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The "Dangers" of Free
With today's Free Summit broaching the subject of the "dangers" of free, TechDirt has an interesting perusal of why free often can't work without a good business model and why it often gets such a bad reputation. "I tend to wonder if this is really a case of free gone wrong or free done wrong. First, I'm always a bit skeptical of 'free' business models that rely on a 'free' scarcity (such as physical newspapers). While it can work in some cases, it's much more difficult. You're not leveraging an infinite good -- you're putting yourself in a big hole that you have to be able to climb out of. Second, in some ways the model that was set up was a static one where everyone focused on the 'free' part, and no one looked at leapfrogging the others by providing additional value where money could be made. The trick with free is you need to leverage the free part to increase the value of something that is scarce and that you control, which is not easily copied. [...] Still, it's an important point that bears repeating. Free, by itself, is meaningless. Free, with a bad business model, isn't helpful either. The real trick is figuring out how to properly combine free with a good business model, and then you can succeed."
Your only constraint is that if you redistribute, you must pay the licensing fee to the original team.
I guess that's part of the problem right there: what constitutes the "original team". I assume the project can't be forked, or else you'd have to continue to pay the original team? And how much payment is warranted in that case? As you phase out the original code with your own, can you pay less? What If I just want to grab some small part of code for a totally different project, do I have to negotiate separate licenses for each piece, or do I have to pay a blanket fee as though I'm going to distribute the entire project?
Maybe "FairSoftware" has all the solutions to these questions, but it seems like these are lots of potentially complicated issues. I would guess that, the more complicated the licensing issues, the less readily people will be to contribute.
free often can't work without a good business model
Last I checked proprietary suffers from the exact same problem.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
The problem (with newspapers specifically) is that newspapers are not in the news business. They are in the advertising business. News was an excuse to sell eyeballs to advertisers. There are more efficient ways today to match up buyers and sellers, so newspapers are suffering.
I have noticed that most "free, gratis, and open source software" is crap
So is most non-free, non-gratis and closed source software. You just don't notice it so much, because you tend to do more research to find the good stuff before handing over your hard-earned, whereas just a click to try something out seems so easy and tempting.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?