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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to ask Ken Mitchell if there were concrete examples that motivated this. Such as...

- Were there specific open source projects where you thought the creators got screwed out of money and therefore this license would have helped them?

- As a thought experiment in the vein of game theory, would projects with heavy commercial usage like Linux, ffmpeg, openssl, etc be in a better situation today if they only had a 90-day window for free use? (Speculate and replay history with L0 license.) My intuition is that the 90-day restriction is enough of a turn off that we wouldn't have the situation today of IBM + Google + Redhat + etc adopting Linux and contributing code back to it.

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There have been many examples. Some involving people very close to me. Some involving clients, who I can't talk about.

I'd encourage you to ask maintainers themselves. They aren't hard to find online. They're often happy to tell stories, the first time and the hundredth time.

>There have been many examples. [...] I'd encourage you to ask maintainers themselves. They aren't hard to find online.

How would I know which maintainers to ask if you don't provide any examples of open source projects that would have gotten equivalent adoption by commercial entities with the L0 license? The 90-day restriction creates disincentives for use so that game theory has to be taken into account.

I mean, we can daily see how much effort is wasted on projects beholden to stockholders and business interests. In my experience, open source software is the only software that can stand the test of time; everything else will be pivoted, sunset, or bought out eventually. The problem is that it's so hard to make money doing it.

(Not that this is necessarily a good solution, mind you.)

I think it's come from the typical pattern of maintainer burnout and project abandonment after a few years, since a successful open source project typically turns into an unpaid second job.

>typical pattern of maintainer burnout [...] , since a successful open source project

Right, but that's what my "game theory thought experiment" was trying to dissect: the 90-day restriction can dissuade commercial entities from embracing that software so therefore, it's not "successful". As a result, there is no work overload and no burnout.

Which past open-source project can we confidently replay history with the L0 license and say it would have roughly the same commercial adoption and the maintainers got paid more money?

> a successful open source project typically turns into an unpaid second job.

which the maintainer voluntarily performs. If it's a burden, stop! If users of said software are asking for features/bug-fixes, and you as a maintainer can't be bothered, then ask them to pay for said fixes (either via a common-pot method like patreon, or a one time fee, or some other method). If those people asking for fixes aren't willing to pay, then they clearly don't really need those fixes.

The reality is open source developers tend to maintain multiple projects at the same time, and a small set of them can be monetized with this.

I think monetizing those, targeted to large companies who can easily afford it and would happily pay a few bucks to use the software (they would likely burn more money in a meeting discussing whether to adopt the said software or to switch to a free alternative) is a good trade-off if it allows indie open source developers to pay their bills.

On the long term those developers will generate much more open source output than when working as employees somewhere and creating only proprietary software all day and struggling to create open source only when they have some spare time a couple of hours a month.

In addition, all this licensezero software will be developed in the open, which brings many of the practical benefits of open source to a vast majority of the users, and the open source ecosystem will grow as a side effect that the developers will also create other software distributed under ordinary open source licenses.

first off, linux is free software (a subset of open source) despite being considered "toxic" GPL is actually favors the creator quite a lot. (it is my suspicion that this fact is why it is labeled as toxic in the first place, but i digress) the copyleft aspect contractually obligates you to contribute back to the original project. this means that any company that uses your tech is effectively paying their staff to contribute to your project. this is a good thing as it prevents them from extracting value from the project.

linux is a great example of how a free software project can utilize corporate support to further its goals without becoming a victim of exploitation (unlike openssl, gnupg, &c.)

> Ken Mitchell

I'm not sure who that is, but I'm sure you could contact Kyle Mitchell[0] instead.

[0]: https://kemitchell.com/

Open Source to me is e.g. the ability of a farmer to hack on his modern combine. And I would think it perfectly fine if the manufacturer voids the warranty in such a case. Note that the hypothetical farmer paid for the combine.

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