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Making The GPL Easier For Companies To Swallow
stupidNewbie writes "There is a new GPL "wrapper" gaining momentum on Capitol Hill. Dubbed O-STEP, the Open Source Threshold Escrow Program allows vendors to license their products until so many millions are made, then agree to release the code under GPL. This sounds like a good bridge for companies looking to tap into the strengths of open source distribution." Starting from zero, it can certainly gain momentum quickly -- sounds like a good idea though.
I'm just worried that things will get out of hand.... how many millions are we talking before source is released?
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
I can think of a few legacy projects I'd like to see released like that - Clipper for one.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
One of the big strengths of Free Software is that you can leverage the community for rapid development and bugfixing. If you've already developed the code under a closed-source, proprietary model, and it's been released long enough to sell 10^6 units, then much of the development is (presumably) already done. Plus, if development was open from day 1, the final codebase would tend to be less messy and obfuscated, IMHO.
Not that I don't welcome such a "late release" model for proprietary code, just thinking out loud...
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I have a friend who used to (years ago) be an accountant in the record industry. Their books were set up to NEVER show a profit. It wasn't illegal, and if you didn't know about it and agreed to a percentage of profit, you were just screwed.
Unless they're very careful with wording on this, companies will just set things up so that the threshold is never reached.
If they ARE careful enough that no legal loophole is available, I suspect that companies will consider this a time bomb and avoid it anyway.
Of course, it's possible that some organizations would just put off buying the software since they could get it for free after the expiration date. But presumably if the organizations can afford to wait that long (5-10 years, maybe?), they probably didn't really need the software in the first place.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Note that this has already happened for the Blender3D toolkit. Not under the O-STEP license, of course, but using a similar scheme -- raising enough funds, then open-sourcing the product.
There was also an abortive attempt for a while to open source the GoBe Productivity suite. That cost a bit too much to purchase though, apparently.
*shrug* So it can work sometimes...
-- Askari: Give JavaScript the bird.
If I need a custom solution, I'm wiling to pay the $10-$50k to have it developed. However, some systems aren't really custom and someone needs it. I'm happy to pay $700/designer for Photoshop, it's critical to their function. I'm not willing to pay $20m to get 4 licenses of Photoshop.
As a result, commercial companies can spread the development costs among EVERYONE.
In this case, let's suppose that their is a system that would benefit everyone. They sell licenses until the set profit (cost +, it's government contracts primarily), then everyone gets it.
This avoids lock in, but eliminates the open source problem. Right now either someone duplicates an existing product for the benefit of Free Software (how GNU started), or someone builds a custom solution and releases it (I'm discounting the hobbiest scratching an itch that results in thousands of MP3 players).
If government agencies began to require this for certain projects, we'd get a lot more software under the GPL.
This is a BAD IDEA. It seems good on the surface, but it has many problems.
First, what happens if the company never makes the expected volume of sales? People using the software with the belief that it would someday become opensource would then be screwed when commercial support dries up and it is never released OSS.
Second, what exactly is placed in escrow? And how can you know? Perhaps the company will hold back on critical components of the software and you won't discover that until after it's "released".
Third, opensource matters in the early days of a project more than at any other time--it is at this point in time when the project is shaped into what is needed by the community, and when the most critical bugs are found and fixed.
Fourth, there is no need for an "escrow" to do this--a company can release the software under a "community source license" which is not open source and simply state in the license the conditions under which it reverts to the GPL. There is no need for any additional agency.
Fifth, I think it has little strategic value for the copyright owner. If the project is going to be such a great success under a commercial license then why cripple your future sales revenue? Most developers open software in order to gain access to resources they would otherwise lack, or as a means of grabbing market share without having to spend a lot of money on marketing. If a company has such a winning product and the money to market it, I simply don't see the value for them in opening it up!
There are MANY better ways to sit on the fence between the opensource and commercial world:
1. You can release your code under a non-open "community" license but with a sunset clause. The sunset clause states the date on which the code flips over to the GPL. New releases would keep advancing this date, but a two year old release might be available under the GPL for all.
2. You can dual license your software under the GPL and under a commercial license. GPL users must keep all their own code GPL'd, but you sell a closed-source license for $$$ which allows closed source distribution of the product.
3. You can take the BK approach: Provide your software under a "mostly" open license which contains some crippling restriction. Note that the BK license includes a clause that if BitKeeper goes out of business the software reverts to the GPL--not after a certain number of sales, but instead if their open logging servers cease operating for a period of 180 days. (This is not great either, but at least it's tied to the failure of the company--and loss of support for the product--rather than its success!!)
It is really NO GOOD to tie the opening of a software product to its success, especially its financial success. This is simply a bad idea.
places of work will most likely buy expensive specialised products when they become available and the staff cry out for them; not holding back (years maybe?) for the 'free' verison.
having source at a later stage would be a great blessing. i for one, would LOVE to see the source to older versions of maple and matlab GPL'ed. (not to mention the masses of games, which companies have produced and thrown away over the years!)
The first point, of course, is some agreed means of tracing the sales or revenue. After all, if a company sets the mark fairly low, and then finds out they've got a killer product, they would have to be tempted to fudge the figures to keep the revenue coming in.
The second is that you'd probably want a nominated "end-of-life" date. At that point, the source should be released anyway, regardless of how much money has been raised. 5 years after release would be a suitable point, probably.
You could probably combine them, so that you can have a reducing threshold of revenue vs time.
What I would really like to see, however, is a legal requirement that companies either support software they've sold basically forever (either through patches or free upgrades to more recent releases), or release the source so that somebody else can do the support. There's a lot of machines still running Win95 out there that have major bugs, but MS will never lift a finger to help those people out. I have no problem with companies wanting to sell software, but if there's a bug that causes things to break in a product I've paid cash for, then I want it fixed, dammit!
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
I worked for a software company a couple years ago that made Linux-based security software, including a hardened Linux distribution, that was partly funded by DoDefense grants. Even back then, I was told by the people who designed the proposals that the department was very partial to proposals with this kind of license.
Wil
wiki
As a product approaches it's expiration date, a prospective seller can say to the salesman: "So why should I pay full price for this software if it's going to be free in 4 months?"
An income threshold, on the other hand, allows the sales(wo)man a reasonable response: "If you pay full price, it will get it that much closer to Open Source." There would also, of course, be the support factor.
That having been said, I'd add a couple of caveats: Is the vendor promising to release the original code or the current code at the time the threshold is reached? If it's the original code, then -- unless the threshold is reached in a matter of weeks or months -- that code will be all but useless to the outside community. It will likely be missing all sorts of bug fixes and even enhancements. Slimey companies might even lock down a horribly broken version, and then 'update' to a version that actually works properly for real sales..
I guess this leads to a different issue: Will outside programmers be allowed to view the escrowed source code -- to make sure that it's reasonably clean and maintainable. The last thing I'd want is to find that the company has GPLed a compacted version of their code -- with all the comments and extraneous white space removed.
And, yes -- I'd need a promise based on sales, not profits. The entertainment industry has pretty much perfected the process of making even the most wildly successful project look like a money looser. It would be all to easy for a software company to hire an RIAA certified accounting firm. There should also be a condition that, if a company stops selling a program, that the code gets released after N months -- whether the target has been reached or not.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
I have NewsMonster under a similar license.
The only difference is time. We don't become Open Source based on $$$ we go
OSS based on time. I believe this yields less animosity within the community.
Right now it is three years. I am going to send Tony an email now telling him
that NewsMonster will be under an O-STEP license.
Kevin
It strikes me that as the threshold is approached a company will have less and less incentive to offer support on their product, because after all they will not be able to get direct revenue from the sale for much longer. Likewise development. Why release new versions? At the same time, there will be no open source version, so no one else will be able to fix it.
I think the they key problem here is the assumption that a piece of software is created, and released at one point in time, when this is clearly not the case. Is the Emacs that I use daily 2 months old since that was when it was released. Or is 20 years old because some of the code dates back that far?
Software does not exist at a point in in time, but is a continually developing thing. This is why many companies are moving toward a leasing model, and this is also one of the main advantages of free software...you can track the development as and when you choose, not as the company chooses to release a new version.
Phil
Imagine the lower health care costs if the drug companies could make up their research costs, but once done, would have to distribute at cost!