With all due respect, I don’t think you do. Open source is about rights, and creating a secondary unwritten set of rules about obligations that are extralegal is just a more advanced way of circumventing them. Please read the DFSG, or OSI definition of open source, or the FSF definition of free software for what I mean. All of them are explicit that you can not discriminate on endeavor (explicitly including commercial) or the licensee. That’s not accidental.
OK. So let’s say I want to participate in open source. I release an open source project on the internet. The way I see it, here are my options:
1. I can release it freely, on a project forge like GitHub, and thus nobody has any obligation to pay for it. I can use dual licensing schemes and/or offer commercial support, or solicit donations, but by and large everyone from your average Joe to the fortune 100 are treated the same, because that’s part of the definition of open source and free software, and indeed, part of the draw.
2. I can release it at a cost, but still provide it under an open source license, but because it’s open source, someone can simply release the source code when they pay for it. In practice this actually has worked out this way; take a look at how this has been attempted with the Patron model for emulation software, for example.
3. Do #1 but ask politely (or impolitely) for big companies (how big?) to pay back when they take advantage of open source software. Create a culture wherein using open source projects implies obligations that may not be written out explicitly. This is a commonly expressed viewpoint when people talk about the problem of compensating open source maintainers, and it’s where the “extralegal” part comes in, wherein there are social expectations that contradict the license.
Selling software under a license that doesn’t allow redistribution would obviously fail almost any open source or free software definition, so I’m struggling to think of another potential interpretation here.
Great comment! My message is to the group of OSS maintainers that pick option 3 and then throws a tantrum when it doesn't work. My message is: Option 3 does not work and will never work. Accept it and pick another option.
Apparently, we’re on the same page. However, I think we can still do better than this. While some more organized projects will successfully find a model that helps them meet their goals, initiatives that try to help individuals externally could also (and obviously do) contribute to the solution.
It’s basically the same level of expectations on both sides: nobody is expected or obligated to do anything; they do so because they want to, or because they believe it is a mutually beneficial decision. It’s kind of like the comparison of engineer salary vs open source donations. Yeah, on one hand, open source donations are not likely to pay you enough to live in most cases. On the other hand, it’s money given to you under essentially no obligations. The same reason you can’t really complain much about the support you get from open source maintainers; there was never really any obligations.
But, I believe that open source has proven itself enough to have earned more donations and funding, and that there’s plenty more funding that could be making its way to open source if we could resolve issues with routing it there.
