that?
I've emailed the License Zero people, hopefully they'll do something for that.
The "that" in question was "copyleft if your project is open, pay us if your project isn't open". For that, try the AGPL or GPL, depending on your use case and customers, and then sell alternate licenses for people who don't want to make their own code open.
> Maybe the Prosperity license?
That isn't an open source license, despite its efforts to be ambiguous on that front. That and the even worse "commons clause" are exactly the kind of license that motivated the latter half of my original comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24005833
The Prosperity license seems like a better fit to me, as the GPL/AGPL has a different set of constraints (e.g. customers who want to keep their code closed).
What's wrong with a license that's non-OSI "open" but gets developers paid from large companies to develop otherwise open software?
> The model of "copyleft if your project is open, pay us if your project isn't open" is one where I have no problems or concerns, and will happily use the open version and recommend that people building something proprietary purchase a paid license. Nor will I typically worry about the motives or future of the project unless I have some other reason to. And the KDE Free Qt Foundation means I never have to worry about Qt going proprietary.'
Software under a proprietary license is something I can't build other Open Source software atop of that I expect other developers to use and collaborate on. I don't want to have a forked ecosystem of proprietary-with-source-available software, I want to actually collaborate on Open Source software.
With Open Source, I'd feel confident that if we had to manage it ourselves, or fork it and add a patch, or get a third-party to develop a patch, or work with a dozen others with the same needs we have and collaborate on it, we can do so. It's reasonable to build an ecosystem or community or company around. You cannot replicate that with any non-open license; by the time you're done granting all the necessary rights, what you'd have is a non-standard-but-Open-Source license, at which point you'll get more traction if you use an existing well-established Open Source license.
I don't really care about encouraging the development of more proprietary software, whether or not it happens to have source available. There are already well-established models for getting people to pay for proprietary software. If someone is looking for a funding model for Open Source, and what they find is "turn it proprietary and generate FUD that it's as good as open", that's a failure. And when people are looking for Open Source and they find proprietary-with-source-available, it undermines decades of careful work and explanations by the FOSS community, and generates substantial confusion.
It's your software, and ultimately your choice how to license it. Various companies have tried the "source-available but still proprietary" model. Just please don't call it open or contribute to the FUD around proprietary-with-source-available licensing.
Speaking from experience, when encountering software under a proprietary-but-source-available license that tries to act like it's open, the response from companies that actually deal in Open Source is not "Ah, OK, let's pay them and use it", it's "yikes, get this away from us, how did this even end up in consideration, let's either use something Open Source or use something actually proprietary, not something by someone who is either confused about the difference or hopes other people will be". (The set of engineers and lawyers who deal with software licensing professionally, at various companies, tend to talk about it with each other.)
That makes sense. Unfortunately, as someone else in the thread has mentioned, the ways of monetizing OSS misalign the incentives between user and developer, and they haven't really been very successful anyway.
I develop multiple popular libraries that thousands of people use, yet I've never seen a single cent from them, which is fine for me because I don't develop them to make money. However, it's really hard to foster an ecosystem when companies who extract millions of dollars of value from FOSS don't feel like they need to give back.
> Unfortunately, as someone else in the thread has mentioned, the ways of monetizing OSS misalign the incentives between user and developer, and they haven't really been very successful anyway.
Many ways of monetizing it don't misalign incentives. As a user, I don't value support less just because software is more reliable; on the contrary, I trust the software in higher-value contexts because it's reliable, and in those contexts I need the support more. I don't value "host this for me" less just because the software is easy to install and configure (because I still don't want to be the system administrator if I don't have to). And "please develop this feature for me" has great alignment of incentives.
> However, it's really hard to foster an ecosystem when companies who extract millions of dollars of value from FOSS don't feel like they need to give back.
You're a lot less likely to get paid for software that's under an all-permissive license (e.g. MIT or Apache or BSD). It's unfortunate that so much of the ecosystem has settled around permissive licenses; with such licenses, your best strategy for making money may be "use the software to get hired somewhere or to build reputation for consulting". There's a reason companies love permissive licensing, and subtly (or unsubtly) discourage copyleft. Strong copyleft gives you more options to monetize something, either now or in the future.
That said, I also do agree that there need to be more good ways of funding Open Source.
Maybe you're right, I do tend to choose MIT/BSD usually. I think I'll switch to GPL, though I don't entirely agree with your first paragraph (I am less likely to pay for software if I can host it myself, for example, though possibly not by much).
Not sure but I think maybe they were mixing up profit vs. revenue and pointing out how a company can ensure it has zero profit. But I guess you'd also have to be careful about which entity or sub-entities are covered by a license and the revenue limits.
Unreal engine charges a 5% royalty on sales after the first $1M in revenue. And source is all on github, so it's basically zero friction until you get big.
I’ve been using Qt/C++ for a few months here and I’m really really impressed. It’s really nicely done, and the performance is fantastic. Honestly, I’d have probably considered Electron, but the software runs in a somewhat resource constrained environment and has pretty significant soft real-time processing requirements (the C++ part)
If the licensing model asks for companies to pay for the "Enterprise" features which are still OSS, it would resolve this problem for me at least (not sure about the OP).
In general, its been my experience that the closed source enterprise only crap that most companies push for is exactly that: crap. I suspect its because those features are treated as a business expense, and thus built to keep costs low. Almost every time those features are underwhelming and buggy.
If its OSS, at least I can contribute a patch; if the thing is popular, likely someone else has already fixed it.
Enterprise support is a fucking joke; they will delay delay and delay. If you push hard enough, they say "its on the roadmap" without giving any gurantee of when it will be fixed. The only time Enterprise support has really worked well is in my org that got the best support package for GCP. GCP's support for urgent issues and product feature requests has been somewhat reliable and predictable. Much more than literally any other enterprise (I'm looking at you Okta).
- we had requested some way of being able to remove IAM permissions that went stale. GCP introduced a “recommendations” feature that indicates which IAM roles have been unused for a long time and can safely be removed.
- we requested a way to prohibit the provision of ILBs on shared VPC subnets without explicit grants; GCP introduced a role for that
- we had issues with the number of compute instances being too high on our VPC and reaching limits because of the number of vpc peerings. In the past, every GKE cluster created a new peering. We have a bunch of GKE clusters, and as we added more the Max number of instances we could provision was reduced significantly. GCP introduced and fast tracked a feature that enabled all GKE clusters to use a single peering rather than create a peer per GKE cluster.
There’s a bunch more. But on this front I have been a happy customer.
If you're saying "source-available" as opposed to Open Source: complete non-starter. I'm looking for Open Source, not a faux knock-off of it; don't try to give me a subset of Open Source license terms that you think would placate me while not actually being open.
