How to support open-source software and stay sane (2019)

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02046-0

by rbanffy • 4 years ago

65 48 4 years ago

manholio7• 4 years ago

What we need is an time-bombed open source license, that allows a limited exclusivity period for the author during which they can charge for the software. After that time expires, say 3 years, the software reverts to a free shareable license, that anyone can fork into their own commercial, 3-year time bombed projects.

Dangle the carrot and let working people make a living, but force them to give back and prevent them from building closed source proprietary empires fueled by vendor lock-in.

There is a certain type of software, for example professional tools use by non-programmers - graphic editors - where traditional open source models, support contract or volunteer developers, can't work. If you won't be able to charge for copy, such software will never be written in an open variant.

freeqaz2• 4 years ago

That is the goal of the Business Source License[0] which has been gaining popularity recently. It's still a bit tricky to "adopt" into organizations because it is not usually on the "approved license list", but it's a pretty good middle-ground imo. A lot of companies are starting to move behind it like CockroachDB, MariaDB, Couchbase, and many others.

I'm less of a fan of another license that's gaining popularity too, the "Server-Side Public License" (SSPL)[1], with projects like Airbyte and MongoDB because it doesn't have the "time bomb" aspect that BSL has. If there was a license that were in the middle between the two (SSPL but w/ a time bomb) I'd be pretty stoked.

Until then though, we'll just have to live with custom "Additional Use Grants" in BSL to carve out who can use it.

0: https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-mariadb/

1: https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license...

yubozhao• 4 years ago

Curious about your reason behind being less of a fan of the SSPL license. Can you elaborate more?

disclosure: I have a repo using the SSPL license

manholio7• 4 years ago

What I dislike about BSL and related is that on the Change date the software typically reverts to GPL, which prohibits others from creating their own BSL competitor to MariaDB.

What I would like is to take the MariaDB 4 year old source and release my own database with better features, then compete in the market place with MariaDB, and have my own commercial exclusivity period, as I have explained elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32339945

To use the BSL in the sense I am referring here, the Change license must be BSL itself, with flexibility to allow a new change date, at the new developer's discretion, no longer than a set limit (4 years for BSL). If want to make the code free-beer, I set the change date to be the same as the release date, but the next day every other developer has the option to fork my BSL code and release their own BSL time-bombed version for up to 4 years and make money of it. Users who don't want that can take my code and enjoy all the freedoms that GPL would grant. [1]

Otherwise, if my only option on the Change date is GPL, which is very restrictive to me as a developer, I have zero incentive to work on certain types of free software that can't make money off support.

In a sense, a recursive BSL is freer than GPL, because I grant my users all the freedoms of GPL but additionally the freedom to create their own timed-bombed commercial release, i.e., to restrict the freedom of others with their own releases. The end users then have to option to use my original free-beer version, or pay for a better feature set, which itself is guaranteed to become free beer in a number of years. This incentive structure ensures a steady revenue stream for the developers as long as they create new features which are desired, but the revenue stops if they try to rely on vendor lock-in.

[1] (of course to do this recursive-style licensing one would need to modify BSL to grant the actual freedoms to run the code, distribute etc., the current text lacks this and relies on an external open source change license after the Change date).

JoshTriplett2• 4 years ago

time-bombed open source license

That's contradictory by definition; such a license would not be Open Source. (With care, the three-years-later version could be Open Source, at which point people could build on that.)

valbaca• 4 years ago

no, it's not. the source is open, it's support that's charged.

manholio7• 4 years ago

It would not be open source for the duration of the time-bomb, clearly, that's the point of creating an exclusivity period.

After the time-bomb, it's undeniably open source: users have all the freedoms granted by open source and they have the option to release their derived version with a zero days time bomb, effectively equivalent in all respects to GPL. What GPL does not grant, and such a license would, is the ability to create a non-zero commercial exclusivity period, during which the software reverts to commercial-with-source-available status.

imiric2• 4 years ago

There's nothing precluding F/LOSS from being commercialized. That's a common misunderstanding. The F/L stands for freedom, after all.

There are many ways that can be done, and authors are free to pick whichever business model works for them, depending on the type of software.

If it's a web service, build a commercial SaaS around it, and make sure that you're the first and best option for users.

If it's a desktop app, offer commercial extensions that enhance the core product. Or serve binaries behind a pay-what-you-wish paywall.

If neither of those are a good fit, premium support, merchandise and ultimately donations might be an option.

scombridae3• 4 years ago

Knee-jerk (and correct) response to the "but OSS can be commercialized!" insistence:

Why play the business game in nightmare mode?

Leverage is real, folks, i.e., I can withhold my software if you don't pay up.

manholio7• 4 years ago

If neither of those are a good fit, premium support, merchandise and ultimately donations might be an option.

And what if neither of those are a good fit? Will you concede that there is a real world out there where open source software competes with proprietary and closed source systems? And that you cannot compete with corporations eating passion alone? That you have to have a monetization system in place that can generate at least a non-negligible fraction of what the closed source competitor can?

pessimizer• 4 years ago

Isn't that just writing proprietary software, making money from it for three years, then open sourcing it? Nothing wrong with that plan, but you don't need a new license to do that.

leereeves• 4 years ago

I think GP is talking about a copyleft license like GPL, but with a few years of commercial use before the copyleft restriction kicks in.

candiddevmike• 4 years ago

What we really need is better "free, source available, non commerical" licenses and breaking the stigma that these are somehow inferior to FOSS _for end users_.

I have many things I would make source available if I didn't have to worry about someone reselling them.

andreareina• 4 years ago

Would MySQL, PostgreSQL (among many many others) be so good as they are if they weren't open source but just source-available? I don't know, but I suspect not.

sneak5• 4 years ago

Why do you worry about someone reselling them? What is the harm to you?

preezer• 4 years ago

THIS! I got the exact same problem. Last year a company wrote me and wanted a quote for a job to my open source software, so that they are able to sell my software to others?!

I mean... okay... it's currently a MIT license, but I really was pissed just for the question.

freeqaz2• 4 years ago

I wish that this article had focused more on the "how to" aspect of this problem and less on the "what" part. It feels a little muddied between trying to explain the problem space (researchers re-using code) and the "steps" involved (write clear code + docs, use Git).

As somebody that runs a semi-popular Open Source project[0], I am very aware of the painstaking task of taking a "hacky script on my machine" and turning it into something public that others can not only use, but trust enough to _depend_ on too.

Here is a rough checklist of tasks that come to mind:

- Write a Readme with a description of what the project is (help Google index it for future search)

- Publish a Docker image that can build the whole project and produce a binary or run the server (this is a massive PITA to get setup -- once you do this, setting up CI becomes very easy)

  - Ideally there is a Docker image with a small POC app too (which is often more useful that docs are imo)

- Put the project into Awesome Lists so that people will actually find it (also helps with SEO)

- Add a license to the repo and, if you really want people to trust it, add license headers to every file (I see _so many_ projects without even a LICENSE file. Without this, it's illegal to use the code at all!)

Beyond all of that, Docs help a lot too, as does a "legit" looking website, but you can get away with pretty crappy docs if you do all of the above.

0: https://github.com/lunasec-io/lunasec/

_jal• 4 years ago

but you can get away with pretty crappy docs if you do all of the above

Depends on your audience, I suspect. When evaluating something for use, the first thing I look at are the docs. No docs, or just videos pretending to be documentation makes it super easy to skip and move on to the next possibility. Crappy docs means I only come back to it if everything else is worse.

huepfebein• 4 years ago

Documentation, preferably including FAQ for bigger projects, is key. Saves time and energy for users/customers (current or potential), future maintainers, other developers and support teams.

Another recommendation: Limit your dependencies to what is strictly necessary.

TedDoesntTalk2• 4 years ago

I see _so many_ projects without even a LICENSE file. Without this, it's illegal to use the code at all!)

In what jurisdiction or country?

ianbutler• 4 years ago

It's not illegal perse but without a license file all rights are reserved to the owner per GitHub. So you could get sued and they'd (maybe) have a case.

I won't argue for a particular license, but you should have one. I personally won't touch a project without a license as I usually aim to monetize my work somehow and don't want a potential legal headache.

Loranubi• 4 years ago

AFAIK in at least some countries it's enough to mention the license somewhere. It's not necessary to include a full license file.

sdoering2• 4 years ago

For example in Germany. Copyright applies automatically and you can't just use anything (images, code, text, and so on) without explicit okay by the producer of this.

A license just allows you to use the content/code under specific conditions.

Else you just are not allowed to use it.

chrchang523• 4 years ago

(2019)

dekhn• 4 years ago

Although I totally understand how tough it is for a modern academic to maintain software, I gave some thought when I reached the Berkeley computational biologist who complained: Nelle Varoquaux says that, in her field of machine learning in biology, software tools quickly become obsolete because the size of the data sets is changing so rapidly

Let us consider another software project at Berkeley: BSD UNIX. BSD was a research project, a vehicle for groups to do operating system research, an environment for the development of modern relational databases, and the tools that it helped introduce have scaled through multiple orders of magnitude of data set size and through many different hardware architectures. It was done by a combination of professors who obtained funding and crazy grad students who lived and breathed UNIX.

Eventually, the primary funder felt the project had reached its impact limit and reduced funding https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1992/0622.html but the reality is that all this open source stuff happened before and will happen again. The government funding agencies have a messed up incentive system that funds primarily the "sexy" stuff and only around the time when it's producing the "sexy" publications. For example, one of the most important things that kept BSD going was Ingres (oh look, berkeley CS still hosts a copy from 1989: http://s2k-ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/ingres/vax-bsd/)

The UNIX tools I've used for over 30 years have scaled to every IO system I've worked with until I hit multiple-terabytes and moved to parallel computing. Even today, you can pump terabytes through pipes and if you have enough space, you can sort enormous files.

Actually, some bio software also qualifies. AMBER has been around since the 70s and is still a competitive molecular dynamics code that runs on the largest supercomputers and fastest GPUs.

I've concluded that the best source for longterm funding is to convince some billionaire that bio software is important, and then get enough funding to fund an ongoing staff that maintains the software and supports the community, and spinning off a commercial company that handles the enterprise integrations.

pvaldes• 4 years ago

Hum, I wonder why is this a nature article. It just seems not the correct format.

manimino• 4 years ago

Scientists sharing code helps with reproducibility.

ccbccccbbcccbb3• 4 years ago

If painters are paid for their paintings and not for songs they sing in discordant voices at exhibitions, builders - for buildings and not for juggling steel beams while wearing clown suits, medics - for healing and not for trying to pitch home-baked heart-shaped cookies to their patients, why on Earth programmers must make their direct product free and invent schemes to make their work profitable?

Well, because "ethics"!

tpoacher• 4 years ago

In theory I agree.

In practice, all the above professions have similar marketing/businessplan/user-vs-customer problems; just not the trivial ones you listed.

krab• 4 years ago

The other professions have the same choice as programmers - either sell their service and worry about all other stuff, or outsource these worries and get hired.

There is no shortage of jobs where programmers are getting paid for programming.

ccbccccbbcccbb3• 4 years ago

But there is shortage of sensible jobs which bring satisfaction, are not swamped in bureaucracy or, conversely, in the frenzy to attain recursive success-in-success-in-success yesterday with inhuman cutting-edge team-building techniques, are not devoid of any sense and can boast a collective of nice people rather than an entangled skein of snakes and spiders.

And at the same time there is a growing abundance of artificially created worries for those who want to remain independent and sell their work directly.

ChrisArchitect• 4 years ago

(2019)

Some discussion from 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20325011

How to support open-source software and stay sane (2019)

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