It sounds like Parens is proposing a centralized mutual fund for closed-source license subscriptions. I'm going to disagree and say I'd rather not have a central authority behind this. Developers should be empowered to sell closed-source licenses, support, documentation, examples, etc. themselves as individuals. As a counter proposal I'd rather have code hosting services and package managers offer better monetization tools because that is more decentralized.

This has got to be the hacker version of watching a band you love sell out.

It's crazy where we're calling "I made this thing that was useful for me and I'm giving it away so that it might be useful to others" corporate welfare like they're the ones betraying the spirit of OSS. But the companies that release OSS as a growth hack for their VC funded startups and are happy to take it away when it benefits them, those guys are the real spirit of OSS.

There has never been a time that selling OSS has ever worked and it seems like business are wising up to the fact that there's no first party advantage in OSS. If your plan is make some software and charge for <something else> you better be damn good at the something else. RedHat made it work with a truly ungodly amount of effort on support, documentation, compliance, and security channels.

May be. Most companies already hate agpl so I figure you could solve some of the freeloader problem by dual licensing agpl and proprietary sorta like Qt does.

He's proposing what sounds like Qt but instead of an app framework led by one company it'd be a huge collection of anything useful from a variety of parties, and developers would be compensated in proportion to usage, somehow.

So the great new idea is:

(1) Proprietary license with annual term, annual mandatory customer audits, and customer revenue-based payment,

(2) Massive bundling so it would all be under one license and payment,

(3) Automated, “git depository”-based determination of revenue sharing to contributors,

(4) Despite #2, multiple different companies involved in actually taking and redistributing payment.

Whose problems is this solving? It’s not solving real user problems (except maybe for some large enterprises, where the added annual fee might be worth the supposedly simplified compliance, though I don’t actually see that this offers necessarily offers simplified compliance.) It’s not solving the problems of the VC-funded startups that have been complaining about not being able to make money off open source. I don’t think its really solving individual developer payment issues better than users with substantial interest paying developers directly for work that those users are interested in and/or supporting foundations backing projects of interest.

open source let some of the most brilliant people in the world find each other, collaborate, and coordinate to produce a tech ecosystem that transformed our whole species and its quality of life in three short decades. it succeded. there are no poor FOSS contributors either.

the music industry is a bad model to emulate because the incentives are even worse than FOSS to rob creators. Streaming platforms paying out fractions of a cent for thousands of uses would be the example software would likely converge on. what free software did phenomenally well is establish merit and signal capability in a culture that produced the most wealth of any other era.

who is it broken for? maybe people who want to use tech as a proxy to govern people without adding value, but i'd argue that's a feature not a bug.

It should be a union, like the Screen Actors Guild. An entrepreneur model already exists for developers; start a company with your software and monetize it. But most developers don't want to do all the activities involved in making a company. Open source developers want to work on their choice of software and get paid. A collaborative venture, like a union or guild, aligns with this.

As we have recently discovered, the current system is clearly open to exploits. Closed source isn’t any better. We need a way to audit the source to find the potential exploits before they are deployed.

This sounds like a solution that is not based upon free market ethos. Much more detail would be needed to evaluate things. Who evaluates which and by how much each developer is compensated?

Don't see how this can work. How would you encourage collaboration between projects when they are kind of competing for resources? How to track the 'contribution' of certain projects?

Some projects may be more important to some and less important to the others, does it mean they need to pay a subscription plus a donation to support that a specific project?

And it feels like this will become a paywall, like those academic publishers, with most of the money going to 'administrative fees' as well as legal fees.

I sympathize with Perens but I don't that this is the right approach. At least not yet.

The recent moves by the EU and the DoJ to regulate companies like Google and Apple fill me with hope that we can fix the problems that these monoliths create.

We shouldn't have to destroy something like open source to stop them from taking advantage of us.

We should just regulate away their ability to take advantage of us.

What if we collected money from users in exchange for a license to use the software. Then, that money could go to an organization: call it a "company." Then the company could use the money to pay the developers! We could call this idea "proprietary software." I wonder if anyone has thought of it?

This is your reminder that OSI shills for corporations and is opposed to the GNU project and digital freedoms.

OSI has always existed to shift the conversation from talking about freedoms and rights in the digital era to about software quality.

Here, again, we see them pushing their corporate-benefactors' interests: reducing costs and meeting compliance requirements.

Interesting concept. Seems like it could be worth experimenting with a bit and seeing what the good/bad/etc points are in practise. :)

Sure, and the internet can run on IIS?

I honestly think the part of open-source that matters most is that it really has no compliance. Free to download is good enough. The fact that you can just download it and use it and don't need to go through legal cannot be understated. Things that are free for private non-commercial use are good enough, because they can be downloaded and used without a PO and getting legal involved. If I wanted to get a $1 donation to the Linux kernel, would never happen. If it's not something that developer's can use behind management's back it's not useful. They'll tell us we have all the ones and zeros we need and are just being lazy.

The people paying the bills don't want better products and just about anything can already be bodged together. Building better products is only desired by the engineers who have no say in the matter.

Or enforce regulations that prevent the corporate exploitation of open source software.

This feels like the opposite direction of where we should be going. Open source should be more like science where you will never get paid unless some company or lab is paying you to do it, and there is a hard focus against commercialization. Parens approach seems revolting

I work at a big company where we both consume and contribute to open source. Our single biggest problem in open source is vendor license issues like confluent and redis, where we can't get that service from a cloud provider without hoops.