Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

https://github.com/FredrikNoren/ungit/issues/974

110 96 9 years ago

mathgeek• 9 years ago

Will be interesting to see the resulting fork that keeps the MIT license. Looks like a few have already sprung up.

sandstrom• 9 years ago

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

deepakkarki• 9 years ago

I've always wondered, in such cases where you have an open core and plan to monetize on extra features and plugins; what do you do if the community just goes ahead and adds those extra features? Or someone forks the project and adds the features?

AznHisoka• 9 years ago

There are several Sidekiq features others have added but I never trust them. If I am an enterprise I value reliability over price. I would pay a premium for something the Sidekiq owner worked on rather than a random contributor

manigandham2• 9 years ago

That's called business competition. Stay in business by delivering greater value.

It's likely the maintainer is in the best position to start a company about the product to deliver more features faster and at higher quality along with more inherent trust.

jdietrich• 9 years ago

The extra features are practically irrelevant. When you're spending other people's money, $995 a year for an "enterprise license" is pretty much a no-brainer, regardless of the actual benefits. It'd cost more than that for legal to check that a FOSS license isn't going to present any issues down the road. $995 a year is chump change, even if all it gets you is explicit permission to use the code in a commercial product.

It's extremely difficult for most enterprise customers to donate to FOSS projects. Small donations just aren't part of the normal corporate decision-making process. Very few people within an organisation have the authority to just give away money. Spending relatively small amounts of money on products and services is an utterly mundane part of doing business. If you maintain a FOSS project and don't offer an "enterprise license" of some description, you're leaving money on the table.

igor_filippov• 9 years ago

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

diggan• 9 years ago

Bad timing, seems licenseyourcode.com is down and does not currently work.

conradk• 9 years ago

It was renamed to faircode.io

wildrhythms• 9 years ago

I don't have anything to add, but just want to say it's refreshing to see such a civil discussion surrounding a license change like this.

tkt• 9 years ago

It is interesting and important to think about ways to support open source project contributors, especially when the projects are being used in commercial organizations. It would have been better to see this license change idea through an RFC before a change though, and with an attorney’s advice. If he does really want this to be an experiment it would have been good for him to have a better background on the types of license models available and an attorney’s help with license language changes and implications.

zitterbewegung• 9 years ago

Has the LYC license been tested in court ? I know GPL has.

I agree with the maintainer that they should be compensated for their time. An open core model works but depending on a project who has the time to set that up? Patreon or Kickstarter has the same issue.

hackbinary2• 9 years ago

I don't think the opencore model works very well. The model that does work well is the Redhat/Fedora model of fast moving, and changing cutting edge of full features, with a premium being charged for the fully tested and integrated product.

Tempest19812• 9 years ago

He proposes no enforcement. Although I could imagine public shaming of those who are out of compliance. And who knows if others using LYC would want enforcement.

rectang• 9 years ago

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...

bobby_the_whale• 9 years ago

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

xj9• 9 years ago

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

ehllo• 9 years ago

It is true, because there is a overall consent about open source.

jcranmer• 9 years ago

Do you have a proposed counterexample? The OSI definition is pretty much the same in spirit and in practice as, say, the DSFG or FSF definitions.

Non-discriminatory terms is pretty much a fundamental precondition for any open-source license. As any lawyer would tell you--and don't forget, licenses are explicit legal contracts--licenses that include discrimination clauses of various kinds (including "fun" clauses like "don't use this for evil") are basically non-starters. It's especially problematic when the discrimination is based on something as malleable as yearly profit, so that someone's inclusion or exclusion on this basis changes every year.

Licenses are legal contracts, and therefore they have the force of law behind them. Rolling your own license is a stupid idea, particularly if you are not a lawyer and you are not retaining a lawyer to give you advice on the matter. Even aspects of major licenses like 3-clause BSD, MIT, GPL, LGPL, Apache, and others have indeterminate legal repercussions, particularly when patents and copyright of contributions come into play.

nine_k• 9 years ago

I'd add that 1M in revenue is barely enough to support 4-5 reasonably paid develops + some opex like aws and a small office in a big city. The license change would probably touch most of its commercial users.

icebraining• 9 years ago

Maybe in the US. Many, if not most of the world can support way more developers with that revenue, and open source projects are used worldwide.

hackbinary2• 9 years ago

While I can understand where he is coming from, his stuff is itself largely built on the free licensed software of others.

In the end, this seems to me like pulling up the ladder after himself, and ultimately quite selfish.

arekkas• 9 years ago

How is making a living from your work selfish?

shadowmint• 9 years ago

It depends, is that work based on the free work of others?

Taking advantage of the community and not contributing back for others to benefit (as you have, for free) seems selfish to me.

Maybe if he proportionately (based on LOC or something) donated any income to his upstream dependencies?

...but I suspect that wouldn’t leave much.

waisbrot• 9 years ago

Reinventing GPL with less care. I can copy the code, re-license as plain-MIT, and now commercial companies can use it for free.

A dual GPL-commercial license is the correct way to handle this. A more useful contribution to the license landscape would be to define a commercial sibling-license to the GPL that described how license payments would be disbursed.

0xfaded2• 9 years ago

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 that authors wish to maintain copyright over, but for minor contributions/bug fixes the author probably doesn't care and it would be better for everyone if the contribution was integrated into the core repository.

Klathmon• 9 years ago

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 really know what that would legally look like, but I've been hit by issues from open source copyright too many times to consider it a "solved problem".

Perhaps a new license "framework" that allows each contributor to say how they want to allow their contributions to be used in the future? I honestly don't know, but the current solutions are holding us back in some ways.

rgbrenner2• 9 years ago

I can copy the code, re-license as plain-MIT

You can't relicense someone elses code. You dont have the right to do that.

If you fork this code, only your changes would be under MIT. So you would have a mixed-license project, and users would need to comply with both licenses.

If you don't want to use this license, you have to fork it from before the license change... giving up the changes that were made after the new license takes effect.

bhuga• 9 years ago

You're right, but both the MIT and the non-commercial portion of this new license explicitly grant the right to sublicense. It's not obvious to me that a free use case can't sublicense its use to a huge organization.

X86BSD2• 9 years ago

I think actually you can. If you rewrite 75%? 80%? You can relicense it. Legally I think the law views that as new code not a modification. A lawyer may need to correct me but I seem to recall something like this.

ajross• 9 years ago

Seems to me like the authors are trying to restrict the use of the software by commercial pursuits, not the distribution. The GPL does the latter, but says nothing about the former.

vortico2• 9 years ago

This is a perfectly moral choice, assuming he has not taken significant contributions from others (or they have allowed this relicense, or granted copyright ownership of their contribution to him). Later in the Issue discussion, they attempt to put a name to the type of license. I propose "Freeware with source". Thoughts?

bonzini• 9 years ago

They have already allowed the relicense by releasing their contributions under a permissive license such as MIT.

vortico2• 9 years ago

Oh yes, of course. Ignore my parenthetical statement then.

pjungwir• 9 years ago

If this becomes a trend I'm afraid it will hurt business use of all open source software, since companies will never know if their dependencies are going to suddenly start charging money. Even though you can use the old versions, getting stuck on outdated libraries is a big problem for a lot of projects, where you try to stay up-to-date. It feels like we are only recently at a point where managers and lawyers will permit building on open source software and not force you to use Microsoft and Oracle. But if every repo could be free today and $90/mo tomorrow, will that change?

microcolonel• 9 years ago

But if every repo could be free today and $90/mo tomorrow, will that change?

Well, it's not "free today and $90/mo tomorrow", it's just that they're not going to maintain the one that's under the free license. You don't suddenly have to pay $90/mo for what was already distributed.

It's a fair attempt to make some money, but this license is odious and bizarre. I don't think there's a trend for this.

skissane• 9 years ago

since companies will never know if their dependencies are going to suddenly start charging money

It is more of a risk for some open source projects than others. Look for example at React – I very much doubt Facebook will try to relicense it into a commercial product, simply because they are not in the business of selling software and probably don't want to get into that business. But, compare that to many small companies who have a product (such as a development tool or database or whatever) and they offer an open source version and a commercial version with extra features–there is a much bigger risk they might decide their open source offering is harming their commercial one, and therefore should be discontinued.

Similarly, an open source project run by a single individual or small community is more likely to be closed up than one run by a large community. On the other hand, a project run by a single individual is likely to be a smaller code base, and hence more feasible to fork or maintain in-house.

So, I think businesses should be aware of this risk, but should evaluate that risk for each open source dependency independently.

fragsworth• 9 years ago

I truncated some of the text to highlight a possible issue with the change written by the Ungit maintainer:

Permission is hereby granted (...) to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies ("Use") of the Software (...)

And then:

If you are a commercial entity with a revenue in excess of $1,000,000 (...) you must acquire a commercial license grant (...) to Use this Software (...)

The problem is that according to the license, you can now pay $90 to "copy", "sell", and most importantly "sublicense" the software. Legally, does this work the way the Ungit maintainer intended?

luma2• 9 years ago

Or, can I as an individual who is an employee of the company, but not the company, "use" it myself and then "sublicense" it to my employer?

Xorlev• 9 years ago

Speaking on his pricing, $90/month is more expensive by far than IntelliJ Ultimate/PHPStorm/RubyMine by far with a lot less value.

Having worked at an org with $xxMM in revenue, we still wouldn’t have paid for it. We would have chosen to find a different tool. It’s a Git UI. Come on.

dangoor• 9 years ago

Since the license allows sublicensing, it seems like a business only needs to buy one license at $90/month, which is a lot cheaper than IntelliJ

antirez2• 9 years ago

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 starting to think that it's a bit unfair that incredibly successful companies sold for billions, mostly based on OSS frameworks, libraries, operating systems, don't support the projects they used to reach to such success. And no... releasing your own OSS project to the public, developed for internal interests, is not going to pay back the authors of the projects used to reach the success.

2) If you like this route, better to start ASAP with such a license, or at least start with some restrictive *GPL license and not BSD. Otherwise you are obviously susceptible to forking once you insert such a clause.

jondubois• 9 years ago

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.

antirez2• 9 years ago

Interesting observations, thank you.

jlg23• 9 years ago

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^wcustomers.

rcthompson• 9 years ago

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.

aseipp• 9 years ago

"Paying people for their work sucks, what a drag. Undercutting their work so we can continue to profit more is a much better strategy."

betenoire• 9 years ago

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

hannob2• 9 years ago

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 lying.

(And before anyone answers: No, there's no "other open source" or "a different kind of open source". Open Source is a clearly defined term and such restricted licenses aren't.)

INTPenis2• 9 years ago

You're confusing open source software with free software.

I'm on your side in principle but the distinction is important in this case.

gpderetta• 9 years ago

This doesn't meet neither the free software nor Open Source license requirements. It might be open source in some colloquial sense, but that's not how the term is usually understood in the trade.

hannob2• 9 years ago

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.

jrochkind14• 9 years ago

nope. i think you're confusing "free as in libre software" with "free as in beer" software.

roblabla2• 9 years ago

I just learned about faircode[0] and I've got to say, I like the idea. I like that right on the frontpage, it shows that I have the choice to keep using the current license, and have it work like a Patreon, or use their own Faircode License (which seems what this story is about). It makes them look honest.

I like that they are honest about the cost of using the faircode service, right on the frontpage (5% on top of a 2.9% + 30c transaction fee).

I like that they thought about having tools integrated in the ecosystem to allow businesses to easily now what license the deps they're using are on, and how to easily pay for them.

I haven't looked too deep into it, but if it could handle a dual license model as well, then it'd be beyond awesome. I don't want to force companies (even >$1M companies) to pay if they contribute back any improvements they make.

[0] https://faircode.io/

FredrikNoren2• 9 years ago

Your wish has been heard; I just added a dual licensing option to the platform :) Enjoy!

roblabla2• 9 years ago

Wow, that's awesome ! You have no idea how happy this makes me ! Thanks for your hard work, I'll definitely be using this and suggesting it to the people around me :D

EDIT: Just tried to sign up, and I triggered an internal error :<

tedunangst• 9 years ago

Would this prevent github from using ungit (unless they pay)? Presumably this would also prevent ubuntu from packaging ungit?

ralmidani5• 9 years ago

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...

jrochkind14• 9 years ago

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.

ralmidani5• 9 years ago

I understand that "Faircode" is not trying to protect downstream users from non-free software. That's my point; It's not about principle, it's about extorting money while appearing to be principled.

Copyleft licenses force people to release their modifications as source code, or pay the copyright owner for an exception (if the owner is open to providing the exception)

Non-Copyleft licenses say "do whatever you want, just give us credit."

"Faircode" says "Even if you release your source code, if you make enough money, you still have to pay us."

59nadir• 9 years ago

I am trying to avoid the word "shakedown", but this strikes me as exactly that.

Yes, the $90/month cost is going to hurt all the companies that have revenue greater than $1,000,000/year. This will put them out on the streets, I'm sure.

Let's be real: This does not apply to you, and on the off chance that it does, why are you complaining about paying $90 per month for something you should probably already be donating more to?

If your business depends on a tool/library and your revenue is in excess of $1,000,000, and you haven't yet donated to that project, you're just a leech. I guess we could both hope that your revenue falls below the limit so that you can escape these unfair shakedown licenses and continue not contributing in any way to the things you use.

ricardobeat• 9 years ago

What if the company makes contributions to open-source through other projects - for which no one is paying them? Is it ‘fair’? Who is the leech?

Even a $1m/y company (which is not big at all) will be hard pressed to pay 1k/year for a git wrapper. The whole idea of OSS is that everyone benefits from the exchange and costs are distributed. This won’t scale at all - count your current open source dependencies and imagine paying that sum for each of them.

bitwize• 9 years ago

In the USA, software is licensed, not sold. The licensor is free to set whatever terms they wish on the license (within the bounds of the law and reason), violation of which revokes your right to use the software.

ralmidani5• 9 years ago

Then we should stop pretending "Faircode" has anything to do with freedom or open source.

jordigh• 9 years ago

This isn't open source: it discriminates against field of endeavours (point 6):

https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

Restricting commercial use isn't anything new or a bold new experiment or anything. It's the same lesson we apparently need to relearn from the 1980s.

quotemstr2• 9 years ago

I've been telling people for ages now that the slow erosion of copyleft mindshare in favor of permissive licensing is going to bring about a return of the bad old days of proprietary software licensing. Now, maybe I'm wrong, but this move doesn't bode well.

siscia• 9 years ago

It is a while that I think about monetizing open source.

Honestly, I do not believe that companies will pay to use open source software when they can just download it.

Developers will prefer to just download instead of waiting for the legal department and the budget approval.

On the other hand, if it was simpler to just download the code/executable and then pay later, without any hassles from the legal department it could be the standard way to use Open Source.

However, there is still the problem of what to sell.

A great idea could be to distribute the executable when it applies, thinking about golang, C/C++, any compiled language. For languages that are interpreter you could distribute the ruby gem, or the python egg or the JS packet.

Now if we combine this mechanism with some rate-limiting and price structure.

Stuff like:

* 10€ for one time download of the current version.

* 50€ for one time download of any version forever, when a new version comes out you can download it too.

* 10€/month for 30 downloads/months of the current version

* 50€/month for 30 downloads/months of any version

* 100€/month for unlimited downloads.

... and so on.

This could already provide several benefits, and be enough for several projects.

However we could also go a little forward.

We could provide an incentive to the buyers to buy the software and that incentives could be to do not distribute the building instruction or the dependencies list as open source.

Of course it will be possible to reverse-engineer the build instructions or the dependencies, however, it will be so time-consuming that any sane actor will prefer to just pay a little fee.

Finally, we could provide, under a restrictive license, the above-mentioned build instruction to whoever wants to contribute to the code base in a non-automatic way. Just send an email, ask for them, explain what you are going to do, promise to do not use them to by-pass the above restriction and you are ready to go.

In this way:

1. We maintain most of the code open.

2. There will be incentives to just pay for open source.

3. There will be a trade-off between new contributors and time/resource the current maintainer will be able to support the project. (I don't believe that somebody willing to dive into the complexity of an open source project to add features will be scared off by contacting the maintainer, explain to him what he wants to add, maybe wait his feedback, and finally get the build instructions. Honestly, I see mostly benefits in this project)

I would love to hear feedback about this idea.

So please share your thoughts and if you are interested in trying something like that feel free to contact me via email :)

X86BSD2• 9 years ago

This thread and the culture of those replying to it fascinate me. Do you really enjoy spending this much time debating licenses, clauses, and legal matters?

I personally, just have to many more important things to do than worry about and waste time on compliance, laws, enforcement. It just seems like such a rediculous waste of time.

I just 2 clause BSD license my code and move on. Compensate me, don't compensate me, I'm busy writing other code, or designing systems, etc

Do people people posting replies here really spend this much time on licensing issues instead of producing?

It just seems so needless to me.

rabidrat• 9 years ago

I would love to continue producing the rest of my life, without concern for licenses and business. Unfortunately I am running out of savings and will not be able to spend even 20% of my time producing. So I am in support of finding some way of getting a living wage for the software I lovingly produce for free.

erik_seaberg• 9 years ago

Licensing is the difference between building on bedrock or quicksand. The profession has wasted millions of hours on rewrites of stuff that already existed but was entombed in failed projects.

hasenj• 9 years ago

I don't think this is a new idea, but anyway it's not a proper "open source" license.

quotemstr2• 9 years ago

Why is GitHub happy to provide free hosting for proprietary software? Ungit is no longer free software in either the libre or gratis sense.

djur• 9 years ago

I was curious about that myself for a similar situation a while back. Their terms of service do not require a free or open source license:

If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality (for example, through forking). You may grant further rights if you adopt a license. If you are uploading Content you did not create or own, you are responsible for ensuring that the Content you upload is licensed under terms that grant these permissions to other GitHub Users.

dwheeler• 9 years ago

The fundamental problem here isn't the relicense, the problem it's that it's being incorrectly called an "open source model".

This is not an open source software license, so it's not an "open source model". It's not a Free software license either, as defined by the Free Software Definition. Instead, it's a proprietary license. It's not a new software license model, either; historically this has been called a "gated community license" or "open box license". Here's article from 2000 about gated community license models: http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/gated.... They've never caught on, in over 20 years of trying, but perhaps this project's experience will be different.

We've had, for decades, a widely-accepted definition for what the term "open source software" means. If someone actually means "open source software" per that widely-accepted definition, then by all means, that person should use the term. Since this project don't actually mean "open source software", then they should not use the term - please call it something else. The world is confusing enough.

Changing the Ungit license from MIT to Faircode

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