Closer To The Ideal

Dustin of MarxSoftware reflects on the difficulty of funding open source software:

I touched on this a little bit when I questioned which single entity (or even consortium) would be willing to pay Oracle for MySQL the same price that Sun paid for it (or even in the same ballpark). My speculation then is that MySQL is worth far more to a wide, diverse collective/community than it is to any one owner (except perhaps Oracle). The reason for this is that while MySQL is a heavily deployed database, it still does not garner the types of revenues most entities would need to justify its expensive price tag. This is a single example of the problem of the open source commons — many of the products are highly valued by their users, but without any or with too little monetary compensation to reflect how valued these products truly are.

Rightly or wrongly, “value” is often measured in terms of dollars. The phenomenon of modern day open source software (not all, but a large and growing portion) is that this basic tenet has been largely ignored. We have enjoyed over the past several years access to many fine open source products in which we have to give absolutely nothing back. Some of us are old enough to remember that it wasn’t always this way and is in many ways a recent phenomenon. Others in our profession are young enough to have never known differently. To them, it may seem strange to have to pay for open source.

…I believe that open source development and use is at a crossroads. The open source development world is facing its own tragedy of the commons. We essentially need individuals and users to do something that does not seem immediately in their self interest (paying for a product that in no way requires them to pay for it) for the greater good and their own long-term good (because of the continuing viability of freely available open source). The problem is that many of us would rather that everyone else pay for it so that we don’t need to.

These “tragedies of the commons” are difficult to resolve because they do pit individual (and often short-term) self interest against long-term community benefit. But, just as with other problems of the commons, if we don’t find a way to do something about it, the true tragedy will be the loss of benefit to the entire community.

But then, various non-profits manage to get by for decades with donations. I suspect after this recession a new attitude will take hold among open source users and sellers – the need for aggressive fund-raising will be more obvious. A lot of non-profits have full time fund-raisers, who spend all day, every day, looking for donations. I think this is what a lot of open source projects will need to do.

The Apache license is more open than the GPL. Richard Stallman claims that version 3 of of the GPL is now compatible with the Apache license. Same Ruby points out that this is a one-way street in terms of compatibility; the GPL can use Apache code but not vice versa.

In the comments, Ruby explains:

In order to preserve the “universal-donor-ness” of the code that we produce, and in order to prevent license surprises, the Apache Software Foundation will not distribute code which has either a direct dependency on GPL licensed code, or will only meaningfully operate when GPL code is installed. None of this precludes, for example, end users from combining code from the ASF with a GPL licensed JDBC driver. Nor is this policy specific to the GPL: it applies to any license which contains more restrictive terms than the Apache License.