If you've never seen it, I HIGHLY recommend Lessig's talk on "Free Culture" from OSCON 2002 (the book too). It's one of the first talks that got me into software copyrights, and covers a lot of ground into an area many of us (or at least I) probably only know at a surface-level:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/5HiW9ZCpnK8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/5HiW9ZCpnK8</a>
Do any of these copyleft (FOSS) licenses address royalties?<p>I was wondering how FOSS teams could get their fare share of revenue from cloud providers.<p>It just seems reasonable that AWS would pay royalties to the elasticsearch, postgres, rabbitmq teams. For examples.<p>Am noob, just started foraging for details. I didn't quickly find anything, so started reading about how the music industry handles royalties, because that's copyright. Stuff like sampling, covers, airplay.<p>Next, I'll probably read about royalties for patents.<p>Thoughts?
On this topic is it possible to show the source code of your product but retain the copyright on it? Like some of the electronics my grandmother had came with a manual that had their full schematic in them. I want to make products that come with the schematic and source code but retain my copyright. I want to build products that empower you to fix it if it breaks and make it last a long time. Is that possible?
I think the standard framing of copyleft as all about the user's rights is flawed. What we call copyright is a deeply flawed legal framework that helps to entrench rent-seeking and anti-competitive behaviour, but there's another side of the coin: the intent of the law is genuinely to guarantee access to the fruits of one's intellectual labour.<p>Of course, copyleft licenses such as the GPL _can_ be used to protect the authors' rights to compensation for commercial use of their work - but the framing matters. I think that's the fundamental reason open source licenses such as BSD and MIT have caught on - they centre on the need of the developer to get productive work done, not on the far more abstract principle of the home PC user being able to recompile their own software stack from source.
I would love if something like this caught on.<p>"5% royalties due on profits derived from this product."<p>So if something is given away free, nothing would be due. But if something were used for profit, part of that profit would have to be paid upstream. And that would be profit for that node which, if used the same license, would have 5% of that trickle upstream.<p>This could be an automatic process and handled through an open registry. Anyone could take anything, register, and then pay their "taxes". If you wanted to donate anything you made, make that an option also.<p>Of course there are an infinite amount of "what if" scenarios, but that's the gist of it based on the following philosophy:<p>No one should need permission to copy anything or profit from anything. But they should share their earnings if they "opt in" to capitalism.
<i>"it wasn’t until the free software movement shed its rebellious roots and rebranded as the more business-friendly “open-source movement” that it really took off. One of the most crucial figures in this effort was Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, who built his business empire by identifying the pieces of the free software movement that could be commodified. Suddenly, corporations that had previously considered open source to be dangerously redolent of “communism” were starting to see its value, both as a way of building software and as a recruitment tactic. From there, an entire ecosystem of virtue-signaling opportunities sprang up around the marriage of convenience between the corporate world and open source: conference and hackathon sponsorships, “summers of code,” libraries released under open licenses but funded by for-profit corporations.<p>If that counts as a victory, however, it was a pyrrhic one. In the process of gaining mainstream popularity, the social movement of “free software”—which rejected the very idea of treating software as intellectual property—morphed into the more palatable notion of “open source” as a development methodology, in which free and proprietary software could happily co-exist. The corporations that latched onto the movement discovered a useful technique for developing software, but jettisoned the critique of property rights that formed its ideological foundation.<p>Yet it was precisely the weakness of that foundation that made the free software movement vulnerable to co-optation in the first place. The movement’s greatest limitation was its political naivete. Even as it attacked the idea of software as property, it failed to connect its message to a wider analysis that acknowledged the role of property rights within a capitalist framework. Free software pioneers like Stallman tended to approach the issue from an individualized perspective, drawn from the 1970s-1980s hacker culture that many of them came from: if you could change how enough hackers wrote and used software, you could change the world. This highly personalized model of social change proposed an individual solution to a structural problem, which necessarily neglected the wider social context."<p>+<p>"the neoliberal consensus of the last few decades has meant that the benefits of technological development have largely flowed to corporations, under the aegis of a strong intellectual property regime. As the free software movement came up against these prevailing economic forces, its more contentious aspects were watered down or discarded. The result was “open source”: a more collaborative method of writing software that bore few traces of its subversive origins."</i><p>— Wendy Liu, <a href="https://logicmag.io/failure/freedom-isnt-free/" rel="nofollow">https://logicmag.io/failure/freedom-isnt-free/</a>
Taking away the political terms like contribute and community (which are not in the GPL license text), the actual license requires the 2nd developer to do two things that are contentious. Release the source to his own mods to the first person's code... AND release the build instructions. If you read the license, this is explicitly specified.<p>Even if the second developer isn't evil, he may be willing to release his mods to the first person's code, but there can be several technical and business reasons that he cannot release his build process to his customers.<p>BTW, nothing in GPL requires that the second guy communicate with the first one in any way. There is no "community contribution." It only says he has to make a copy of his source available to <i>his</i> customers <i>on request.</i> That's a pretty huge delta from the idea of folks sitting around in a community and improving software.<p>To actually use the second guy's code, you'd have to diff it from the first! There is no requirement that the code have any comments or documentation. It cannot be intentionally obfuscated, but it can be obtuse by design. Again, none of this implies any community of people working to improve some theoretical software.<p>And that's because the second person is likely building very different software from the first! The first person and his community probably don't need or want most of the second guy's code. And if there's a community of devs for the second guy's product, well that's kind of his problem.<p>The real burdens that GPL places on the second dev are pretty bad problems. Releasing the build process and the surrounding code which is not related to the first guy's product is a huge problem. You don't have to be evil to see that.<p>There are also many, many cases where the second person is making something that improves the first product but doesn't compete with it. It's in a different technical niche or customer application and in that way, they're not related. (Same software in a TV and a fridge, for example.) Does the TV company care about the fridge people's mods? No, not really. Unless there are some bugs or real improvements in the TV software that the fridge people could make. Since this does happen if the TV code base gets big enough, eventually you see paid software companies like Google and Red Hat who go ahead and fix errors and make improvements in the free software they use. But this only happens when there is a certain critical mass of users or an overlap between the use cases of the base code.<p>Nothing in the fridge people's proprietary software would be of any help to the TV users! There is no great "GitHub in the sky" where all the mods to the TV code for a fridge or some other thing come together to make the "great, perfect TV software!" That just isn't how software development works.
The premise that copyleft licenses force or encourage devs to "contribute back to the community" (the most common claim) is ridiculous. Contribute what? And to whose community?<p>Let's say you've written a library and published it under GPL and it gets used in a cellphone or an automobile. The "community" of users for that paid product is not the same as the users for your dev library. In fact, most commercial software innards don't have a "community" at all. I think that's a complete fiction. What they have is customers who pay.<p>When the automaker changes that code, do you really want it back? Are you really going to publish their automobile version or cellphone version of your library back into your "community?" If its a simple bug fix, you might, but again this big company isn't republishing your software just to fix your bugs. They've <i>modified</i> it for their application. Do you want or need their mods? Are their devs in the same "community" as yours? I don't think so.<p>GPL tries to reach into the surrounding and supporting code that the commercial entity writes and somehow force that company to "contribute" that code back to a non-existent community of people. What right does the first developer have over <i>any</i> code that the second dev wrote? That idea that the first author could reach into my code or my product and have anything to say about it is antithetical to the values of open source software right from the start.<p>Non-permissive licenses use the tools of the enemy to try to do something that sounds good on the surface but in practice is immoral and largely unenforceable. I would argue that, far from encouraging liberal software use and development, restrictive FOSS licenses like GPL and its cousins <i>prevent</i> a great deal of software from ever being commercialized and also prevent great products from reaching users because no one bothers to commercialize them.<p>If you love our industry, please help your fellow devs by giving them the maximum ability to use your work in their own work so that they can create businesses, pay the bills, hire other devs, and so on and so forth.