>I also think we need to change to way we think about critical software like GPG
Maybe the lesson here is not to license important software under such permissive licenses. Make it open source and free for non-commercial, require a donation if it is used in a commercial product. I don't really see how you can give something away for free and then expect companies to volunteer to pay for it.
> open source and free for non-commercial, require a donation if it is used in a commercial product
Every serious definition of 'open source' or 'free software' says that you can't discriminate by field of endeavour - if you have one set of rules for commercial use and one for non-commercial use, it's not really open source. And the nature of donations is that you can't require them.
That's not to say that you can't build a business model around open source software. You can charge for pre-built binaries, you can charge for exceptions to the GPL license to build proprietary software with it (this is what Qt used to do), or you can charge for services associated with the code (e.g. running a hosted service). You can even technically charge for the code itself, though since anyone who buys it can resell it or give it away, that sounds precarious.
We call it Free and Open Source Software for a reason. Open Source means the code is open (i.e., you can study it), Free means it's licensed under a Free Software license (it doesn't necessarily mean free of charge).
People usually omit the "Free and" part when they talk about FOSS.
You are about the open source part: http://opensource.org/osd. The 'Naming' section of your link references the osd.
Calling it just one or the other is enough though. Being "under a Free Software license" by definition means "the code is open (i.e. you can study it), so no need to say "and Open Source".
I do however prefer calling it free software over open source as I find the free software definition simpler and than the osd. And also because the term open source seems to place importance on the code being 'open' instead of 'libre', which you'll here rms talking about everytime someone says open source.
"Free software" has issues as well as a term, since free can obviously mean two things, gratis or libre. However, once the reader/listener has understood the difference between free of charge software and software that preserves your freedom to study, modify and redistribute it, I think open source is the more problematic term as it can more easily cause confusion as demonstrated by your comment (where you think open source means that the code just has to be 'open').
> The kind of "open source" I was talking about is source code that is released under a non-free software license. What do we call that?
"obnoxious".
More seriously, typically something like "look but don't touch", or "proprietary with source available", or "source available under a restrictive license". Microsoft used to call it "shared source", and that term still has those connotations too.
Definitely not "open source", though; that means more than just "has source available".
It's common practice in the game industry to license/pay for access to the source code. Whether you end up changing it or not is up to you, but at least you have a choice. This might not be true for Microsoft's "public" source code. I don't know. It looks like we're talking about two very different domains.
The Unreal Engine is an example for this kind of business model on a large scale. KoboldTouch (used to be?) an example for the same on a very, very small scale (less than 5 people). I really don't see anything "obnoxious" about it.
> It's common practice in the game industry to license/pay for access to the source code. Whether you end up changing it or not is up to you, but at least you have a choice. This might not be true for Microsoft's "public" source code. I don't know. It looks like we're talking about two very different domains.
Yeah, that's a very different case. It's indeed moderately common for proprietary software frameworks/engines to include source, so that their paying customers can modify and redistribute, but cannot redistribute in source form (modified or otherwise). That's not any more obnoxious than any other kind of proprietary software distribution, and I wouldn't call it "look but don't touch", though it certainly isn't open source or free software.
The case I'm talking about is software with publically available source, but under a restrictive license that doesn't satisfy the OSI or FSF or DFSG definitions. For instance, many random projects on github that don't bother applying a license, or rar (the archive format implementation), or tarsnap, or the extremely obnoxious JSON license.
There's nothing wrong with doing that. Feel free to do whatever you want. But what you are talking about is not "Open Source". That term has a (different) meaning. If use "open source" for that, you will confused and trick people.
"open source" has been in use as a term in tech for a long time. It means (essentially) the same thing as "free software". Licences that disallow derivations (or commerical derivations) would not fall under the defintion of "open source" that nearly everyone uses.
You are free to come up with your own defintion of popular, agreed up terms. But this will lead to problems when you're using a different definition from everyone else.
It might be a little tricky in the case of GPG since it is really a GPL port of the commercial PGP software. So a major reason for it's original existence is that it is GPL code.
Gpg is not a port of some PGP version but an implementation of rfc4880 and earlier open standards. I actually took great care not to look at any "open source" PGP code. The reasons why dual-licensing does not work is that I assigned the copyright to the FSF in 1998 and when I terminated that contract 2 years ago too many other other hackers have code in it or assigned it to the FSF. Thus there is no way for anyone to switch to a dual-license.
I think parent was badly worded/thought out, but points to a real strategy. He said "charge for commercial use", which is definitely illegal, but what a lot of projects do is dual-license open source and proprietary. If you're a non-commercial project, you'll usually just use the open source version; if you're commercial, you'll want to be able to both link the project into a proprietary codebase and get support guarantees, so you pay for the proprietary license.
It is not "definitely illegal" to set license terms to whatever one wishes including restricting commercial use. The GPL hinges upon copyright to enforce it's provisions. Copying privileges are revoked for people who violate the license. This is a legal "hack" to get around the need to establish a contract or exchange funds. The same sort of rules can be applied for any other criteria such as the type of user. If I want to prohibit blue-eyed people from using my software I am free to do so. Dual licensing isn't a requirement to do this.
This is exactly what we ( http://linphone.org ) do: we have a GPLV2 license that's used in many many open source projects, and we have a specific license for commercial projects, for which we provide support and ability to not disclose the sources that our clients might modify.
This kind of way to function give enough money to employ 10 people, and also secured a lot of new developments (encryption, video, etc.). Disclaimer: I'm just an employee, not the founder.
I would advise him to switch to that kind of licensing, if he wishes to. There's no reason he shouldn't be able to live through his work.
One problem with that strategy is it forces you to use a licence with some sort of restriction (like copyleft) to make dual-licensing useful. You can of course dual-license a BSD or MIT licensed project but no one would use the "dual" part of the dual-license since the copyfree license allows them to do everything they need.
If you do this, the problem with dual-licensing a copyleft project is as follows:
-The copyleft license allows use in other projects with the same copyleft license
-The "dual" part allows use in proprietary licensed project (the stated enemy of the copyleft license)
-The ones left out are projects that use other copyleft licenses and copyfree licenses.
In my opinion dual-licensing copyleft licensed projects is a mockery of the purpose of copyleft.
All this is however irrelevant to the discussion about funding core FLOSS software. It doesn't matter the license, the challenges to funding such a project are the same.
Don't forget that permissive licenses are one of the main reasons people widely adopt these tools in the first place.
I hear you though. Free of charge and open source need to be two separate things (not all the time, of course). Cutting costs in FOSS development usually means spending less time on websites, documentation/support and UIs, which hurts the projects in the long term. It's a vicious cycle.
It's nice in theory, but then the defintiion of "commerical" can mess it up, and can be subject to how judges (anywhere in the world interpret it). A german court ruled that "non-commerical" (in a CC licence) meant only for personal use, and non-personal entities had to pay. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140326/11405526695/germa...
Maybe the lesson here is not to license important software under such permissive licenses. Make it open source and free for non-commercial, require a donation if it is used in a commercial product. I don't really see how you can give something away for free and then expect companies to volunteer to pay for it.