It’s surprising to me that there hasn’t been a successful license like this yet. I imagine there are other people considering one too. It looks like he’s made more progress than I did though.
My first imprsesion is that 1% of revenue seems low. In comparison
- Epic - 5%
- Apple - 30%
- Google - 30%
- Amazon - 15-45%
- Twitch - 30%
I noticed
Post-Open requires a central entity that receives and apportions payment, does enforcement, and operates the service entity (or three central entities, one for each purpose). Open Source developers are very independent, and have not had to deal with a central entity until now, even one that they own.
I think there needs to be very careful consideration when creating organizations to manage a royalty that would apply to the entire industry.
As an example, I imagine there are organizations that dislike Doctors without Borders because they serve communities within Russia or Iran. If there’s political takeover on an industry license, it could exclude ever being paid for open source work when it touches sensitive topics.
There’s also the risk of financial takeover. The moment the organization starts collecting billions of dollars from copyrighted works, there’s extreme incentive for takeover from tech companies. It sounds insane to me to consider something like “developers should sign all their software over to Oracle and trust Oracle to distribute it back.” Though, I’m not ready to rule out that an organization can’t be successful.
It also creates the complicated question for who should be entitled to funding, and I think it could be tempting to make the case that certain charitable software projects should receive funding. This is in significant contrast to a company like Apple, which collects 30% and can spend it on anything Apple desires. I currently think developers should primarily be entitled to receive the royalty, and if they desire to allocate it to non-profits, that’s their decision.
I still really have to think about it.
I like that he’s well known. It seems like he is politically controversial. I tried some searches, and it seems like there are mixed opinions about him. I don’t personally know the entire history. I think it would be good for a well known and trusted person to champion this type of license.
It also looks like he’s open making changes to it. In the article it says he is searching for volunteers and legal funding.
It looks like he has written lots of information, I haven’t any of it yet. In the article it stated before starting this license
This doesn’t sound bad.
I really want to avoid commenting on it before reading it. I don’t know the history very well. I also am not someone with large stakes in open source licensed software already. There are lots of people with millions of dollars that was licensed. Just monumental works.
I think democratic organization would likely be best for determining revenue shares. I just look at 501c(3) non-profits like OpenAI that signed with Microsoft and I’m wondering why I should care that it’s a 501c?
My first impression is that 1% sounds insulting, I think high levels of organization are possible between people who license large amounts of open source software. (people who license above $100,000+ in value/yearly)
edit:
I think what happened is just the result of many decisions that worked out differently that expected. In 2000, Microsoft didn’t have a shared revenue model for their OS. By 2010, Apple did. By 2020, as mentioned in this article, Spotify had already taken it’s model and started taking as much as possible from artists.
I’m significantly younger than someone like Stallman. I don’t know how or if his actions might have been different if Microsoft existed at the time with a shared revenue model. I just showed up in the aftermath without the to desire to license because I felt like a company was likely to abuse the license.