From: Alejandro Colomar <alx-AT-kernel.org>
Hi all,
As you know, I’ve been maintaining the Linux man-pages project for the last 4 years as a voluntary. I’ve been doing it in my free time, and no company has sponsored that work at all. At the moment, I cannot sustain this work economically any more, and will temporarily and indefinitely stop working on this project. If any company has interests in the future of the project, I’d welcome an offer to sponsor my work here; if so, please let me know.
Have a lovely day! Alex
In my opinion it’s criminal just how often this happens. Big business making obscene profit off the back of volunteer work like yours and many others across the OSS community.
Germany has a Sovereign Tech Fund for exactly this, and while it’s not perfect, it’s one of the better uses of my tax euros.
Didn’t they suspend, or greatly hinder, that recently?
There was an EU-wide one that gota lot of its funding redirected to AI stuff recently that you might be thinking of.
That’s why the current state of open source licenses doesn’t work. Commercial use should be forbidden for free users. You could dual license the work, with a single, main license applying to everyone, and a second addendum license that just contains the clause for that specific use, be it personal or corporate. Corporate use of any kind requires supporting the project financially.
I’m a single dude who sells custom electronics with open source software on them. I sell maybe two PCBs a month. It just about covers my hobby, I’m not even living off of it. I can’t afford commercial licenses. There has to be tiers.
In return, I’ve made every schematic, gerber file, and bill of material to my stuff freely available.
One way to allow for this would be a license that says if you sell them through an LLC or corporate entity of some kind, that should require financial support but if it’s you selling them in your own name or as a single owner business, with your reputation and liability on the line, then you should not be required to provide support. The other thought to include in a license is actual money earned from sales. Once a company earns, for example let’s say $1,000 or 1,000€ a month in profits, that’s when the financial support license kicks in and requires payments to the open source authors. Of course, that would require high earners to report their earnings accurately which is a different can of worms.
I would draw the line at shareholders.
You may use my software free of charge if you are a student, hobbyist, hobbyist with income, side hustler, sole proprietorship, LLC, S-Corp, non-profit, partnership, or other owner-operator type business.
Corporations with investors or shareholders will pay recurring licensing fees. Your shareholders may not profit from my work unless I profit from it more than they do. If you can afford a three inch thick mahogany conference table you can afford to pay for your software.
I hope we see an evolution of licensing. Giant companies shouldn’t get a free pass if they’re just going to treat the original devs like a commodity to be used up.
I agree, but this is mostly an issue with permissive licenses like MIT. GPL and its variants have enough teeth in them to deal with shit like this. I’m scared of the rising popularity of these permissive licenses. A lot of indie devs have somehow been convinced by corpos that they should avoid the GPL and go with MIT and alike
I might be misunderstanding the licenses so correct me if wrong.
Can companies use GPL code internally without release as long as the thing written with it doesn’t get directly released to the public?
… or does GPL pollute everything even if used internally for commercial purposes?
I think it kicks in when you distribute. For example, let’s say I have a fork of some GPL software and I’m maintaining it for myself. I don’t need to share the changes if I’m the only one using it.
The point is that people using a software should be able to read and modify (and share) the source when they want to.
IANAL and all that good stuff
If it’s only internal then technically the internal users should have access to the source code. Only the people who receive the software get the rights and freedoms of the GPL, no one else.
Oh I definitely agree with you there. I just think GPL is close but not close enough.
AGPL? Google has a ban on all AGPL software. Sounds like if you write AGPL software, corporations won’t steal it.
Any license that makes a corporation shit its pants like this is good enough to start from IMO.
https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy
Definitely agree, maybe it’s time to share Paul Ramsey’s talk on the subject again
Bruce Perens is currently working on a new licensing model called Post Open requiring that business with sufficient revenue to pay up.
https://postopen.org/
I hope it catches on!
I doubt it. It is basically equivalent to buying a proprietary software license for 1% of a revenue. I doubt any large business would be willing to spend that much on a single piece of software. And it would always be only one piece of software at a time.
Still better than being exploited
to be quite honest I don’t want to see any large business around my project unless they are paying. They are not my target audience, and I’m not writing to funnel money into their pockets
Then release your software under a license that forbids it.
I believe it’s 1% for access to the “entire post-open ecosystem”, rather than 1% per project which would be unreasonable. So you could use one or thousands of projects under the Post-open banner, but still pay 1%.
It will take years to develop the post-open ecosystem to be something worth spending that much on.
Why only “with sufficient revenue”? All commercial use should pay. Adding “with sufficient revenue” only makes it more difficult to enforce and introduces loopholes.
I’ve looked into this very briefly before and I think part of the reason is that tons of things we wouldn’t necessarily call commercial usage are considered commercial usage. This was in relation to favoring the non non-commercial usage Creative Commons licenses though. (The ones they call free culture licenses.)
It’s criminal to let someone do the thing he actively volunteers to do? It’s criminal to use software that someone intentionally puts out into the world as free?
If you’re willing yo do something for free, people are going to let you 🤷♂️
It’s criminal the propaganda that lead people like this developer to believe they should do the work for free, and not worry, because the corporate world always gives back :)
That “propaganda” is the very idea behind free software. Work on what interests you and is of use to you, and share it with others so they can do with it whatever they want, as long as it stays free software.
The idea that all that work must be paid for by whoever uses it is exactly the opposite of what free software is about.
Not really. The problem with FOSS licensing is that it was too altruistic, with the belief that if enough users and corporations depended on the code, the community would collectively do the work necessary to maintain the project. Instead, capitalism chose to exploit FOSS as free labor most of the time, without any reciprocal investment. They raise an enormous amount of issues, and consume a large amount of FOSS developer time, without paying their own staff to fix the bugs they need resolved — in the software their products depend on. At that point the FOSS developer is no longer a FOSS developer, and instead is the unpaid slave labor of a corporation. Sure, FOSS devs could just ignore external inputs, but that’s not easy to do when you’ve invested years of your life in a project. Exploiting kindness may be legal, but it should never be justified or tolerated.
Sure, FOSS licenses legally permit that kind of use, but just because homeless shelters allow anyone to eat their food, and sleep in their beds, that doesn’t make the rich man who exploits that charity ethically or morally justified. The rich man who exploits that charity (i.e. free labor), and offers nothing in return, is a scummy dog cunt; there are no two ways about it. The presence of lecherous parasites can destroy the entire charity; they can mean the difference between sustainability and burnout.
FOSS should always be free for all personal, free, and non profit use, but once someone in the chain starts depending on FOSS to generate income and profit, some of that profit should always be reinvested in those dependencies. That’s what FOSS is now learning; to reject the exploitation and greed of lecherous parasites.
The point I don’t get is: How can the corporation turn the Dev into a slave laborer when he isn’t employed by them? He can just ignore their issues and say “deal with it, or pay me”. It’s not his problem the corporation depends on his software.
Because not enough creative believe themaxisnm of “fuck you pay me”.
So then it kinda just sounds like they’re doing things they want to do
Fuckyoupayme is more about setting a bar for what people can ask of you. If someone suggests something and you think “heck yeah I’d personally want that” its not really an issue.
The free software as a passion project idea became untenable long ago. It works for UNIX style utilities where the project stays small and changes can be managed by one person but breaks down on large projects.
As a user, try to get a feature added or bugfix merged. Its a weeks or sometimes months/years long back and forth trying to get the bikeshedding correct.
As a maintainer, spend time reading and responding to bug reports which are all unrelated to the project. Deal with a few pull requests that don’t quite fit the project, but might with more polish. Take a month off and wait for the inevitable “is this being maintained?” Issues reports.
I contribute back changes because I want those features but don’t want to maintain a longterm fork of the project. When they’re rejected or ignored its demoralizing. I can tell myself “This is the way of open source” but sometimes I just search for another project that better fits my needs rather than trying to work on the one I submitted changes to.
That is the happy path. The sad path of this is how many people look at the aforementioned problems and never bother to submit a pull request because it’s too much trouble? Git removed most of the technical friction of contributing, but there is still huge social friction.
Long story short: the man pages maintainer deserves something for all the “work” part of maintaining. He can continue to not be paid for the passion part.
I don’t get why the maintainer can’t just ignore all the additional workload and say “I do this in my free time, if that isn’t enough for your needs, pay me or find another solution.”
It’s easy to get pressured into thinking it’s your responsibility. There’s also the risk that an unhappy company will make a non-copyleft clone of your project, pump resources into it until it’s what everyone uses by default, and then add proprietary extensions so no one uses the open-source version anymore, which, if you believe in the ideals of Free Software, is a bad thing.