I have doubts this proposed Open Source Licensing Collectives idea would actually lead to FOSS programmers receiving significantly more income.
This proposal shares a similar limitation with other licensing ideas that try to shift the money from rich corporations: The enthusiastic essays on "better" licenses such as GPLv3, AGPL, SSPL, etc always leave out game theory behavior of potential users to _not_ use the code at all. Examples:
(It doesn't matter if those corporate decisions are based on misunderstanding licenses and FUD. Their decisions are still a reality.)
Thinking in terms of predicting chess moves. Let's say a programmer's chess move is to release the code with GPLv3/AGPL/Collective. The other side's response chess move is to choose BSD/MIT or write their own. They may choose to not play your game at all.
If the type of license causes the code to be not be widely adopted, there won't be any programmer income so it will be a moot point. This probably depends on a case-by-case basis ... i.e. whether it's a library -vs- application -vs- infrastructure component, etc.
Will influential companies choose to "ban software from License Collectives"? This seems like a very realistic outcome. Why would it not?
EDIT reply to: >The license collective described in the article is just another way of selling commercial licenses in addition to offering a FOSS license
Are you the author of the article? If not, I disagree on your interpretation based on what the text says. It is not clear that he's proposing a purely voluntary payment to the Collective such that corporations can use FOSS for free and only pay the Collective if they feel nice about funding projects.
Look at representative excerpt:
>From a perspective of a commercial organization like a corporation or a startup, things become much easier now. They can go to one or more collectives, sign one bigger license and get a license to use thousands of FOSS projects aggregated by a given collective (there could be tiers).
There is no need for all that machinery above of "tiers" or even "dual" in dual-licensing if payment to Collective was optional.
>I'm not sure why a company would ban software from license collectives,
Because alternative software licenses still have to compete in the marketplace with other licenses like BSD/MIT that don't require payment to the Collective. Therefore, it's easier for corporate counsel to issue a blanket rule to avoid all software from the Collective unless the CTO approves. This adds enough friction for adoption that the hoped-for extra income to the FOSS programmer doesn't materialize.
So yes, game theory still applies to corporations that would ban their staff programmers from using any software that requires them to sign a license agreement with a Collective.
The license collective described in the article is just another way of selling commercial licenses in addition to offering a FOSS license to keep the software free and open source.
I'm not sure why a company would ban software from license collectives, unless they a) have a policy against paying for any software licenses at all, and b) have a policy against using copyleft-licensed software. A company that implements these policies is probably not going to benefit the software developer financially regardless of how the software is licensed.
Edit: Replying to your edit, no, I'm not the author of the article. In the proposed arrangement, the user can choose to comply with the FOSS license, pay for a commercial license (via the collective), or not use the software. If the user is unable or unwilling to comply with a copyleft license, the ability to use the software is an incentive for the user to pay for the commercial license. On the other hand, if the software were under the BSD/MIT License, the user would have no incentive to pay any money to the developer (unless they felt like making a donation). Companies that ban software from license collectives were, in all likelihood, never going to pay the developer even if the software were BSD/MIT-licensed, so they are financially irrelevant to the developer. It's the users who don't have such policies that are going to make the difference.
This proposal shares a similar limitation with other licensing ideas that try to shift the money from rich corporations: The enthusiastic essays on "better" licenses such as GPLv3, AGPL, SSPL, etc always leave out game theory behavior of potential users to _not_ use the code at all. Examples:
- GPLv3 is better than GPLv2? Game theory behavior of Apple avoiding it and they switch to zsh over bash4. https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+avoids+GPLv3
- AGPL closes the server-side loophole so corporations with billions can't exploit programmers? Game theory behavior of Google banning it: https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/
(It doesn't matter if those corporate decisions are based on misunderstanding licenses and FUD. Their decisions are still a reality.)
Thinking in terms of predicting chess moves. Let's say a programmer's chess move is to release the code with GPLv3/AGPL/Collective. The other side's response chess move is to choose BSD/MIT or write their own. They may choose to not play your game at all.
If the type of license causes the code to be not be widely adopted, there won't be any programmer income so it will be a moot point. This probably depends on a case-by-case basis ... i.e. whether it's a library -vs- application -vs- infrastructure component, etc.
Will influential companies choose to "ban software from License Collectives"? This seems like a very realistic outcome. Why would it not?
EDIT reply to: >The license collective described in the article is just another way of selling commercial licenses in addition to offering a FOSS license
Are you the author of the article? If not, I disagree on your interpretation based on what the text says. It is not clear that he's proposing a purely voluntary payment to the Collective such that corporations can use FOSS for free and only pay the Collective if they feel nice about funding projects.
Look at representative excerpt:
>From a perspective of a commercial organization like a corporation or a startup, things become much easier now. They can go to one or more collectives, sign one bigger license and get a license to use thousands of FOSS projects aggregated by a given collective (there could be tiers).
There is no need for all that machinery above of "tiers" or even "dual" in dual-licensing if payment to Collective was optional.
>I'm not sure why a company would ban software from license collectives,
Because alternative software licenses still have to compete in the marketplace with other licenses like BSD/MIT that don't require payment to the Collective. Therefore, it's easier for corporate counsel to issue a blanket rule to avoid all software from the Collective unless the CTO approves. This adds enough friction for adoption that the hoped-for extra income to the FOSS programmer doesn't materialize.
So yes, game theory still applies to corporations that would ban their staff programmers from using any software that requires them to sign a license agreement with a Collective.