Basically, he advocates a new license that he wants to develop that basically improves remuneration for open source developers. Use case: A "Post Open" software is used by a company, then this company has to pay a certain percentage (1 to 10%) of their revenue to the "Post Open" software. If it is using multiple "Post Open" packages this percentage is divided among them (according to usage).
Software in this scheme will be allowed to be modified, redistributed etc. and it will also contain a public API that defines the boundaries of the program (so it's not about linking anymore).
I hope that captures the key points.
Clarification: for-profit users pay a percentage of end user revenue. non-profits and individuals pay nothing. Automated auditing envisioned.
This is a proposal, not nearly ready for roll-out.
The concepts are interesting, but only a rough framework exists at this time. The ideas are worth discussing. I wish there was a succinct blog post or something about them rather than this painful video.
Colour me unconvinced of the viability of this scheme.
- Usage auditing for and reporting for Post-Open software is required alongside the payment. This is a huge reversal. Not having to do onerous license compliance monitoring was a big selling point touted by FOSS advocates for the past two decades, pointing to horror stories about audits demanded by the Business Software Alliance and huge payments for license violations.
- It's called the "Post-Open" license for a reason: Bruce says FOSS has been defeated. He points out that corporations have both found ways to make money off of FOSS without contributing much and even hijacked the governance of FOSS for their own benefit. This is extremely startling to hear from someone so well known in open source.
First because involving all the chicanery of accounting to figure out my fee is asking for lots of resources just to calculate and audit fees.
Second, unpredictable costs are bad. If my company’s revenue doubles in a year, that doesn’t mean that my department’s budget doubles. Or that I even have enough earnings to cover licenses.
Finally, this is hard enough with a single product. My org uses thousands of products. If they all charge 1%, where does that leave me.
PS- morally this just seems dumb. If my grocery store charged me more or less depending on my income or the value I derive from a tomato, I won’t shop there. Just publish a price and let people decide to buy or not.
Even if there is only a single "post open" package which gets the full 1% of the rev share, what about one developer which contributes a whitespace or spelling fix, versus another developer which contributes a key part of the package? What if one developer contributes a huge number of lines of code, but it's for a feature which isn't actually used at all by a particular billion dollar use case of said "post open" package?
The devil is really in the details.....
I would suspect lots of Hollywood Accounting is likely; putting all the PostOpen software in a subsidiary that has no revenue, or developing your own software under PostOpen but not distributing it outside, so that the majority of the usage is apportioned to affiliated companies.
Plus, apportioning by usage is a negative incentive for optimization. If your DB reduces query runtime by 10% in the next version, it reduces its revenue, assuming other PostOpen software is in use and doesn't optimize.
So as a purveyor of post-open software, you must have a business proposition that closes the deal. Not impossible, but different from the way most OSS projects operate today. Your skepticism is reasonable. To separate a customer from their money, you need to provide obvious value.
It strikes me that once you take one post-open package into your stack, the incremental cost of the next N is zero. So maybe there is enough virality in that feature to drive adoption. One high-value post-open project could create a coat-tail effect.
I still think its a weird business model. I can't imagine any propriatary software would work with that. Its very discouraging for small projects that do simple things, or for companies that want to try out software a little at first before committing to using it at a large scale.
This also places an undue burden on the payment receiver as they have to get into the business of running enterprise audits to find out who is using what.
I’m not saying that PostOpen is impossible or can never be used anywhere. Just that it sucks and is not feasible for broad use.
But it doesn’t replace OSS and I think will produce different software. I can’t imagine many developers switching to this. I wouldn’t contribute to a project with this license because I don’t want to bother with some incremental level of income. I’d rather just donate time.
I also wouldn’t buy software that had a cost contingent because I wouldn’t want that kind of relationship with my software vendor. Of course, this happens now with enterprise software where a big company will get a quote for $5 and a little company will get a quote for $1. But having something explicit is illogical since software is a near zero marginal cost product.
But even for real world stuff, I’d never hire a gardener who charged differently based on customers income.