zlacker

I just skimmed the video so my TL;DR might not capture everything he said.

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.

>>Azrael+(OP)
Pretty good summary.

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.

>>Azrael+(OP)
There's a couple of other points of note:

- 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.

>>Azrael+(OP)
What's unclear is how is the revenue percentage split across all of the various contributors of a particular "post open" package. Suppose there are 10 "Post Open" packages; do all of the packages deserve to get an equal share of the 1% rev share? Maybe some "post open" packages are more technically complex than others? Maybe some "post open" packages are more key to the value-add than others.

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.....