To be a little more precise, the OSI does not own the "open source" term. But most of the industry accepts that, if a license isn't OSI-approved, it isn't an open source license. (And certainly isn't if it clearly violates the open source definition in some manner.)
> To be a little more precise, the OSI does not own the "open source" term. But most of the industry accepts that, if a license isn't OSI-approved, it isn't an open source license.
I agree, but this is only putting it mildly. To make an analogy, does the United States get to decide what the borders of the United States are? No; there is (AFAIK) no international law which has delegated that right to the US Government. But most of the international community accepts that, if the US says that someplace is a part of the US, it is. In the same way, OSI and its Open Source Definition decides what is and is not Open Source.
Not at all. The various GPL licenses are OSI-approved. Though the GPL may restrict your ability to offer an open core version of the project.
I think what you're missing is that if a project is licensed under an open source license, you can dual license it--including only offering some components under the proprietary license, i.e. open core--but the existence of that dual license doesn't take away any of the rights associated with the open source license on the open source portion of the codebase.
But dual license doesn't mean that the use of an open source codebase can can be carved up into allowable uses under the open source license and allowable uses under a proprietary license.
Conflict may have been too strong a word. In argument maybe? From what I understood, GNU was/is kind of a big deal, and OSI didn't have a monopoly on OS, or otherwise they would have on GNU also.
> if a project is licensed under an open source license, you can dual license it
Confirming this is all I am after.
I wasn't talking about carving anything up, though that sounds fun.
>Conflict may have been too strong a word. In argument maybe?
The FSF (including GNU) and OSI have their own histories, missions, and philosophies (to some degree although there's no real conflict about what open source/free software are). Yes, there are politics around both organizations but that's mostly inside baseball from the perspective of the average software consumer. There are any number of other non-profits in the open source space that also do their own various things.
And, yes, you can dual license. But understand that if one of the licenses is, say, MIT, a commercial entity can still use the software without paying no matter what the other license says. i.e. you can't use the second license to take away rights from the first license.
No, dual licensing simply means something different from what you think it does. Doing your IF statement violates the terms of the MIT license (assuming the same public codebase.).
A dual license is not IF/THEN/ELSE, it's pick $mit or $commercial--your call. If I pick $mit, no obligation to pay. You can not use $mit at all. But if you use it whether as part of a dual license model or otherwise, you don't get to rewrite it. Of course, you don't need to be open source at all which is what I usually tell clients who want their software to be "open source" for marketing purposes but get around some of the business model challenges.
Here's the fairly canonical MySQL example of a dual license: "Oracle uses a dual licensing model for MySQL to meet the needs of its consumers. Oracle offers MySQL under a proprietary (OEM style) license for licensees who want to create and commercially distribute proprietary derivative works incorporating MySQL without revealing the underlying source code and do not wish to be subject to other restrictions and obligations of the GPL. Additionally, Oracle licenses MySQL under the GPL for licensees who simply want to use the software or who want to incorporate MySQL into a product to be later distributed likewise under the GPL."
(Note that Oracle owns the MySQL copyrights. They perhaps couldn't otherwise do this unless subject to some restrictions. You can also just use MySQL without contacting Oracle.)
But what you're proposing, the software doesn't have an MIT license. It has MIT license verbiage coupled to other license language that forbids free commercial use. It's not a dual license. It's a new, different, and non-open source license. (Which is fine but your software isn't then open source.)
So from the IF/THEN/ELSE perspective your variety of dual licensing is not possible in the sense of a rider on an approved open source software license.
(Of course, that assuming you can even define much less enforce "commercial." Creative Commons basically gave up.)
> A dual license is not IF/THEN/ELSE, it's pick $mit or $commercial--your call.
No, it can be both. As the originator of the work, you are free to grant licenses based on qualifications. It's done all the time. I can't choose Adobe's student licence because I'm not a student.
So is this what's held back dual licensing and OS authors profiting? If the buyer could just freely choose of course it's broken.
(edit)
Just to add, even Oracle's license isn't completely free for the user to choose. Depending on the plans or policies of the buyer, they are restricted to their choices. So an IF statement exists.
If you release something under an open source license, of course I get to choose to use it under the terms of that license. That's the whole point.
If that's not acceptable, don't release it under an open source license. Like Adobe's proprietary software, you can release it as free for educational or non-profit use only under your own license. Can be hard to define and hard to enforce but that's your problem.
Do open source or don't do open source. I don't care. But it's tiresome to have people who want the "open source brand" but don't actually want to release open source software. Most of the actual advantages of open source don't accrue to tightly controlled products anyway.
And, yes, I don't consider it a problem but dual licensing, at least outside of open core (which has its own problems), is fairly useless in the general case. So in that sense it's broken. But that is open source working as intended.
This is in response to your latest response. Not sure why the reply link isn't showing.
Take adobe student discount. They license at a discount if you're a student.
The rights holder can restrict who gets what license. If you're trying to be able to say "released under OSI approved rubber stamped" then sure, maybe duel licensing is not ok. But you don't need the two licenses to be in agreement, and if you're not a student you don't legally get the student discount just by identifying as one.
So you could easily and legally do, free for not-for-profit, $50 otherwise with source.
>Maybe it's semantics or whatever but a rights owner can impose restrictions based on conditions
Yes. But what we seem to be going in circles on is that IF the rights holder wants to release the software under an OSI-approved license, they don't get to change that license, which is what you're doing if you want to say the software is only available under that license to some subset of users. Of course, they have the right simply not to use an OSI-approved license at all. But OSI-approved licenses all say you CAN'T impose certain restrictions if you're going to use them.
What they CAN do is to dual license the software under an all rights reserved license and their own "source available" license (for eligible users). So long as an OSI-approved license isn't involved, they can do anything they're legally permitted to. If you want usage restrictions, just don't use an OSI-approved license. It's pretty simple and the result is effectively the same.
They can even just cut and paste the MIT license and add a usage restriction clause. They just can't call it--and it isn't--the MIT license anymore.
Final comment. I couldn't quite parse the AND/OR comment. But dual licensing is providing a choice of options--pick A or B. It's not attaching a rider to an existing open source license that takes away some of the freedoms of the existing license based on usage.
Correct. “Dual licensing” means “The conditions in this license OR in that license applies”, not “The conditions in this license AND in that license applies”.
Some the consumer can freely choose. Others are imposed. eg. Adobe's student discount. You can word it or structure it however you want, but you're perfectly capable of imposing stipulations on specific groups. They're licensing the product to students at a discount.
For example:
If you plan on billing a client for this software or claiming it as an expense for your business, this software is provided with source for a one time fee of $50 with future upgrades provided at $25, after which will be under the MIT license. Otherwise this software is provided free of charge under the MIT license.
Licenses usually come into play after someone has acquired some software; anyone can place any conditions on giving someone else a copy; a license affects what a person holding a copy may do with it.
Also, having contingencies on what someone “plans” to to seems fragile. Suppose I don’t plan to bill a client for this software, nor claiming it as an expense. Therefore, I acquire a copy of this software, licensed only under MIT. Suppose then that I change my mind. I should be completely free to bill clients for the software, since the MIT license freely allows me to do so. Right?
Either I am free to do that, or the software I acquired was not actually licensed under the MIT license at all, but had added conditions. And in the latter case, it was not actually Open Source.
It really isn't that complicated. You could just lie too if it isn't beneath you.
If I am looking to update a site for a client and see software that I need, and the author is asking for $$ for commercial use, and the client is willing to pay, I will respect that.
Presumption of conflict and safeguards against it, or just giving up, has caused a lot of great projects to be abandoned in my opinion.
If you go to github and the source is already there, the source is open. Any definition of open source beyond that is political and legal. And with that source being open, you could just copy it without even reading the license.
How do you enforce that, especially as a small company/solo developer? How do you stop people from creating a FOSS alternative by reimplementing your freely available source code?
It really isn't about enforcing it. How do you enforce that is the question that even GPL struggles with.
It's a simple value proposition and a simple premise. If you're commercial, we're commercial. If you're not making money, you can still have it.
Compare that to just someone buying something. Individuals and especially businesses will buy what they need to buy. Imagine someone insisting "you don't have to buy me, but I am hungry". That's not even a business model. I find it's the value proposition is what is broken with most OSS. It's virtue signalling plus relying on donations. NPR does that, except they spend hours on the air begging for money. OSS might work if they were given the airtime too, but usually all the time they have is a few sentences the "shopper" reads before they hit the (free) download button (or enter the git command or whatever).
Just adding to this for the record since this was silently downvoted.
Most businesses make decisions based on $$. And they are happy to buy anything that helps their business. It's the cost of doing business. Think shopify apps. Most of those apps could be open source even if the only way to install them instantly was buying them through the app site. So having a paid for app for an open source project would be a great way get paid (or fund raise). Kind of like Linux being packaged for sale on the shelves of bookstores. That wasn't free, but people would buy it.
For business transactions, adding virtues and missions and meaning doesn't really come into play unless the marketing department has some plans that coincide with whatever virtues being sold. If the business is small, then maybe the founder. But again, it's not directly relevant to the product and use of it. Activism can be distracting when all you want to do is take care of business.
"If you agree with me, help me (or don't, you can still have it)" is a tougher sell compared to "this is $100, thank you, btw i believe in this" especially to the person/entity that could easily afford it (and pays for proprietary licenses already).
It's clear that if more OSS projects did better at making themselves money, they'd survive and maybe afford the price of continuing to improve and get better. This is in the interest of open source. I never took os to mean non-profit, although it has been synonymous with not-able-to-profit for quite some time now.
If OSI is an authority, maybe it would be in the best interest of "the community" if more help (in the form of guidelines and best practices) was provided in recouping development costs.
We have lots of people running around with "open source" projects worried about licenses when in reality they it provides them little if any protection against anything. This is owner of "open source" projects with dead community and fewer users worried about being exploited by "commercial" corporations and thus has foolishly believes that they can entrap "commercial user" with fancy IF/THEN/ELSE, statement in GUI license prompt. If tomorrow AT&T stiffs my bill with an extra $500 I and they refused to reverse the charges, I would probably eat those fees rather then waste more time and effort with money taking AT&T to court to get a judgment against them.
Many of these "open source" projects don't need licensing because no one is using because they don't have anyone to license too. You can't pay a commercial user to use this code even if you wanted to. These projects are akin to the people that start side businesses but spend all the time and money registering for an LLC and SEO advertising but have no work or customers for their side business but appear busy day and night working on their hustle and reports losses on their income tax and pay the accountant extra to setup tax shelters for imaginary income that aren't coming but that's what they saw someone else do and thus they need this and that tax service as well.
People will come in and yell that non commercial license isn’t open source… but sorry it is! All my projects that are more than hobbies have non commercial licenses. It’s open source! If you want to profit it off of it, you can pay me part of that profit.
I don’t know. Does that matter? I have written stuff that audio companies would love to steal but I provide for free to people who won’t make money from it. If there’s money to be made, I want some of it.
Free for private and non-commercial use. $$ per seat for commercial use.
This can still be completely open source.