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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

My favorite model is to make it closed source initially, then once it's paid itself off plus profit, then open source it.

This is what John Carmack did with the game engines he wrote at id software, and the id lawyers hated it (but it was a great boon to the rest of the world)

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When Carmack opensourced Doom and Quake those game engines were very dated and they had made hundreds of millions from them.

The Doom source code was released two years after Quake was released and 6 years after Doom was released. There was no opensource business plan.

That timeline doesn't seem quite right. Unless I am mistaken DOOM was originally released in December of 1993 and the source was released December 1997. That's only 4 years, however Quake was released in June of 1996, which is close enough to 2 years.

It is also worth noting that commercial releases of DOOM continued through 1997 on various home consoles even if you ignore the various resurrections it has had for the likes of the GBA or Switch.

Edit: I think I get your timeline, you're referring to the re-release of the DOOM source under GPL in October of 1999.

That mode does work particularly great for video games and other creative media, which really do depend on early sales but often have very little revenue after the first few months/years.

The vast majority of the back catalog of movies, music, and TV is nearly worthless to studios and labels, and when you dig into it you actually find out that studios are as cheap as possible with their archive of masters (perhaps with the exception of consistently profitable blockbusters). I recall reading an in depth article about a recent vault fire that destroyed many original studio recordings, and that the issues leading up to the disaster were preventable.

I think the studios are too short-sighted to see the value of releasing many of these into the public domain, and I think some creativity could turn it into a business model that drums up interest and revenue.

Here’s an idea: a studio or record label could run a “Kickstarter” where sales of a commemorative collection could hit a certain threshold to trigger release into the public domain. These could be mainly made up of content that has otherwise fallen into relative obscurity.

I mean, I’m no business expert and maybe that’s a dumb idea but it’s at least new and unique.

Vault fire article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-m...

Follow up from this year: https://centralsauce.com/lost-in-the-fire

A previous notable fire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Fox_vault_fire

I think the problem with vaults and vault fires is that the original - the master recording - is analog and irreplaceable by definition. All copies theoretically don't encode valuable data still left in the master that might be useful in the future as remastering technologies continue to improve. It's not a digital master where every copy is identical in fidelity. Until we can accurately clone physical objects, there can only be one master copy of an analog recording.

Thanks for that, I was far too lazy.

I wonder if there is a license that you can use that had a built-in expiration date. Like a auto-public-domain code release clause.

Some way that if you start using a product you have a legal guarantee that you won't be dependent on that company's service indefinitely.

A built-in expiration date, like a sane copyright law. The original law was 14 years before disney got a hold of it.

According to Wikipedia though, that copyright extension was to harmonize with the EU copyright terms. The EU member states increased the copyright terms first and companies in the US also wanted the same terms in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

The Business Source License does that. I'm not able to find a site for the project but Sentry's got a blog post about it: https://blog.sentry.io/2019/11/06/relicensing-sentry

Yes this is possible. Founded a company selling to governments and we put this in every contract. It help assuage their concerns in case we went out of business.

Sounds somewhat like the Transitive Grace Period Public License, where derivative works must be open sourced a year after deployment

In the United States, authors cannot put their creative works into the public domain. There is noting in the statute or case law that allows this. Furthermore, authors (except work-for-hires) and their heirs, have the right to terminate copyright transfers and licenses after 35 years.

No, but you can license the work on terms roughly equivalent to what is allowed under public domains via something like https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc...

I don't think you need a special license. The owner(s) of the code just need to issue a statement that the code will be available under <license> as of <date>, similar to what Dan Bernstein did with qmail.

If you are a company dependent on a startup you can often get the source code in escrow if the startup would to fold or be acquired. I have had this work out multiple times in the past.

Yeah what if it were similar to patents, they have a standard shelf-life of protection.

With software I feel like a much shorter timespan would be better as systems become obsolete much faster.

How would you enforce it? Patents require a patent so it’s easy for that to slip into public domain but source code is a living beast that’s al2ays changing are the patent offices supposed to keep an up to date repo of all projects?

Seems like it would be easy to circumvent by altering your system clock. But I like the idea! I guess you could deal with that by hosting an activation server or something like that where you can guarantee the time is accurate.

I think op is talking about licenses, not drm.

oh, whoops

I mean it's perfectly possible to have a license that legally expires at a certain time. Most businesses, in an effort to avoid fine liabilities, will follow the legal terms. Periodic online activation definitely helps increase compliance rate, but in terms of true, total compliance enforcement, it's a DRM situation, it's not possible.

A license is a legal agreement, and good luck arguing in court that you live in a different time than everyone else. You’re talking about the mechanics of how a license key would work, which is really not what is being discussed.

You'd have to change the system clock of your legal system.

How is it an open source business model?

It is a closed source business model that decides to open source legacy product. It worked so well that the open sourcing stopped when Id was acquired by ZeniMax.

That is a cool move but (unfortunately?) not a business solution. Most of the common web tech would have failed if their creators had chosen this model at inception.

Reddit would disagree (although they’ve went the opposite way in recent years.). They were open source early on and yet no competitor arose to overtake them.

The thing about that though is an engine is not the game, and it's common to separate game content/assets from it's engine. It's not so clear that other software breaks down in the same way; should the whole thing be free, or should only the "core"?

Maybe applications can open their libraries, but not the apps themselves?

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