Re: draft of a new Open Source Commercial License

[Pirmin Braun]

Am Wed, 18 Sep 2013 09:50:48 +0100
schrieb David Chisnall <David.Chisnall@cl.cam.ac.uk> :

> Hi,
> 
> On 17 Sep 2013, at 22:45, Pirmin Braun <pb@intars.de> wrote:
> 
> > we plan to license the upcoming IntarS 7 under this license.
> > What do you think about it?
> 
> What is your goal with this license?  I don't think that it will work to 
> encourage contributors, because I certainly wouldn't send patches to a 
> project where I might suddenly find that I'd have to pay if I started using 
> it a lot.  I'd also have the same reaction to using it: if I build a program 
> using it and deploy it, I don't want to suddenly find that I'd have to pay 
> extra if it became popular.

The goal is to earn additional money from those power users that make 
themselves lots of money from using the software and on the other hand preserve 
the LGPL conditions for all others.
There have been no contributors so far except professional programmers working 
for money.
You only have to pay extra when it turns out that you've become a company using 
the product permanently with more than 5 concurrent named users. Normally you 
grow into this situation.
You won't "suddenly" find out since you'll be informed about this very clearly 
on every login. When you're a company and planning to hire another employee who 
will
- use the software
- under an own login name
- concurrently with at least 5 others
- permanently
then you will need this 900,-- EUR additional investment. Which is peanuts 
compared to the other costs associated with creating a new work place.

> 
> Is the goal simply to allow people to port it to other systems?  Again, I'm 
> not sure why I'd put the effort into putting this in the FreeBSD ports tree 
> and ensuring that it worked (nor why Sebastian would do the same for OpenBSD) 
> if we'd end up having to pay if we used it in anything other than a very 
> small scale.  

The point is commercial usage. Edu, privat, non profit usage is free in any 
scale. Additionally you are free to license your port under your own license 
and also earn license fees (with different conditions) as you like - as long as 
we get our share from our defined power users. It's the end user's 
responsibility to pay all affected licensors in the license chain their share. 
For such a value added derived work that wants extra license fees from the end 
user we reduce our claim to 30% (or whatever) to give partners more room for 
their own business model.
So a partner might sell his derived work well below our price of the original 
work. But in no case a contributor has to pay us. We don't sell OEM licenses.

> 
> As others have pointed out, it is not OSI or FSF compliant.  This may also 
> mean that it would be hard to distribute in binary form.  As it's currently 
> written, it's an end-user license agreement, and so we'd have difficulty 
> distributing it, because we'd need to have a framework in place that would 
> require the user to accept the license before installing it.  We do this with 
> the Oracle / Sun JDK and a few other packages already, and it requires manual 
> intervention and prevents us from distributing binary builds.

with the proposed draft of the IntarS license this is not the case. You can 
install the binary and use it. No need to accept anything.
Even when you're a commercial company you can work with up to 5 concurrent 
named users for years. You even can do load tests or evaluation with more 
users. Only when you permanently (longer than 1 month) have more than 5 
concurrent commercial named users there is a decision to be made: either pay 
license fees or use IntarS with less users or at least make users login with 
the same name or at different times.

> 
> David
> 

Besides all that, the FSF has created the LGPL to address certain cases. Since 
then the world has changed a lot. Open Source has beome ubiquitous. The war is 
won. Just have a look in your Android device Settings/About .../Legal 
Notices/Open Source Licenses. There are now more "certain cases" that should be 
honored. One of these is that there are Billion-Dollar-Companies taking 
advantage of Open Source software while the programmers have nothing more than 
a mention in the "About" section. Attending Open Source meetings is always a 
special low budget experience. Source Forge is crowded with abandoned projects 
and there are so few that can earn their living from doing Open Source.
Does it have to be that way? I think it's time to discuss a CLGPL (C like 
"Commercial"). 

-- 
Pirmin Braun - IntarS Unternehmenssoftware GmbH - Am Hofbräuhaus 1 - 96450 
Coburg
+49 2642 40526292 +49 174 9747584 - skype:pirminb www.intars.de  pb@intars.de
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