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Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

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Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#51

Post by jondubois »

antirez wrote: post #23

I do not want to judge the license change: everybody should be able to do whatever they want with the code for which there is ownership. Just two general observations: 1) I think this is going to be a trend in the future, for two main reasons, one is that the cloud poses very challenging limits to individuals or small companies to monetize they OSS projects selling services, the second is that many OSS developers are…

Yes I think it depends heavily on the type of open source project and it shouldn't be frowned upon for certain kinds of projects.

I run an open source project which is technical and is designed to integrate into other systems; it's ideal for fast growing companies and large organizations that have money; because of this, inbound leads for consulting, technical support, sponsorship, partnership and contract work trickle in on their own. So in my case, a very permissive MIT license makes sense even financially.

If you have a relatively simple product which is more like an external stand-alone tool (not designed to be integrated into proprietary systems at the API level), then it will be impossible to monetise it through consulting or sponsorship.

Also, other kinds of open source projects which are difficult to monetize are those which implement established and well understood industry standards.

Adhering to standards helps with adoption and greatly increases your project's chance of success but it's not creating any new markets; you're tapping into an existing user base and competing with other implementers in a race-to-the-bottom in terms of performance, efficiency and usability and it's hard to capture any value out of that.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#52

Post by igor_filippov »

sandstrom wrote: post #3

For open-source projects driven mainly by one contributor, I think the model employed by Sidekiq[1] is better than this one. There is a base version with the MIT (or similar) license. Then there is a PRO version which adds some enterprise functionality + premium support. But still a good thing that Ungit is trying this. There is value in experimentation! [1] https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq

Are there more products with the same model as Sidekiq which have the same level of financial success and are one man show?

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#53

Post by bonzini »

erikb wrote: post #38
arekkas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is making a living from your work selfish?

Please read a comment before you respond. The whole comment only exists to say that it seems like the author of ungit is not making a living on his own work alone, but also on the work of all the OTHER contributors, who contributed assuming this would be a free and open community project.

Other contributors were using a very permissive license, that allows sublicensing. They were okay with a proprietary software company embedding their code into a proprietary product and selling it, they should be okay with this as well.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#54

Post by riffraff »

Klathmon wrote: post #49
0xfaded wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like a companion contributors agreement to the GPL that provides the correct legalese to assign copyright back to the project owner. I decided to go the GPL route, but am not currently accepting contributions. I've managed to successfully license the code under a companion license, which is doable since I'm the only copyright holder. My thoughts are that there should be a contrib fork for major contributions…

I personally feel that assigning copyright on commit is a stopgap. What if you die? What if you abandon the project? How can a fork of your project work with that if they want to change the license down the road? Copyright basically lasts forever now, so any choice about "assignment" will last forever. Personally I really feel we need a solution that allows the current "maintainers" to have control over it. I don't r…

Assign copyright to Apache or an equivalent organisation, that takes care of governance past the single maintainer.

In any case this is worse if there are multiple contributors each owning their copyright, not simpler.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#55

Post by ralmidani »

Maybe I am missing something. If you release something under a non-copyleft license, as long as I make proper attribution, what I do with it should not be your concern. If you do not want people making money from your software without paying you, use dual copyleft/proprietary licenses instead.

"Faircode" seems like an attempt to have it both ways: squeezing money out of people without being labeled copyleft (because that's not cool in some circles).

There is nothing "fair" about making a company's revenue a criterion for deciding which license terms the company enjoys.

What if I make more than $1M but am willing to release all of my modifications? Does that make me less of a friend to the community than people who sell non-free versions, but have had less success with their business model?

I am trying to avoid the word "shakedown", but this strikes me as exactly that. From the Medium post announcing the license:

"Some people have asked my about the difference between this and donations. I think that for a project like Ungit small individual donations would never work; we’d have to convince thousands of people to part with small sums of money. We’re simply not big enough for that. With LYC the idea is to ask a few big players who benefit commercially from the project to part with bigger sums instead."

Source: https://medium.com/@fredriknoren/trying-a-new-open-source-mo...

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#56

Post by rcthompson »

jlg23 wrote: post #34

Licenses like these are a logistical nightmare. If someone deploys software under that license, paying that person for the job is the smallest item on the bill: Now I have to connect my legal department with my techies and with the finance folks. Let's schedule meetings every 3 months to review for which software we have to pay now! Just the logistical overhead alone justifies a fork for any of the targeted users^wcu…

Yeah, the thing to remember is that "cost" is not a smooth or continuous function of price. There's a very large jump discontinuity between $0 and $0.01. It's not an issue that comes up for most products, because for most products a price of $0 doesn't make sense. But software runs up against this regularly.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#57

Post by xj9 »

bobby_the_whale wrote: post #47
rectang wrote: post #11

This is not an "open source business model", as claimed by the Ungit maintainer, because the new license is not open source under the long standard definition maintained by OSI. Good commentary from Grant Bakker in the discussion: https://github.com/FredrikNoren/ungit/issues/974#issuecommen...

Just because something is old, it doesn't make it true.

get back to me when the faircode license is listed on the OSI website or considered a free software license by the FSF

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#58

Post by jrochkind1 »

ralmidani wrote: post #55

Maybe I am missing something. If you release something under a non-copyleft license, as long as I make proper attribution, what I do with it should not be your concern. If you do not want people making money from your software without paying you, use dual copyleft/proprietary licenses instead. "Faircode" seems like an attempt to have it both ways: squeezing money out of people without being labeled copyleft (because…

I don't see the relation. Copyleft licenses and what the faircode license are attempting to do are pretty different things. I don't see any relation between them, other than that they are both licensing terms. They are different licensing terms.

I do think the terms of this new license are going to be confusing and make it difficult to figure out how to use it legally. As with most if not all "non-commercial use only" licenses (including CC-NC), of which I'd consider this a subset (non-commercial use or commercial use by companies with income under X). But non-commercial-use-only terms and copyleft 'share alike' terms are different things.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#59

Post by hannob »

INTPenis wrote: post #40
hannob wrote: post #37

Of course people can license their stuff in whatever weird way they want and I don't have to like it. But I don't like it when people lie to me. The title is "Trying a new open source model" - the content is "Trying not to be open source any more". If you don't want to do open source then you can of course do that. But if you don't want to do open source any more and still say you're doing open source then you're lyi…

You're confusing open source software with free software. I'm on your side in principle but the distinction is important in this case.

> You're confusing open source software with free software.

No, I'm not. Please read the open source definition: https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

In practical terms there's very little difference between free software and open source. It's mostly a "philosophical" difference - free software advocates put an emphasis on "freedom", while open source advocates see it more as a business model. But the requirements for the licensing are identical.

Re: Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

#60

Post by jrochkind1 »

Klathmon wrote: post #49
0xfaded wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like a companion contributors agreement to the GPL that provides the correct legalese to assign copyright back to the project owner. I decided to go the GPL route, but am not currently accepting contributions. I've managed to successfully license the code under a companion license, which is doable since I'm the only copyright holder. My thoughts are that there should be a contrib fork for major contributions…

I personally feel that assigning copyright on commit is a stopgap. What if you die? What if you abandon the project? How can a fork of your project work with that if they want to change the license down the road? Copyright basically lasts forever now, so any choice about "assignment" will last forever. Personally I really feel we need a solution that allows the current "maintainers" to have control over it. I don't r…

it's pretty straightforward, there just needs to be a legal entity (ie, a corporation) representing and controlled by 'the maintainers', to assign copyright to.

The easiest way to do this is under the umbrella of a foundation like ASF. But you could create an LLC or any other form of corporation with no income or assets other than the copyrights it holds, if you want. There would be at least some minimal annual registration costs etc.

Any framework that allows contributors to _individually_ set terms for their contributions is going to be pretty unworkable, as the actual terms for the whole product become the union of any term any contributor has ever set or something, a mess.

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