Making Open Source economy more viable with dual license collectives

I have been considering, in new books and new editions to books I have written, to change the license for the book examples to AGPL, but for people who purchase a book, they get a commercial use license. I make all my recent eBooks available as a free download, or people can pay. I use the statistics of which books more people pay for to guide how much writing effort I put into different topics. On average I get about 50 downloads for each paid for book. I have been happy with this process.

What is changing is that as I approach my 71 birthday, I am getting pressure from family and friends who retired a long time ago for more of my time, and as much as I love working, I will probably “retire” from paid work in the next year or two. I think that making writing my “job” again might be a good way to still enjoy staying current with deep learning and AI in general, and also earn a little money from doing so.

I do worry that the dual licensing approach might turn off some readers, so I think I will try out this plan with a new book and see how it works.

EDIT: might be of interest: by far my most paid for book is my Common Lisp book, followed by my Haskell and Hy (Python Lisp) books. Those books are scheduled to get new editions. Since almost all of my work in the last 7 years has been deep learning based, my next planned new book is a practitioners guide to DL, from my personal perspective.

- On the low level more generic tooling I use ALGPL, so a mix of AGLP and LGPL, you can think of it as LGPL but you cannot modify it without sharing the source if you make money off of hosting a service which uses the software (Amazon f.ex. would need to share source if they used it in a paying server product).

- On the higher level multiplayer layer I mix MIT and a flat out commercial license: So if you are using the system for fun you have MIT but if you want to charge for the product you need to pay monthly in proportion to your company stuctures yearly revenue.

I don't know if this is going to work eventually if anyone begins to care about the stack because of the MMO I'm trying to build to gather interest, but we'll see!

As for gathering the payments, I think github has a big role to play by adding optional global VAT (and paying it automatically) to the sponsorship tiers (just add a commercial license checkbox) so that programmers can focus on programming without too much bureaucratic distraction. Itch.io has that but they lack recurring payments, so this is a callout for a feature that today needs alot of cumbersome work: recurring payments with automatic VAT! (I have allready talked to both github and itch)

I found colors on my laptop in a project of a customer of mine. I downloaded it as part of a npm install or probably with yarn. It is a dependency of another dependency. My customer should pay for the license, but how?

Among the other things, that "how" means also having a way to know how much they're going to pay if random-developer-1 adds a new dependency to package.json. This leads to asking a manager before adding a dependency, some paperwork, etc. All that we were doing when we had to buy software coming on floppy disks and CD-ROMs (but also downloads from the internet.)

However I must be able to use colors for free if all I'm doing is getting it for a non commercial project of mine. The author and the collective should reasonably feel sure that I'm not cheating. How?

One of the possible outcomes is companies dropping entire FOSS ecosystems and going back to buy whatever web development system Microsoft will hack together, backend and frontend and Windows Server + SQL Server too. Or from Oracle.

Maybe Microsoft already thought about selling a monthly license to use everything that gets uploaded on GitHub or distributed via npm. You stop paying, you rewrite your webapp with other components.

So yes, nice idea, but I'm not sure that the outcome will be good. Maybe we should keep thinking that if a customer or employer pays us to write some of our code as open source, than we'll write a lot of it. If we have to write FOSS instead of going out, maybe we'll write not much of it and we'll make money out of something else.

Personally I would rather software be Free than have a unavoidable middle man taking a % cut.

Would Linux be as popular now if it was dual licensed from the beginning?

Everyone who wanted to install Linux in a company had to pay $99 per CPU? (or whatever), or PostgreSQL, GNU tools and so on.

If you dual license it, can you legally enforce who can use which? Can you take a company to court if they are using the tool that is open source as well as dual license?

Opensource is a fad now. Everyone wants to make their software "open source", make the world better, while at the same time making billions., and getting really mad if someone else is making money off it.

Though the term open source is not so worn out and tired that it is nearly meaningless since people use it in all sorts of ways.

When I use the term, I mean classic GNU and Linux open source.

For people who get angry about the inability to make enough $$$ on a GPL license should also ensure that they are not using GLP licensed tools/apps/code in their work.

I have no problem with people making proprietary software and selling it. I dont have a problem with people making GPL software and offering to sell it.

I dont like the duality in wanting to be "cool and open source saving whales" and at the same time expecting billions off the product.

Isn't dual licensing already somewhat popular? To me it seems like what's being proposed is a lot like a SaaS solution for handling the unpleasant legalese-heavy aspects of licensing software, but with some sort of a community weight behind it, or maybe i'm misreading this?

If nothing else, it's curious to see all sorts of attempts at new licensing schemes show up, even though some (like SSPL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Public_License) are really controversial. I guess eventually we'll see what works and what doesn't, i just hope that the people who need to be compensated for their work to keep contributing will find ways to do that, with it hopefully being normalized enough by then.

I'm not sure whether that's open source, though - more like conditional open source, that only applies to other open source or non-commercial projects, but requires investment for commercial entities. A bit like "source available" for them, in this case - you can still view the code and maybe try it out in an internal prototype, but will have to get a license to actually use it.

Then again, i don't really think of it as a bad thing and it might be a decent solution to the problem of "Software below the poverty line": https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html

As someone who receives about 20-30k euros a year (dayjob as a dev in Eastern Europe, though it's been pointed out to me that i should strive for more), additional income in any form, be it freelancing, bug bounties or even something like this seems like a nice idea!

Let's say I want to license package A which depends on package B (which is, let's say, licensed under AGPL). Package A enters the Collective, package B doesn't. What now?

A "collective" is really just a benevolent dictator with multiple personality disorder.

They start out as reasonable and efficient entities in theory. Expecting they will remain such once they have control is a flawed assumption that ignores human nature.

But kudos for addressing this at the end of the article.

This is NOT about individuals or companies selling AGPL exceptions and bending FLOSS to financial interests.

A large collective entity would have the power to receive large fees from companies and benefit the whole developer community.

Think of a developer union.

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> the pragmatic reality is that FOSS developers live in a material world, a market economy, and need to make money somehow.

That's the point of leverage right there: Let's transform the economy so that machines do the scut work and no one has to "earn" a living.

To me that is the whole point of computers. The obvious thing to do with them is create a kind of secular, pragmatic, realistic utopia. Of course you can't cure the human condition with machines, but you can eliminate most of the nitty-gritty problems that people have, like acquiring food, shelter, clothing, transportation, education, health, and so on.

That's where the "extraordinary and even spiritual ... idea of a global, voluntary, collaborative yet competitive network of people sharing their knowledge and work and building together something that can challenge even the largest commercial organizations." should be headed. (Otherwise you're just automating the existing stuff, which, frankly, doesn't seem all that well thought out.)

Rather than trying to embed in the existing economy, computer programmers should seek to transform it. The invention of the transistor and the Turing Machine together has unlocked a flood of resources (not unlike how oil unlocked a similar flood) and we can direct that flood to "lift all boats".

* I could get behind this if the open license is something like MIT or Apache, ideally WTFPL or public domain even. I worry that AGPL would lead to corruption in ways that I don't see yet, probably through copyright and IP, so someone like the RIAA/MPAA would end up owning the collective somehow.

* Open source was/is compelling to me because I thought that freedom through free software could be a model for humanity. I'd prefer that society went toll-free, rather than adding a toll to free software. So stuff like UBI, expanding the commons by making internet free like public land, roads and bridges, etc etc etc. Coming at this from an abundance (rather than scarcity) mindset.

* Along those lines, I thought that maybe something like a lien could work (not sure if that's the right word). For example, say a company uses 100 pieces of open source software. That would show on an open source "ledger" as a debt of 100. If a developer wrote 1 of those, the company would have a "debt" to them of 1%. So if the company nets $1 million per year in profit, it's kind of like 1% of that is owed to the developer, or $10,000. Some companies owe billions of dollars in open source debt. Until they pay that, maybe there should be limits in how they can exercise their power. Perhaps they could be banned from lobbying the government, for example, or risk losing the use of any open source license for profit until they pay their debt. So I guess the real power of the Collective would be to blacklist companies that abuse their power.

Unsurprisingly, it is a failed experiment. Among other things, every time you buy storage media that could be used to store music (burnable CD, DVD, ...), you are forced to pay a GEMA fee because you could use the medium for piracy (which, of course, remains illegal nevertheless). Everyone publicly playing music has to pay GEMA fees, because he might play something from the GEMA portfolio. As a musician you more or less need to join their club and pay membership fees. All the money, GEMA collects is then (minus a generously large administrative overhead) distributed among all members, depending on how big they are in the business. This means, small time musicians may actually subsidize the big names.

Just add additional paid services on top of your open source project, e.g.: https://raccoon.onyxbits.de/blog/bugreport-free-support/

At the end of the day, open source software is different than commercial software is what you're proposing.

No idea if they're successful or not. Or if they're successful on behalf of their maintainers either.

In other words, he thinks companies avoiding potential license infection of their closed-source code is not the main reason. To be clear, the author believes in the promise of AGPL and thinks the real issue is the payment structure. Excerpt:

>So we're going to build on the idea of dual licensing. You know – licensing under both AGPL, which is rather unfriendly to commercial applications and another separate commercial license. In my opinion, it is a very promising funding model for many projects, with one problem: it does not scale.

Let's consider Google's ban on AGPL as one example: https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/

Thus, using author's framework, we'd interpret Google's ban as merely avoiding too much licensing paperwork (too many software contracts are not scalable) and that they actually have no intellectual property problem with AGPL.

Basically, it seems like he's proposing "AGPL"-collective rather than AGPL-multiple-custom-contracts. The philosophy of AGPL is still a crucial part of his proposal. In his view, once the AGPL-collective is in place, the main reason for the Google AGPL ban would no longer be there. Excerpt:

As an Open Source developer, you build a new cool library or a tool and license it under AGPL. This preserves all the Free Software freedoms for all the non-commercial users out there. You don't have to compromise on it. Debian and Brew can still ship them. Then you go to one or more FOSS Collectives and sign a licensing deal

He's saying programmers don't have to compromise on ideals of AGPL -- just give commercial companies an easier way to pay for it with a one-stop-shopping experience for the license.

That would give the companies/users an option of regularly contributing a fixed budget to x FOSS projects without having to track down who/where/how for each dependency. The org collecting the micro payments distributes once a month to project maintainers with commit privileges.

For static libs, the project maintainers recursively use the same mechanism, the money trickles all the way down the dependency tree.

Many people aren't "copyleft hardliners" like sfconservancy here, but I do think the fundamental point is valid in this case. If you want to make money by selling software licenses, then by all means go ahead and do that, but don't pretend it's also FOSS.

I’d hate to raise the costs of launching a startup.

Are there any potential solutions?

This proposal shares a similar limitation with other licensing ideas that try to shift the money from rich corporations: The enthusiastic essays on "better" licenses such as GPLv3, AGPL, SSPL, etc always leave out game theory behavior of potential users to _not_ use the code at all. Examples:

- GPLv3 is better than GPLv2? Game theory behavior of Apple avoiding it and they switch to zsh over bash4. https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+avoids+GPLv3

- AGPL closes the server-side loophole so corporations with billions can't exploit programmers? Game theory behavior of Google banning it: https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/

(It doesn't matter if those corporate decisions are based on misunderstanding licenses and FUD. Their decisions are still a reality.)

Thinking in terms of predicting chess moves. Let's say a programmer's chess move is to release the code with GPLv3/AGPL/Collective. The other side's response chess move is to choose BSD/MIT or write their own. They may choose to not play your game at all.

If the type of license causes the code to be not be widely adopted, there won't be any programmer income so it will be a moot point. This probably depends on a case-by-case basis ... i.e. whether it's a library -vs- application -vs- infrastructure component, etc.

Will influential companies choose to "ban software from License Collectives"? This seems like a very realistic outcome. Why would it not?

EDIT reply to: >The license collective described in the article is just another way of selling commercial licenses in addition to offering a FOSS license

Are you the author of the article? If not, I disagree on your interpretation based on what the text says. It is not clear that he's proposing a purely voluntary payment to the Collective such that corporations can use FOSS for free and only pay the Collective if they feel nice about funding projects.

Look at representative excerpt:

>From a perspective of a commercial organization like a corporation or a startup, things become much easier now. They can go to one or more collectives, sign one bigger license and get a license to use thousands of FOSS projects aggregated by a given collective (there could be tiers).

There is no need for all that machinery above of "tiers" or even "dual" in dual-licensing if payment to Collective was optional.

>I'm not sure why a company would ban software from license collectives,

Because alternative software licenses still have to compete in the marketplace with other licenses like BSD/MIT that don't require payment to the Collective. Therefore, it's easier for corporate counsel to issue a blanket rule to avoid all software from the Collective unless the CTO approves. This adds enough friction for adoption that the hoped-for extra income to the FOSS programmer doesn't materialize.

So yes, game theory still applies to corporations that would ban their staff programmers from using any software that requires them to sign a license agreement with a Collective.

Please don't do this, and don't advocate for this. (A/L)GPL is poorly understood by most, poorly worded, and the FSF refuses to clarify basic points regarding it and are openly hostile to people who sell software for money.

One example of the lack of clarity is what constitute linking, and where the boundaries of the covered software is. The like to play a game here where the on one hand suggest it is not linking to make network calls, but then in their own documentation say it is open ended and for court to decide where the boundaries are, which basically makes it completely pointless and a massive landmine. Just use a sane license by less zealous people.