after reading Ford Foundation document [0] i'll go beyond and purpose FOSS not only limit commercial use but also forking [1] as it seems we have an endless stream of libraries which do the same thing, scattering even more this "fragile" ecosystem which would benefit so much of big tech's evergreen

[0] https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep... [1] https://happort.org/constraining_freedom

I'm not sure it fits the free and/or libre software philosophy but I'm a big fan of releasing otherwise free and open source software as a paid version and with some exclusive QoL features in proprietary store fronts.

For example Krita. https://krita.org/en/download/ FOSS but you can buy it on Steam, Microsoft Store, Epic Store, and Apple Store. You get one exclusive feature, automatic updates (and more recently Steam Cloud sync support), and you also support the developers (on the other hand Valve, MS, Epic, and Apple also gets a cut too).

If you read for example the Steam reviews everyone points out that it's a free software but buying on Steam is also a good and very importantly straightforward way to support the devs + the platform itself has such a pull ("buying games you never play") that people buy it just for the case of having it in their library

https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita

Filebot used to be open source. I bought it on the AppStore, it was a way to support development and I figured it would give me easier updates that would just happen in the background.

When Apple moved to ARM, the App Store version lagged behind. An ARM version was available, but not in the App Store. I assume this is because that ARM version was a separate download instead of being a universal app, and the x86 app would run on everything (for now).

The app is no longer open source, and is paid. To get the ARM version (due to my stubbornness in not wanting to install Rosetta), I had to pay again just to get the app through a different means of distribution.

Too many run-ins with silly issues like this can really sour a person on the “free app in a paid store” model.

Not a very effective way to support the devs though: only about 60% of what you pay gets to the developers, because of Steam's cut and VAT.

The free software philosophy aside, I feel like another problem is that once you start accepting payments then you start accepting various forms of responsibility/liability/accountability/etc. along with it. At a high enough price it'd become worth it, but that might not be anywhere near the price that your customers/users want to support you at.

I feel like the main issue with projects switching between a permissive and less permissive license and back is that starting out as fully permissive in the first place was the main error.

If everybody would just agree to start their open source code as something like source-available or OpenRAIL -requiring companies with more than $5M in annual revenue to pay for the work - we wouldn't be in this situation.

https://fair.io/

Yeah its a bait and switch. People want the social credit, early adoption, and community embrace of being open source, but they also want a captive business model.

It's not a bait and switch because the old version of the software that was released with the old license can still be used as such. If you call this bait and switch then I suppose this means that you somehow feel entitled to future versions of the software having the same license, forever.

They won't do this, because starting out as non-free doesn't get the same traction. Now that I think about it, it's basically a form of enshitification: draw people in with one deal, then after they're onboard, change it to something less favorable.

Why is it enshittification if you only have to pay when you have >$5M in revenue? Is your world so shit if you cross that threshold?

I think the issue is more on how you audit such things. Governments struggle (partially by design, but still) to get proper audits on who uses what and how much money they make.

The theory is great, but I'm unsure how you execute this.

The usual pushback I get from FOSS zealots is that any time I mention things like money, popularity, increasing adoption etc. they just say none of that matters because it's "not a project goal."

In fact, often they don't even want money to be a thing at all, they think capitalism is inherently evil (cough innovation) and would prefer if everyone was just poor and lived in the woods or something.

Sorry... I like the world to be a little more interesting than that.

Now, finally, I have an idea. It's gonna take 5000 words to get there, though, so if you don't have that kind of time, skip to the part about registries.

This article is full of LLMisms, which is to be expected but maybe it wouldn't be 5000 words and wouldn't need this disclaimer if they wrote it themselves

The only llmism I sensed is the use of "load bearing". Im usually queasy after reading llm slop, and stop before the end. This didn't have that effect.

Maybe the llms are getting better, but either way, this article reads like a real hunan write the whole thing.

This article feels like it was written by a human who has just read to much llm writing

Stop whining about it, the constant whining is worse than the LLM prose

While I’m usually one to also get annoyed at uncurated slop, this doesn’t strike me in any way as LLM text, and likely something the author meant in earnest. I reads lot of LLM text. What part about it appeared generated to you?

From my perspective the piece was well structured, paced and thought through (and yes, a bit long)

Isn't this similar to the anaconda model? (Except they keep the money instead of distributing it.)

Depending on how you count, in my research group we are like 10 and in my whoooole university we are like 60.000 employees. When they went from free to restriced for big organizations I just uninstaled it.

You seem to be forgetting the most important word in FOSS..

For them it is not the most important word, apparently.

But it is one of the words.

The Free in Foss is not "Free as in beer".

I think I'm starting to forget, but could someone maybe tell me what the F in FOSS stands for?

"Free as in speech, not free as in beer."

I'm not reading an AI slop article, but there's nothing in either the Free Software Definition or the Open Source Definition restricting the selling of software. It does prevent you from restricting people from sharing that software once they've bought it, but you could always use a threshold pledge system to ensure you get enough money before releasing anything:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system

"Free as in speech, not free as in beer."

As I understand it, if you have the first, the second follows from it. So it's effectively the same.

Not the same at all. Free as in beer means you get nothing. Free as in speech allows you to get as much money as you can using a threshold pledge system. This isn't just theoretical: the famous 3D modelling software Blender was released this way, becoming Free Software only after a €100,000 payment.

"We encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. ... So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it. ... Distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't waste it!" https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

The reason I dislike this is because of the game it creates. Let's say we have someone who developed a small, well-used dependency (say: xz) but there is now incentive to be "in the dependency chain." xz is open, LLMs are really good at stealing/recreating; what stops someone from publishing rxz (maybe a rust port, maybe a gnu-r port, maybe it's "Really fast" xz, maybe it's just hoping for a typo in a registry.) This new dependency adds very little over the original xz and xz could have just used a simple PR.

On the other side of things, does accepting a PR from someone grant the author the ability to collect royalties for that software project? If so, how would you quantify that? LOC seems like a quick but really bad answer for what it is incentivizing.

For many, the entire point of "F" in "FOSS" is not getting tangled up in this kind of mess. I personally would never want to add "am I opening myself up to a lawsuit if I don't pay someone for their PR" to enter my calculus of accepting a PR. Especially if this is because I reject payment at all on a project.

Finally, if a company/employee submits code to FOSS under this model, do they now expect a return?

This new dependency adds very little over the original xz and xz could have just used a simple PR.

I kind of like the incentives created by this competition. This "what if someone takes your software, adds one feature, and sells it" argument has been made many times and I think the answer is that you, as the original maintainer, are in the best position to add features and if you squander that position you deserve to lose.

Seriously imagine the consequences of this "eat or be eaten" approach. What it incentivizes is not feature development per se, but fragmentation for the sake of it. This in turn leads to less attentation toward maintaining the shared base of the fragmented forks, as it has been superseded with features X and Y in different, probably incompatible forks.

If you want people to pay you for your software, stop writing it for free. Conversely, if you write it for free, don't expect people to pay you for it. Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.

The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed.

(Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")

In what world was Netscape a failure? Made some people an awful lot of money and then gave us Firefox... Pretty far from failure

Netscape basically died and was replaced by Firefox which doesn't/can't effectively charge users for the software so instead makes money by selling default search engine, etc.

Netscape existed as the internet was coming into existence. You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it. People barely knew how to use their computers so the activation cost for bypassing their "pay wall" was high enough.

First, a self-correction: Netscape did not produce open source products until it open-sourced Navigator 5.0 in 1998. Until then, Navigator was freeware: free to download and run, but not open source.[1] I shouldn't have mentioned them, but my point still stands.

Second, it depends on what you define as success and failure. Netscape made its pre-IPO shareholders money if they timed their stock sales right. But the stock didn't go up because the company was profitable. It went up along with every other dot-com stock until the 2000-2002 crash, based on hopes and dreams, not fundamentals. The company never turned anywhere near close to a profit.

To me, a successful company is one that makes a sustainable profit based on its business fundamentals, not one that makes its founders and early investors rich in an investment bubble.

[1] Correction: Netscape did charge for the browser if used in a commercial context, but few people actually paid up.

There's nothing stopping you from charging money for FOSS software. Sell the first one for as much as it cost to write it.

There's nothing stopping you, true. But I think you will find that nobody is going to buy software for whatever thousands of dollars it took you to make it. So the limitation in this case is a practical one, not a legal or moral one.

That suggests there's never been a viable market for commercial software at all, which is obviously wrong.

Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.

This seems like a pet-peeve that's slipped through, because

1) It's really not; the FOSS developers never forced anyone to use their software, even if they're asking for payment for a product that was originally "marketed" as "free",

and

2) With the damage to society done by the work of many of the people in the tech industry and "respectable" white collar work in general, they should hope to be as virtuous as the window washers. Service done, pay for service, they go away and don't bother you for a while? No subscription shenanigans? Don't have to give them my credit card number? No annoying marketing emails? Not intentionally designing their service to be addictive? Geez. Adobe, Google, Facebook, Amazon employees make them look like saints. People give themselves way too much of a pass just because they sit in an air-conditioned office all day.

The thing is; if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free.

Also, the most difficult problems which software solve are hidden problems. Sometimes critical, but hidden nonetheless. Nobody cares about system failure, at all, until it happens to them.

No matter how good your software is, you can't effectively market it as "reliable" because every single piece of software ever created in the world claims to be realiable even though almost none of them are! The label has lost all of its meaning and hence, cannot be communicated.

So this means that far worse competitors can gain adoption and take the entire market from you if there is any friction at all between the user and your product. Open source is an attempt to reduce friction as close as possible to 0.

Anyway this creates a hyper-competitive environment. If you don't have a voice in the economy, open source can seem like your only option to gain any adoption at all. It's a business model born out of desperation, not out of choice.

You entirely miss the point of open source.

Open source is not about your ability to charge for the software. It is about the ability of the users of your software to modify it.

"Open-source software has its roots in the culture of source code sharing that dates back to the origins of computing in the 1950s. The term was formalized in 1998 with the founding of the Open Source Initiative, succeeding the free software movement initiated in the 1980s, with the intention of overcoming the ambiguity of the word "free" — meaning both freedom and gratis — to better appeal to the business world."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

You seem to be caught up in the 'free' part of 'free software'. It does not mean 'gratis software'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

The evolutionarily stable strategy for a piece of software is "anybody may use this for anything, including commercially, for free." That's MIT, BSD, Apache, the licenses that ask for nothing. Every project that has tried to be a slightly less generous dove has lost to a project that stayed a full dove

Linux (GPLv2) seems like an obvious counterexample?