FSL: A License for the Bazaar, Not the Cathedral

That’s why I said “competing” and not “using”, yes.

It’s just that for me the phrase “exclusivity period” would imply that you could compete as a provider of sufficiently-old versions. And technically you can, except the script kiddies will take you down in a heartbeat, and in that respect you’re in a very different world from the one the original developer was at that point in the past even if alternative offerings are ignored.

(Consequently, the original developer is not competing against old versions of their own software the same way as Microsoft used to be competing against old versions of Office or Apple is now competing against older Macbooks.)

No, but that challenge would exist if it was GPL which is why a hypothetical FSL-GPL would not be possible.

It's very hard for me to take anything which starts with CatB seriously. It was very charismatic, beating up a strawman which didn't exist, and zero of it played out as expected. Eric Raymond is mostly gone, as everything he's touched has failed. Open-source has started to realize Richard was right about ethics, as the two movements have increasingly converged. Richard, for his part, is still marginalized, socially awkward, and everything seems to be playing out by the playbook he wrote in the nineties.

This writing is just as confused. The author is missing the basic points of a license: A license is like a constitution for an ecosystem for how people will interact, a check-and-balance on the monopoly power of the license-holder, and a community contract. The FSL is looked at through none of those lenses. The attempts at empathy with the opposing viewpoints clearly don't express an understanding of those viewpoints. The reasoning is just bad.

Even taken at face value, a license which does not set up an ecosystem of equals is a cathedral license, not a bazaar one. The citation is weird.

Analyses needed for licensing:

- Who will contribute, and why?

- What ecosystem is being set up? One of equals? One with a central party?

- Why will my customers give me money? Does this preserve my ability to make money?

... and so on. Those require deeper dives. "If you build it, they will come" doesn't work. If you want contributions, for example (not everyone does), you want to do a deep dive on the needs, wants, and motivations of potential contributors. An ecosystem of equals (bazaar) will bring in more contributors, but also more competitors.

I'll give a personal example:

In my professional work, I use 100% open-source, largely to mitigate for the risk of what happens when the cloud vendor disappears. FSL mitigates that risk, while BUSL doesn't.

The license seems non-crazy, though, and a huge step up from BUSL. What's concerning, though, is that it's completely unclear that the author understands why this license makes sense, so it's liable to be misused. It feels more accidentally-stumbled-upon.

What we have now is exactly what would have happened if the AT&T vs BSD lawsuit had come to a conclusion before Linux kernel came into the scene.

Big iron UNIX would keep going and cherry picking from the BSDs as it had done until the lawsuit took place.

It is no surprise that all new FOSS OSes for IoT, none of them embrace copyleft licenses.

That’s a purely hypothetical situation. Even in that case a court would very likely uphold the license just by the name. For what it’s worth plenty of software is only referencing a license by name or reference and I’m sure you are using that software as if that license were there in hardcopy.

More importantly if you want to make a fork you can always retain that license the moment you fork, not the moment the license swaps. In fact you probably would want to start collecting contributions under Apache 2 straightaway.