There has been a lot of talk about companies and individuals adopting licenses that aren’t OSI opensource to protect themselves from mega-corp leechers. Developers have also been condemned who put donation notices in the command-line or during package installation. Projects with opensource cores and paid extensions have also been targets of vitriol.
So, let’s say we wanted to make it possible for the majority of developers to work on software that strictly follows the definition of opensource, which models would be acceptable to make enough money to work on those projects full-time?
Personally I like the following two approaches:
Free and open source for selfhosting, paid when hosted by the company (e.g Nextcloud, gitea, cal.com)
Free and open source with basic features, paid for proprietary business addons (e.g Portmaster, Xpipe)
I think those approaches are fully compatible with the open source definition, but please correct me if I am wrong. (The examples I mentioned are just some of which I personally know and use, but of course they are many others)
I would add:
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Cost for commercial, free for personal may not always be open source. Redis for example.
How would this look like? Are you suggesting a different license? Or is it more something like paid binaries but the code stays open?
Anti Commercial-AI license
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Both of those aren’t opensource (at least I can’t find their repos on their webpages), but I see the model your proposing. Maybe just providing an option to pay at all, and not make it a donation, could work. The only problem I see is a competitor swooping in with a bigger team (or a team in the first place), and building upon the existing project to kill it in order to end up selling its own product. With non-restrictive opensource licenses like MIT and Apache, I assume it would be trivial. GPLv3 would make that a little harder.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Also paid integrations into your existing environment.
Proxmox does this.
Syncthing has vendor support - they use ST in integrations.
Both seem like effective models
Do you believe anything should be done if a large competitor takes over the business of hosting for other companies and hosting is the major revenue stream of the opensource project?
That sounds like Open Core and I am for this, but there seems to be a dissatisfaction within the loud part of the opensource community regarding it. They don’t consider it “open-source”. Do you still count it as opensource?
Your proposals concern services or applications. Do you have any thoughts on opensource that isn’t that e.g libraries, frameworks, protocols, and so on?
Anti Commercial-AI license