Some Notes for License Submitters

Open source licensing is vastly too complicated. IMHO it needs a menu-like system similar to the Creative Commons options. I think OSI should bite the bullet and lead the way on this change: work with the community to define the options and then say that all future licenses will use the menu system.

FYI: The "Mitchell" quoted above and the "Kyle" mentioned above are the same dog.

> My usual answer for this is that if you have to ask how you're going to make money, you're the wrong person to make Open Source. Nowhere in the mission of OSI is any mandate to provide authors with a viable business method.

Indeed, it is a principle of open source that people can freeload off your work. As soon as an author restricts their work to non-commercial use or commercial-with-a-fee (which is entirely reasonable), it is no longer considered "open source".

> We are asking of you only one thing. Go forth and use your license. We are not stopping you. Just don't call it Open Source.

Go ahead, call it open source. The OSI has no trademark over the term, and the idea that their narrow definition is the only "official" one is a load of crap. There is plenty of room for what constitutes open source that doesn't fall underneath their umbrella.

Edit: I understand this opinion is controversial. If you disagree, please comment and explain why.

That’s why I’m working on https://licensezero.com/!

Or we could have a Basic Income for all so that anyone who wanted to create FOSS could without having to take a paying job. Or we could have better 3D printers, gardening robots, materials extractors, portable recycling equipment, and printable solar panels so that programmers making FOSS would not need to engage with the exchange economy much. Or we could expand the gift economy (which FOSS is part of) to more of the material world (e.g. Freecycle). Or the US government could repeal most drug laws and convert freed-up prisons into places where FOSS programmers or others who wanted to make free public digital works could hang out and get free room and board and so on (or maybe build nicer accommodations to the same goals).

Or the filing or holding of non-freely-licensed copyrights by non-profits (e.g. most universities who already employ a lot of people to do programming) could be determined to be "self-dealing" by Congress or maybe just the IRS: https://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."

Or in the absence of such a legal ruling, foundations and other donors could require grantees to sign a pledge to only create free and open source works: "Pledge to only fund and create free software and free content" https://pdfernhout.net/pledge-to-only-fund-and-create-free-w...

Or programmers could keep creating FOSS in their spare time both for its own sake and in the hopes the growing quantitative mass of FOSS eventually leads to a qualitative shift towards a post-scarcity society.

I have never been directly paid for my OSS work, but I am well compensated because of it.

Programmers should be paid if they are asked to implement someone else's requirements.

There need be no structure for paying programmers who invent their own requirements and thereby just implement whatever they want.

The mass market proprietary software model is indeed based on the process of inventing and implementing requirements and then convincing paying users to value and adopt those requirements and then pay for a copy of the implementation.

That doesn't work for free software, because it is given away; those who like the requirements and their implementation just help themselves to a copy.

The way to get paid, then, is either via donations/crowdfunding, or else to be employed working on customizing open source stuff to specific requirements.

That latter kind of work cannot be the only OSS there is. Someone first has to develop the stuff that is then adopted, and a business forms around it. Those somebodies usually just put in the uncompensated time.