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by random3
585 days ago
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Hey Elliott, long time .
I think the key issue is with the assumption that anything beyond the license will happen. Any assumption that there's another (moral?) contract is wrong. If the OSS is free, then the product can't be the OSS. Any unaligned incentives can put the community in conflict which is something that was common in the Apache ecosystem. So the problem is not with OSS itself, but the sustainability assumptions around some OSS efforts. |
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I agree the contract should be clear up front. Changing expectations later is a big problem. People want to give away the software for a while, using it as a loss leader to get attention while not being honest about their later need for money to fund the ongoing concern.
I tried to write a little bit about that in my post here: https://www.batteriesincl.com/posts/fairsource
I was starting Batteries Included and had been writing it in Elixir. I want to give back to the community, show how to use Phoenix/Live view, and be transparent about what users are running, etc. However, I also know that if this will work long-term, I can not give it away to everyone forever. So it's better to be honest about things as early as possible.
We paid a very smart lawyer to draft the best compromise we could as early as possible.
https://www.batteriesincl.com/LICENSE-1.0
This means we can develop in the open here: https://github.com/batteries-included/batteries-included while also giving it away long term and still being honest that this will require some long-term revenue stream. That revenue stream will come from the companies using it on larger installs.