171–180 of 454 posts
I always thought Street Performer Protocol is an obvious answer to fund open source software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_performer_protocol Do not release the source until the fund is raised.
And that's the closest of the various older theoretical models to the proposed solution of Crowdmatching being worked on at https://snowdrift.coop
I'm currently experimenting with this directly. Specifically trying to make Open Source sustainable but for a consumer project. I think Open Source really works for infrastructure projects and it's possible to do really well either working on a system like Kubernetes or Elasticsearch. Not so well for projects that are more focused on consumers. My app, Polar, is focused more on consumers and is an app for people to m…
Oh wow, this is fantastic. Could you highlight this a bit more on your splash page? I missed it completely the last time I visited getpolarized.io.
The best we can do is to work within the dilemma. That's what https://snowdrift.coop is aiming to promote and support.
Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS. Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it t…
We need a good license in the spirit of Commons Clause: source available, feel free to use, but don't sell (just written better and hopefully supported by wider community).
The most curious thing about this is that when a company behind a successful OSS project decides to change a license that would extract some of that value back to the actual creators and maintainers of OSS, they get the backlash from OSS community [0][1]. Ironic, given that the same authors openly post the donations received that amount to... well not peanuts exactly, but not something comparable to an average programmer's pay either. Not all feedback is like this, of course - some recognize the unfairness in the system and support the search for change.
What I currently miss most is some viable 3rd option - not open source, not closed source, but something in between. Apart from GPL & co., and MIT / BSD / Apache, we need a sort of license that would allow creators to extract some part of money from their work. Or at least allow them to sell services, based on their product, without fear of being undercut by competitors who don't bother developing. Why develop when you can take the best OSS product, integrate it to your infrastructure and sell the service?
Current situation with "middle-ground" licenses is:
- Fair Source license is very well written, but is unfortunately only applicable to a very narrow use-case (user-facing apps), and bigtech can still undercut you at hosting (though you do get some royalties... probably)
- Commons Clause seems a bit vague about the term "Sell", has a very unfortunate name, and their main proponent already chose another license... too bad, because the idea is great.
- Zero License is too complex (for me at least)
- Business Source License looks promising, though I am not thrilled about the prospect of turning my software to GPL after 3 years (AGPL with closed loopholes would be a better choice).
If someone knows of a better license in the spirit of Commons Clause, I'm all ears.
[0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/fair-source-licensing-i...
[1] https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/22/Commons-clause-will-destr...
The downside of this is that OSS can only be produced by people who have a sufficient degree of financial security. No matter how useful a given piece of OSS is, if the creator is not financially secure they're required to either beg for money, or beg for a job. Isn't it odd that a piece of software, could be widely deployed, forked, starred on Github etc. etc. and yet with all this infrastructure there is no mechani…
I think you can make money on Open Source, but I think you need partners to do so. I work for a Danish municipality that is a member of a municipality driven open source community called OS2. We’re around 60 members, and we’ve recently won a national award for tech-reuse issued by our ministry of digitisation and around 10 interest groups. We don’t build the code ourselves. We do own, review and manage the code. We h…
> We don’t build the code ourselves.
Ha, ha, well put. That much everyone agrees on, and Amazon especially so. :)
The question is: can you make money as the developer of OSS?
Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS. Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it t…
This, 1000 times. We need a good license in the spirit of Commons Clause: source available, feel free to use, but don't sell (just written better and hopefully supported by wider community). The most curious thing about this is that when a company behind a successful OSS project decides to change a license that would extract some of that value back to the actual creators and maintainers of OSS, they get the backlash…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are doing God's work. Is it on github?
Street Performer Protocol means the source won't be released until the fund is raised. (It's work-in-progress, so I am not fundraising yet. It will probably be on Kickstarter with a demo to prove the thing is real.)