> open source distribution systems [...] could buy the license from the original author
> A company like NPM [could] charge a company for using particular packages on a monthly basis
Wouldn't this require changing the license? How could NPM buy an MIT-licensed (for example) project and then charge for it? I suppose they could charge for the privilege of downloading the package through NPM, but that seems easy to work around if the code is available elsewhere (such as GitHub).
Also, any sizable open-source project has multiple contributors. What are the legal technicalities of the project's founder selling (and possibly relicensing?) other contributors' code?
> I suppose they could charge for the privilege of downloading the package through NPM, but that seems easy to work around if the code is available elsewhere (such as GitHub).
Yeah but as mentioned, workarounds have costs. The amount of money required to pay a maintainer is so small relative to the number of downloads it would still be cheaper to just pay it in almost all cases.
> Also, any sizable open-source project has multiple contributors. What are the legal technicalities of the project's founder selling (and possibly relicensing?) other contributors' code?
Not sure, but I’m sure a company like GitHub, npm, bitbucket or similar could figure it out
> The amount of money required to pay a maintainer is so small relative to the number of downloads it would still be cheaper to just pay it in almost all cases.
The workaround in many cases would be as simple as pointing your package.json file to GitHub instead of npm.org. Or paying to download it once and then caching it in some local NPM proxy.
> Not sure, but I’m sure a company like GitHub, npm, bitbucket or similar could figure it out
I don't mean any disrespect, but that's a pretty flippant attitude towards such a crucial detail of your idea. You're assuming a legal solution actually exists. I'm not so sure that it does in many cases.
An example where it could work is with a project like MySQL--before Oracle acquired it, all contributors had to sign an agreement giving Sun Microsystems ownership of their changes. Ownership passed to Oracle, so in theory they could change the license from GPL to whatever they want (though they haven't so far). They could not, however, retroactively apply this to versions of MySQL that existed before the license change. That code is already out in the wild. At least that's my understanding--if there are any lawyers here with experience in this area, it would be interesting to hear their take.
It's worth noting that a lot of contributors never put much thought into that agreement and were pretty unhappy to learn about its implications after the acquisition. It may well be harder to pull off an agreement like that today because of it.
The question is how many projects have agreements like this? I've contributed to a few and was never asked to sign anything. I suppose there could have been a CONTRIBUTOR_AGREEMENT.md file somewhere that says merging code implicitly gives ownership to someone, but I never saw it.
In any case, I think what you're suggesting would effectively make these projects no longer open source in the eyes of many people. They're now proprietary products sold under a proprietary license. I imagine that would kill their community support and contributions in most cases.
> The workaround in many cases would be as simple as pointing your package.json file to GitHub instead of npm.org. Or paying to download it once and then caching it in some local NPM proxy.
You just described like $1,000 worth of work. If the price of conveniently getting access to code were tarsnap style fractions of a cent then any company that is hiring people wouldn’t care.
I can’t seem to copy any more of your response because safari is being funny on my phone but from what I can see the chief complaint among open source maintainers is how challenging it is to get meaningful contributions from the user community in the first places
I don’t even think you’d need to change the license on the software, it could still be MIT but instead of being copyright Some Coder In Nebraska it would be copyright NPM.
Or not maybe you don’t need the copyright to change, I think the key innovation here is that the distribution network takes the payment directly and pays someone to maintain the project.
> A company like NPM [could] charge a company for using particular packages on a monthly basis
Wouldn't this require changing the license? How could NPM buy an MIT-licensed (for example) project and then charge for it? I suppose they could charge for the privilege of downloading the package through NPM, but that seems easy to work around if the code is available elsewhere (such as GitHub).
Also, any sizable open-source project has multiple contributors. What are the legal technicalities of the project's founder selling (and possibly relicensing?) other contributors' code?