There has been a lot of talk about companies and individuals adopting licenses that aren’t OSI opensource to protect themselves from mega-corp leechers. Developers have also been condemned who put donation notices in the command-line or during package installation. Projects with opensource cores and paid extensions have also been targets of vitriol.
So, let’s say we wanted to make it possible for the majority of developers to work on software that strictly follows the definition of opensource, which models would be acceptable to make enough money to work on those projects full-time?
Personally I like the following two approaches:
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Free and open source for selfhosting, paid when hosted by the company (e.g Nextcloud, gitea, cal.com)
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Free and open source with basic features, paid for proprietary business addons (e.g Portmaster, Xpipe)
I think those approaches are fully compatible with the open source definition, but please correct me if I am wrong. (The examples I mentioned are just some of which I personally know and use, but of course they are many others)
How would this look like? Are you suggesting a different license? Or is it more something like paid binaries but the code stays open?
Free and open source for selfhosting, paid when hosted by the company (e.g Nextcloud, gitea, cal.com)
Do you believe anything should be done if a large competitor takes over the business of hosting for other companies and hosting is the major revenue stream of the opensource project?
Free and open source with basic features, paid for proprietary business addons (e.g Portmaster, Xpipe)
That sounds like Open Core and I am for this, but there seems to be a dissatisfaction within the loud part of the opensource community regarding it. They don’t consider it “open-source”. Do you still count it as opensource?
Your proposals concern services or applications. Do you have any thoughts on opensource that isn’t that e.g libraries, frameworks, protocols, and so on?
