A presentation at Diffusion 2019 in in Berlin, Germany by Boris Mann
OPEN SOURCE LICENSING EVOLUTION DIFFUSION OCTOBER 2019
BORIS MANN • 15 years ago, worked on building out the Drupal community, built the first commercial company around Drupal, helped form Drupal Association • Last year, focused on Ethereum community, helping out with the Ethereum Magicians, Core Devs • Fission is building developer tools: decentralized Firebase with user controlled data ✨
W H AT D O E S O P E N S O U R C E M E A N ? • The problem with the term open source is that everyone means something different when they use it. • Some people just mean licensing. • Some people think of a particular community’s set of practices. • Others think that it means some kind of fuzzy democracy and mob rule.
DEFINITION OF OPEN SOURCE
COMMONS BASED PEER PRODUCTION Lots of people work on it, everybody benefits from it, and then people can build upon it (even in a revenue generating fashion) Ted Leung: Explaining Commons Based Peer Production, er, Open Source (2005)
OPEN SOURCE DEFINITION • Maintained by the Open Source Initiative • https://opensource.org/osd • Last modified in 2007
Open source is not a business model
CHOICE OF LICENSE • Distribution/adoption • Free labour from contributors • Lock it open • No one but my company can easily commercialize it • Copyleft: GPL, AGPL • Permissive: Apache, MIT
WHY IS APPLE MOVE FROM BASH TO ZSH? • Licensing of course! • Apple has been shipping an “old” version of bash with Mac OS for a long time, because it is GPLv2, and newer versions now use GPLv3 • Zsh uses an “MIT-like” license, plus some GPL shell functions
L I C E N S I N G I N N O VAT I O N • For the first time in 15 years, we’re starting to see licensing innovation again • Cloud providers making record profits vs. open source projects • except it’s not that simple…a lot of those projects are VC- funded businesses
LICENSE ZERO
Do you think current open source software licenses are the best we’ll ever have?
X L C : C R O S S L I C E N S E C O L L A B O R AT I V E S • Solves a problem with one person or organization owning the copyright (and potentially trademarks) of a project, often represented by contributor license agreements. • “Maintain your projects’ licenses and create shared moneymaking opportunity without any company, foundation, or dictator” • “developers can hack cross-licenses and contributor license agreements to manage and monetize their work cooperatively, through cross-license collaboratives.” https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/10/05/XLC.html
996.ICU • The name 996.ICU refers to “Work by ‘996’, sick in ICU”, an ironic saying among Chinese developers, which means that by following the “996” work schedule, you are risking yourself getting into the ICU (Intensive Care Unit). • Anti 996 License — derived from MIT
D ATA E T H I C S • We are starting to see people care about data — specifically, their data • What requires software developers or companies to act in certain ways with data? • From principles (Fair Data Society, Local First Software) to licenses (Cryptographic Autonomy License, Icepick)
A constellation provider rather than a cloud provider, built on open source We are building a “decentralized Firebase”, a backend-asa-service that can run from your laptop, uses emerging Web3 tech, and gives developers the tools to keep data user-controlled.
@FissionCodes • https://fission.codes Boris Mann, @bmann
There has been much discussion lately about the utility of different open source licenses for software. Join a discussion group on different needs of software licensing, from their effect on adoption, commercialization, and even regulatory considerations.
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
The Parity and Prosperity software licenses, plus command line tools to sell licenses
“Maintain your projects’ licenses and create shared moneymaking opportunity without any company, foundation, or dictator.”
Created by Chinese tech workers pushing back on 9am - 9pm, 6 days per week work schedules.
This is a weapon of mass user protection
for free. You
can too.