It's surprising to me that there hasn't been a successful license like this yet. I imagine there are other people considering one too. It looks like he's made more progress than I did though.
My first imprsesion is that 1% of revenue seems low. In comparison
Epic - 5%
Apple - 30%
Google - 30%
Amazon - 15-45%
Twitch - 30%
I noticed
Post-Open requires a central entity that receives and apportions payment, does enforcement, and operates the service entity (or three central entities, one for each purpose). Open Source developers are very independent, and have not had to deal with a central entity until now, even one that they own.
I think there needs to be very careful consideration when creating organizations to manage a royalty that would apply to the entire industry.
As an example, I imagine there are organizations that dislike Doctors without Borders because they serve communities within Russia or Iran. If there's political takeover on an industry license, it could exclude ever being paid for open source work when it touches sensitive topics.
There's also the risk of financial takeover. The moment the organization starts collecting billions of dollars from copyrighted works, there's extreme incentive for takeover from tech companies. It sounds insane to me to consider something like "developers should sign all their software over to Oracle and trust Oracle to distribute it back." Though, I'm not ready to rule out that an organization can't be successful.
It also creates the complicated question for who should be entitled to funding, and I think it could be tempting to make the case that certain charitable software projects should receive funding. This is in significant contrast to a company like Apple, which collects 30% and can spend it on anything Apple desires. I currently think developers should primarily be entitled to receive the royalty, and if they desire to allocate it to non-profits, that's their decision.
I still really have to think about it.
I like that he's well known. It seems like he is politically controversial. I tried some searches, and it seems like there are mixed opinions about him. I don't personally know the entire history. I think it would be good for a well known and trusted person to champion this type of license.
It also looks like he's open making changes to it. In the article it says he is searching for volunteers and legal funding.
It looks like he has written lots of information, I haven't any of it yet. In the article it stated before starting this license
In 2020 Perens resigned from the Open Source Initiative, the non-profit overseeing the OSD, when the organization was considering whether to give its blessing to the Cryptographic Autonomy License because he believed it wasn't "freedom respecting."
This doesn't sound bad.
I really want to avoid commenting on it before reading it. I don't know the history very well. I also am not someone with large stakes in open source licensed software already. There are lots of people with millions of dollars that was licensed. Just monumental works.
I think democratic organization would likely be best for determining revenue shares. I just look at 501c(3) non-profits like OpenAI that signed with Microsoft and I'm wondering why I should care that it's a 501c?
My first impression is that 1% sounds insulting, I think high levels of organization are possible between people who license large amounts of open source software. (people who license above $100,000+ in value/yearly)
edit:
I think what happened is just the result of many decisions that worked out differently that expected. In 2000, Microsoft didn't have a shared revenue model for their OS. By 2010, Apple did. By 2020, as mentioned in this article, Spotify had already taken it's model and started taking as much as possible from artists.
I'm significantly younger than someone like Stallman. I don't know how or if his actions might have been different if Microsoft existed at the time with a shared revenue model. I just showed up in the aftermath without the to desire to license because I felt like a company was likely to abuse the license.
Second, while copyleft doesn’t get developers paid directly, it does at least given them a fairer chance to compete on more equal footing with big tech companies that would otherwise embrace and (closed-source) extend if it were permissively-licensed.
This is throughtout a group where significant members are in frequent communication. It maybe wasn't clear 30 years ago, but organization and centralization of contributors is arguably more obvious today. Equal footing would be able to demand more because of powers like unionization.
I don't even know if people who are primarily licensing would have that goal. It's seems common for someone in this type of position to already have really good career/pay options, they may not see a purpose for organization
It does seem problematic. I could see it being a larger issue later, so it could be good to find a better solution.
Some possible alternatives
Remove the ability to move it up/down.
The consequences of this seem worse to me. Set permanent numbers might have been good at first, but there's potential for them to become worse
Distribution to different set groups.
A simple example would be a distribution on repositories sorted by stars.
The lowest 25% receives nothing, there's a cut off to reduce abuse.
25 - 50% receives 33%,
50 - 75% receives 33%
75 - 100% receives 33%
This is just an bad example, but seems more careful in distribution than 1000 stars that can be increased by other licenses. It's definitely more complex to understand, but tools could simplify it
Something else?
It doesn't seem possible to move star counts down easily
It doesn't seem possible to change the amounts later with the license. I don't think a company is going to be too willing to choose a license that seems to imply funding groups are available then leaves the potential for them to drastically change later
I mean, I guess it could always be more complex
ex. 5% royalty to a non profit where any person who has had their identity verified can vote in elections yearly to...
All of my projects are on Sourcehut. So all of my projects are automatically excluded from your narrow definition of “open source projects” worth supporting. So are all projects on gitlab, or… anything but github. Your license sounds more like a mechanism for promoting a monoculture and incentivizing developers to host on github.
I don't disagree. I don't really know how to fix the problem in what has been considered without an extra organization that does some form of identity verification and then collects votes on open source from anywhere on the internet.
The only reason GitHub was selected was because it's easily recognized and the metric is understood
Say my library uses a library that uses your library. Is your license more infectius, like the GPL, or parasitic? Do all projects using your library have adopt your license, or include it?
Anything that depends on it would be including it in something else later. I was considering anything that used it that made income had to pay 5% royalty. A library that uses a library that uses a library with it would had to pay 5% on income made with the final library. Though, I don't necessarily have an opinion on requirements of the license of the final library. I also wasn't considering open source restrictions like the GPL.
I think revenue seems easier to enforce too. Just revenue didn't really make sense in the context of what I was doing, as people are writing contracts that handle millions of dollars and collecting like less than half of a percent. It's just confusing. It does make sense when the business is creating iOS or Android Apps and selling digital items, etc. I think the license could be restricted to business category, it's just more to consider, and a lawyer would probably really understand it.
I'm not exactly sure what is meant by investment valuation tests. As an example, is the investment valuation supposed to be something like "the financial contribution to this repository cannot be more than 5x the estimated cost to contract the entire source code by a reputable institution?"
Oh. I thought “it” was your software project.
Yes, I want to use a custom license for my project.
I've also wanted for a while to create some type of distributed royalty license, but the level of effort I want to put into that is just dependent upon how much potential there is for it to be successful. I haven't decided on what I will do yet for my own project. I think the main issue is it's just difficult to find terms that are not hard to understand and people readily support.
I love this idea. I feel like a shakeup with licenses is needed. I wonder if you could consult a lawyer then ask some larger open source projects if they would be willing to adopt the license?
Contacting authors of repositories seems really smart. I imagine it could be possible to contact a large percentage of them. I just want to be confident that I have a good license that will be liked before I make an attempt.
edit: Though, looking for feedback from them might also be a really good idea
It does have to be careful to not be exploitable. I know in this post, there's already been mentions of using revenue instead of income. I am aware, and in the past I have seen posts on reddit about actors who were denied pay in the millions because of creative accounting. (and probably also due to them not consulting a lawyer before signing)
Lawyers are probably the best positioned to give advice.
I'm not searching for advice yet, I'm just interested in understanding what others want in a license still. A lawyer will be necessary for being confident that a license is enforceable.
I like the distribution to set group sizes. I dislike royalties directly to a nonprofit, I have doubts about the people who will show up the moment it's managing billions of dollars in royalties.
or there’s a clause that says it must be included with incompatibly licensed software, in which case it’s parasitic: someone could still clone my library, replace the dependency that uses your license with some other library that doesn’t - remove the parasite, so to speak. In the latter case, I could still BSD-3 Clause or MIT my library, with a big ol’ warning in the README about your license and the implications.
A clause for being included with incompatibly licensed software would likely be my preference given the other doesn't have more support. My first impression is that having people use it is more important. A goal of the license being to make it overwhelming to escape because it is everywhere.
If I continue, I would like to do something like the following
The group that this targets, software developers, I don't think we're difficult to contact. There's usually personal websites or email addresses associated with accounts. I think it could be possible to survey a large randomized sample, above 10,000 developers who have contributions to highly appreciated repositories.
There would have to be some cut off for who to select. I think I would like to focus on developers who are planning on licensing software, as in, they're already demonstrated they're writing licensed software. This is all to say, I don't want to haphazardly screen the general public opinion.
In this post, I noticed that those responding seemed to slightly skim over or misunderstand parts of it. This is partially a communication failure for me, but also seriously hinted to me that asking with text about licensing details seems like it could be a bad idea. I think like a video that first covers topics followed by a survey might be better, but I'm worried something like that will bias those that I ask.
Before all of this, before I talk to a lawyer, I want to think about all possible restrictions or options available. This is where I think comitting to a git repository would be a very good idea. Just making an attempt to determine everything that is relevant, because there are clear differences in how a license should work.
After that, I can consult to determine what is and isn't possible. And from there, I'm hopeful that it's possible to carefully survey and understand opinions on what more developers and companies would like to see in a license.
I don't want to accidentally create a license that becomes stuck and is extremely damaging. I want it to serve those that are using it in a way that makes them happy.
I'm still not 100% committed to this yet, but feel good about the responses here. I was worried the responses would be highly negative, as it's something that takes very unrestrictive software and tries to convince the authors to charge for it. I'll have to think about what I want to do some more.
I responded here to @onlinepersona detailing how I might try to continue finding terms that are highly approved. I think what I've thought about so far isn't very carefully considered, so before I try to choose a specific license, I want to take some time to think about more options.
I really like text. I sometimes read documentation multiple times over before considering asking a question. I don't assume I am correct, and try to verify that I'm not wrong before finally asking a question. Though, other times, I'm guilty of skipping or skimming over text.
The problem I felt like I was having was that I was attempting to describe many complicated rules with as few words as possible. I felt like if I didn't try to limit words, other people would not read it. Even with all of this, it felt like many people who were responding were still not really reading it. In a survey, I might try to cover multiple contract styles, in text, it could be lots of words. The concern is that the importance of the topic will be missed to someone completing a survey.
Maybe a combination of both would be better? Like provide as much text as I want, and also a video with it. I still have to think about it.
I also don't think I entered with clear goals. Am I designing a license or trying to find a license to use?
I've seen language design blog posts here and on reddit. These are usually long, but with the intent of creating a discussion. I don't think I was even intending to create a discussion or reach an audience. I just was looking for approval of the idea. I think there's always going to be some amount of people that will skim, but stating that text is the issue is wrong, text does not stop productive conversations or creating something.
I think there's also the difference between law and software (outside of machine learning) in that there's also some level of interpretation when the subject is about a spectrum. Like when does yellow become green? I felt like I was stating lots of information that loosely goes together, and it was not concrete or solid in understanding.
There's so much to read that I haven't already. I think real democratic control of a license could be good. Though, I haven't taken time to understand the governance structure of it.
However, they explicitly name and define machine learning model training as a prohibited use of the covered work.
This doesn't immediately sound bad to me.
I'm not informed on software law. As an example, my understanding from Oracle v. Google is that Google received a ruling from the Supreme Court around 2020 that stated their copyrighted use of a public API, like the public side documentation side of method calls could not be considered a violation of copyrighted works. The idea that they could use machine learning on the internal code of methods and use it to write their own version from the the start of the method call doesn't exactly seem like a good thing to allow.
Though, this is a really uninformed opinion. I haven't read any of it in detail. The public opinion is usually on Google's side. I'll leave an excerpt.
Now let us consider the example that the District Court
used to explain the precise technology here. Id., at 980–
981. A programmer wishes, as part of her program, to de-
termine which of two integers is the larger. To do so in the
Java language, she will first write java.lang. Those words
(which we have put in bold type) refer to the “package” (or
by analogy to the file cabinet). She will then write Math.
That word refers to the “class” (or by analogy to the drawer).
She will then write max. That word refers to the “method”
(or by analogy to the recipe). She will then make two pa-
rentheses ( ). And, in between the parentheses she will
put two integers, say 4 and 6, that she wishes to compare.
The whole expression—the method call—will look like this:
“java.lang.Math.max(4, 6).” The use of this expression
will, by means of the API, call up a task-implementing pro-
gram that will determine the higher number.
In writing this program, the programmer will use the
very symbols we have placed in bold in the precise order we
have placed them. But the symbols by themselves do noth-
ing. She must also use software that connects the symbols
to the equivalent of file cabinets, drawers, and files. The
API is that software. It includes both the declaring code
that links each part of the method call to the particular
task-implementing program, and the implementing code
that actually carries it out. (For an illustration of this tech-
nology, see Appendix B, infra.)
Now we can return to the copying at issue in this case.
Google did not copy the task-implementing programs, or
implementing code, from the Sun Java API. It wrote its
own task-implementing programs, such as those that would
determine which of two integers is the greater or carry out
any other desired (normally far more complex) task.
This isn't all that relevant, and there's lots of case law. It just seems slightly frustrating to me that the law might allow 1) a company to use copyright software for learning 2) take public methods, and their supporting documentation 3) and finally use them inconjunction with a prompt of the documentation to generate the internal code.
This all is a very unresearched or serious view of it. For whatever reason, I just was already thinking about it. It's all to say, I think I understand the argument for disallowing machine learning use. I haven't really decided where I align. I think it's really valuable that we can automate anything, but I also feel negative to the idea of signing everything over to the tech companies and hoping for the best.
Bruce Perens proposes draft Post-Open Zero Cost License ( www.theregister.com )
Feedback on open source royalty license?
Feedback on open source royalty license?...