
An Open Licensing Organization for Open Source Software - zrail
https://www.petekeen.net/asacp-for-open-source-software
======
vortico
Congratulations, you just came up with a proprietary license concept. That's
great, but don't misuse the phrase "open source" or "free software". Perhaps a
better alternative to the absurdely complex system you've proposed is to
simply exchange software licenses/units/subscriptions for cash, the way it's
normally done. Other people can contribute to your software through
"contracting" and "being hired". This is the easiest and most straightforward
way to handle proprietary software.

If you truly believe your concept deserves the name "open", you should
research the concept at [https://opensource.org/](https://opensource.org/) and
reevaluate.

Open-source software is for _everyone_ to use, not just those advantaged
enough to have free time to contribute to projects in a secret club.

------
daly
no, No, NO.

We're programmers. If you can think of it, we can do it. But it takes someone
who has the motivation and the time. Motivation is easy to find but time is
not. Because Time is Money (as I'm sure you've heard). So the real issue is
open source funding.

I've spent the last 18 years trying to get Axiom funded.

I tried the NSF. They will not fund Axiom because there is a "competing
commercial product" (aka Mathematica).

I tried the Air Force (AFOSR). They cannot give grants to open source work
because it requires financial tracking. Somebody has to managed the funds and
the receipts. When I was at City College I did get a grant but they have a
Provost (who took 55% for "support").

In order to handle accounting open source needs an "accounting office" with
professional, certified accountants. I approached several companies (e.g. IBM,
TI, etc.) with the idea of "donating a certified accountant or two" to an
organization that would "manage open source grants" with services like funds
management, receipt clearance, taxes, etc. That way an open source project
could accept grant money. So far, nobody wants to donate people. I think such
an office could completely change the whole open source funding issue.

I've tried setting up donations for Axiom. The idea was not to pay people to
work on Axiom, just to support things like setting up a conference or paying
to attend a conference. I was the only donor.

Open source is not free. I estimate that I spent about $3000 per year on
things like travel to attend a conference and paying for hosting services. I
now have the Axiom server under my desk on a $1200 dollar computer. In order
to ensure Axiom runs everywhere I have to buy computers like the Apple (used
to be a non-Intel processor), the PowerPC, a Windows machine, a Linux machine,
etc. It all adds up to a lot of money.... not to mention the cost of books to
keep up. Oh, yeah, and my time is written off as "free".

~~~
zokier
> They cannot give grants to open source work because it requires financial
> tracking.

There is nothing special in open source work that would preclude financial
tracking. Sure it takes effort, and there are costs related to getting all the
paperwork done so you need to think twice if it is worth it. But still, its
just normal part of the business.

~~~
daly
Yes, you can set up a business to handle everything. And you can pay an
accountant to handle the grant. And you can do all the receipt tracking. And
you can get your busiess certified by organizations that issue grants.

All of which means that you don't spend time programming. The fundamental idea
is to centralize that "overhead" so that open source programmers can program,
not run a business.

We're not trying to make and market a traditional product.

------
danShumway
> The OSCC license would be a variant of Apache 2.0, BSD, or MIT, with the
> additional clause that the rights granted by the license are also predicated
> on paying for annual OSCC license fees.

Then it's not Open Source.

I agree that funding Open Source software is hard, and I want a solution as
much as anybody: It's not even a theoretical problem for me, I am currently
self employed and would _really_ like to fund myself with just Open Source
software.

What you're describing is a really bad idea though, it isn't actually FOSS.
Heck, it's actually considerably worse than many of the other licensing models
out there, because it basically boils down to being a subscription service.
Many of us are involved in Open Source because we specifically hate the
'software rental' model.

Better ideas that I've seen people kicking around that I wouldn't immediately
dismiss:

\- putting a paywall in front of issue trackers

\- dual licensing under the GPL and a proprietary paid license.

\- requiring upfront payment for new features (ie Kickstarter/Patreon)

\- open core models (ie Gitlab's strategy)

\- advertising and sponsorships via READMEs and official sites.

Many of these ideas also have problems, but at least they don't require us to
completely abandon FOSS licensing.

~~~
acover
Do you know if projects that use the patreon style? Successfully or not?

~~~
danShumway
Funding OSS on Patreon-like sites is really stinking hard[0]. There are not a
ton of people making it work, although a few are close[1].

I suspect this is because OSS software on Patreon usually doesn't come with
many actual benefits. One of the models I'm interested in playing with in the
future is having Patreon-specific issue trackers and access to separate
development repositories.

In any case, you should not be trying to fund yourself purely through Patreon
unless you have a good reason to believe you're going to be different.

Kickstarter and crowdfunding on the other hand has been real
promising.[2][3][4][5]

I think there's strong evidence that OSS developers should consider charging
upfront for feature development. It probably doesn't work for every type of
project, but it seems to work for _many_ types of projects.

[0]:
[https://liberapay.com/explore/teams](https://liberapay.com/explore/teams)

[1]: [https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/fund/](https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/fund/)

[2]: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-
th...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-the-magical-
git-client)

[3]:
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-m...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-
mark-ii-the-open-voice-assistant)

[4]: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-
just-a...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-
blogging-platform)

[5]: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbs348/diaspora-the-
per...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbs348/diaspora-the-personally-
controlled-do-it-all-distr)

~~~
acover
Thanks. What do you think of a subscription that gives you access to
suggesting and up voting/down voting features?

~~~
danShumway
:) Is there a hosting service that supports it?

This is the other problem I ran into trying to figure out how to get Patreon
set up - Github and Gitlab have pretty broad permissions.

It would be good to see people experiment with a wide variety of permissions
surrounding issues, from access, to commenting, to creation, to upvoting. A
lot of Open Source projects aren't even really looking for funding, but still
want something in front of people who are just showing up to complain.

I don't know of a public issue tracker that supports that kind of granularity
though (if you do, let me know), so the next best thing I could find is to
make a private group on Gitlab for development branches and issue tracking,
and then to mirror everything to a public repo for stable releases with issues
disabled.

If anyone who works on Gitlab/Github is lurking around, it could potentially
be a really cool differentiator to have those kinds of granular permissions.

------
zrail
Author here. Y’all are right, using the words “open source” for this model is
a mistake because it doesnt fit the existing definitions well.

The core of the idea is to centralize the complexity from the perspective of
both the developer and the business that uses the developer’s software, such
that businesses fairly compensate developers without developers having to
develop a separate, unique business model. Musicians banded together a century
ago to make this happen for them and it’s worked well for everyone concerned.
It seems like we should be able to do the same.

~~~
prepend
I’ve read of some horror stories around ascap suing various bars and
restaurants [0], and that seems like something that I would want no part of as
a developer, user, or company. As a music lover, this seems like a system that
causes much harm and has been opposed to file sharing and free information
sharing.

[0] [http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/news/ascap-sues-
peninsula-...](http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/news/ascap-sues-peninsula-
bar-for-copyright-infringement/)

------
mperham
The easiest, fairest sliding scale I can think of for charging corporations
for this is __per employee __. Charging based on revenue or other accounting
metric allows for monkeying and funny math.

For example, $500/yr/employee. That's minimal for small startups. For a
company with 50,000 employees, that's $25m/yr.

Realistically you can't start charging that much initially but as more
developers and projects use an OSCC license, the value increases and you can
raise the royalty rate.

~~~
prepend
That’s great for companies, but bad for organizations. I run into this with
commercial vendors who try to explain how all 10k people in my org would
benefit, whereas I know only 100 would use it.

Just because something is easy to verify, doesn’t make t fair.

There’s very little software that I would ever think warrants
$500/employee/year for a small startup.

~~~
mperham
You're misunderstanding. You pay $xxx/employee to buy a license to use ALL
software with that license. You aren't buying one thing for N employees.

Let's assume Linux, Apache and PHP all licensed via the OSCC. $xxx/employee
means you can use all OSCC projects in production for your org. Royalties
would go back to those projects based on usage tracking (which itself is a
major complication).

~~~
prepend
There is software not using your system that I would need. Even if this
covered all OSS products I use, I wouldn’t pay $500. The price is kind of
ridiculous. If it’s for every employee in the org

------
qz3
I'd like a dead-simple and globally accessible way of donating.

Like github/gitlab/etc allowing to easily deposit money via CC, Paysafecard,
Google Wallet et al. The projects could have a "donate" button by default.

I often clone and browse projects and absolutely wouldn't hesitate to donate a
few dollars here and there if it's just a click away.

~~~
prepend
Flattr does this, sort of. I pay a monthly fee and it distribute it to
whatever repos I star that month. They distribute to more than Github as well,
but not everything.

------
sixdimensional
So, I have gone down a similar mental experiment trail also, before. I like
this direction of thinking, although I haven't arrived at an ideal solution.

What I could not avoid with your type of thinking, was ending up with
something that seemed like a patent/copyright shell company. If someone can be
excluded from licensing by not paying a due, then is this truly open? I
understand your intention is to re-use open source licenses and add a small
clause directing payment for use to this open licensing organization, but
ultimately, I think that such an organization may become a threat not a
benefit.

I might be wrong - the Apache Foundation works pretty well for humanity, and
Apache licensing works well also. And, they seem to raise at least enough
funding to keep the lights on from their supporters.

I personally always get stuck debating between the concepts of for-profit [1]
/ non-profit [2] and public [3] / private [4] goods.

I think the tendency in these discussions is not to get specific enough about
what we are talking about. For example, the traditional confusion between
"free" and "open" source software... e.g. the "free as in beer" vs. "freedom
of speech" [5].

In a sense, your proposal would solve that problem because it would create a
clear organization supporting a clear license, with a clear compensation
mechanism. However, how would this organization run? As a non-profit? As a
for-profit? Maybe a social benefit corporation [6]? I think the choice is
everything, if it can work at all. There's a reason, I think, that open source
is especially associated with the rise of the Internet and networks, and
decentralization, and sharing. Perhaps there is not a perfect legal model for
such a thing.

I think in a naive sense, the concept of "open source" is sometimes thought to
be analogous to able to be saying that a copy of the intellectual property can
be used and/or modified without restriction, the copy can be owned by anyone,
and can be shared with anyone, in any situation (commercial or not). Of
course, depending on the specific license (GPL, AGPL, MIT, Apache, etc.) there
are differing degrees of how open "open" really is.

There is a desire to make something.. truly open with literally no
restriction. Ironically, many companies and organizations might not touch such
a thing out of fear of the origin, they worry if they use it they might get
sued. It's almost as if we cannot have a situation where there is just a piece
of intellectual property, openly shared, without a license (for example,
"common knowledge".. a gray area term as well, but, do you have a license for
it?).

This again is an area that clarification may help... if you know that you have
access to this huge portfolio of IP and source, as a member of such an
organization as you propose, you don't have to worry about the license anymore
as long as you pay your dues. But, what risk would such an organization carry?
We need look no further than to the recent acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft
to see an example, we'll have to see how that turns out.

I think I'm rambling now, but I hope some of these thoughts come together to
help. I'd be willing to chat more about this.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For-
profit_corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For-profit_corporation)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_good)

[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre)

[6]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation)

~~~
mperham
Apache committers are almost all employed to work on the projects, a patronage
model. Nothing wrong with the patronage model as long as you realize you work
at the behest of the King. Mozart and Bach, for instance, spent much of their
life searching for jobs and/or patrons to support their musical efforts.

~~~
sixdimensional
I have to admit to not knowing exactly how the projects and people for Apache
Foundation are compensated, so thank you for sharing that.

I think you're absolutely right and perhaps I brought up the example of the
Apache Foundation as one that seems to be working, but even it too is quite
different from the model that OP was proposing.

