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.

Comments

Great Idea!

[TerryAtWork]

I can think of a few legacy projects I'd like to see released like that - Clipper for one.

w00t!

[trmj]

Now I only have to wait for a couple more million copies of RedHat 8 to be sold before I get access the the source!

Re:Not Bad...

[joyoflinux]

Well, anything is better than no consideration of the GPL at all..

misses the point

[LMCBoy]

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...

Re:misses the point

[erikharrison]

DOOM?

Quake?

Guarenteeing that software which recieves a certain level of popularity becomes Open Source means that the community can pick up development where the company left off.

There is always the danger that a company will cease to support a product which has become integral to your operation. This is one of the much touted benefits of Open Source - self and community support. This guarentees that sort of support in the long term while ensuring that the companies get there profits.

They'll never reach the threshold.

[jridley]

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.

Re:They'll never reach the threshold.

[iabervon]

It's based on sales, not on net income. It's a bit harder to arrange to never show any sales, and still survive as a company.

The idea is for major customers to demand this, not for companies to be interesting in doing it on their own. There are no benefits at all for the producer in this system, except that you may be excluded from consideration by major customers if you don't play along.

But we didnt make any money.

[Zapdos]

I am sure that with the propper acountants anyone can always break even and never make any money.

Developing trend

[JDWTopGuy]

First it was "glowing cyber balls", now "Making the GPL easier to swallow"? Is slashdot trying to make troll-friendly stories?

Re:My target is $10,000,000,000

[Pharmboy]

Great, so I want to get on the good side of the government and big companies by signing up for this license. I think I'll just set my target for $10 billion so I don't have to worry about it ever actually going open source, god forbid

But the point is, the amount is declared up front. The buyer sees that the seller won't open up until he makes 10bil, and another that is looking to make 150mil, then he looks at the 150mil knowing it will go open source sooner, and his costs of licensing will go down on an already installed infrastructure.

I don't know if this really is the way to go, and at first I though, 'eh, sounds silly'. But the more I looked at it, the more interesting it is. The one thing that I DO like about it, is the fact that it assumes that being 'open source' is important and desirable to the end user. While appearant to you and I, to other consumers who don't know or care what OSS is, it exposes them to the idea.

As to the application of it, I have always thought that Microsoft should release the source for DOS 6.x and 16 bit versions of Windows. Of course, the time to do it would have been when 98 came out.

Good idea, but needs some work

[RodgerDodger]

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!