zlacker

I've listened to only 2/3 of it, but: he promotes Crystal+Lucky (crystal is compiled) as good replacements for Ruby and Rails. The second part of his talk is about promoting a new variant of open license called PostOpen, which will require commercial users of Post Open software to pay 1% for using, 1.5% for using without sharing modifications. There is a 10% fee for worse offense. All percentages are percentages of revenue. This is partly aimed at large companies that host open source software with few modifications as a service and charge for it. Money goes to PostOpen and possibly conventional Open Source developers.

>>george+(OP)
Ah, so a linux system contains more than 100 packages, does that mean if it used this scheme companies would have to pay out >100% of revenue?

Colour me unconvinced of the viability of this scheme.

>>george+(OP)
I think any license that requires a percentage of revenue is DOA.

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.

>>prepen+6h
That's not correct. It's a flat 1% of revenue regardless of the number of Post-Open software packages used. (From the slide at 13:30 "The same fee whether you use 1 Post Open program or 1000.") The organization that receives the payment is supposed to handle splitting up the revenue among software package authors, so it does require auditing of all usage.

>>george+(OP)
I see a low probability that anything licensed "post open" will see adoption if there is a royalty owed for it.

>>bawolf+8d
leftpad intensifies

>>bawolf+8d
No, and this is expressly discussed in TFV. It's a flat 1% regardless of how many "post open source" resources are used. This is intended to encourage adoption of more POS (unfortunate acronym) once you use any.

>>prepen+6h
Yeah, I don't know what corporation would be happy with a license where the cost is nebulous like this.

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.

>>prepen+6h
Maybe. That depends if OSS devs switch to this or not. This only hurts those making money off OSS which is fair. Think of it as contributing to improving the OSS.

>>johneb+Mj
Imagine the business decision of selecting between a post-open licensed ware and BSD licensed similar functionality. In return for 1% of revenue and the hassle of an annual usage audit, you get what value in return, exactly? That is the key question.

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.

>>prepen+6h
You make a compelling argument except for ignoring the fact that many licences (in particular patent licences) work on percentages of sales or revenue. So it seems not to be a problem in those cases, why is it for software?

>>jhauri+Pk
Well if people want their ideas to be heard they need to write them down instead burying them in long videos amidst topics i dont care about. (Not blaming bruce, we're not the target audience here, but im still not watching a long form video).

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.

>>Throwa+Ij
That helps with my final point but #1 and #2 are deal killers as well.

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.

>>cycoma+EB
I’m sure there’s some software that works on percent of sales or something. But it’s not common. I’ve worked on some fixed cost, percent value contracts and they had very distinct parameters unique to the contract and they weren’t very good for generalization (eg, “your foo process costs $50M today, I’m going to deliver changes that reduce that cost, I want 50% of the cost reduction” with tons of pages of caveats and details and stuff).

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.

>>mrtwee+Rv
I think the more software the better so if people like using this then good for them. More software in the world.

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.

>>prepen+6h
What if only companies above some revenue threshold were charged? Would you feel differently if licenses had a progressive fee of some kind?

>>prepen+6h
Having spent 20 years in the film industry (see https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0673302/), I am well aware of your concern. The demand is for 1% of end-user revenue collected, through all entities. This is to use all Post Open software, not just one program. Obviously this is not going to gain immediate acceptance by many companies. But if the collection gets large enough, there may be a tipping point.

>>throwa+Av1
I don’t sell software so this is just theoretical. But I wouldn’t want to know my customers’ revenue. That’s too much work and not my business.

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.