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by tordanik
2770 days ago
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I would have a lot more sympathy for this effort if it wasn't for the misleading marketing. So you are selling software with a free 32-day trial? Nothing wrong with that. You're also allowing non-commercial users to use and modify their software for free? That's nice, and probably even makes sense financially if your market is mostly business users anyway. But then you just have to use a name and logo that's strongly reminiscent of the CC-Zero and brand yourselves "a new way to support open software developers". Except the "prosperity" license is not actually an open source license, and devs using it for their software are therefore not open source developers. The PR surrounding it follows the same pattern. It very much feels as if you are trying to benefit from the positive reputation that open source has built. Yes, the information is all there if you read the license text or readme, but it still seems intentionally designed to give an incorrect first impression to people who don't look too closely. Which is probably most people. |
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Using a non-OSI license for one project doesn't make a developer not an open source developer, any more than Open Core makes companies stewarding open source projects not open source companies. Most examples of financially self-sustaining, independent open source developers I know make money on contracts for closed development. A few standouts avoid that by running their own proprietary software businesses, offering additional features on top of their open work. Prosperity helps those developers who want to make the source for their paid-only features publicly available, and to make it free to many users who could never buy.
Prosperity, the noncommercial license, is one of two public licenses published under the project. The other is a very strong copyleft, or "free for open source" license. Both are controversial. I maintain, and have maintained, that the latter conforms to OSI's Open Source Definition, and that it's net-positive for software freedom, eschewing ruinous compromises. I remain far more personally passionate about the share-alike option, but it's just not functionally sufficient to create license-based opportunity for all projects. Freestanding applications not used to build other software, in particular.
None of the branding issues here have been easy. Part of the reason I renamed the public licenses to remove all mention of License Zero itself was to decouple communication problems. Also to emphasize their independence from L0. The licenses are perfectly usable without any dual licensing, or without licensezero.com in particular.
But while I want to be sure to get my messages across clearly, I strongly reject the idea that open source, however defined---OSI has not approved CC0-1.0, for example---deserves a special branding "buffer zone", that it's on other approaches to distinguish themselves, rather than for whoever wants to define "open source" to be clear what they mean. Open source branding itself takes advantage of lots of benefits attributable to mere source availability, and to public licensing more generally. It takes advantage of momentum from developers participating in a movement, some of whom reject any license-based definition of that movement, and some of whose needs, aspirations, and history orgs like OSI no longer seem to honor.
I named License Zero as a I did to reflect its goal: zero out friction in dual licensing, even for projects built with many deps, as through npm. Due to the documentation, and the readability of the licenses themselves, I believe it's actually far easier for developers to tell what's going on with L0 and L0 licenses than for most open source terms and business approaches. But I haven't stopped publishing as much as I can to help with those approaches. For example:
Popular: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2016/09/21/MIT-License-Line-b...
Recent: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/10/24/How-to-Speak-Copyl...