Ouch!!!!
I'm afraid I don't see any counter to the points ER raises.
If semi-open source is not option, then I am back to question #1:
Under what circumstances is an open source VC-fundable??
Again, support contracts are nice, but do they provide the kind
of exciting revenuses and growth opportunities that VC's like to
see? (If already covered in his book, a page reference will do
-- finishing it is still on my todo list...)
Jon Winters wrote:
>
> I've attached Eric S. Raymond's reply to my post last night.
> Eric was mentioned in the open source lecture during the colloquium.
> You can learn more about him and read some of his writings at his home
> page: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/
>
> Enjoy!
> --
> Jon Winters http://www.obscurasite.com/
>
> "Everybody loves the GIMP!"
> http://www.gimp.org/
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 02:09:08 -0400
> From: Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>
> To: Jon Winters <winters@obscurasite.com>
> Cc: unrev-II@egroups.com, rms@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: [unrev-II] License Model: Preliminary Suggestion
>
> Jon Winters <winters@obscurasite.com>:
> > Successful open source projects do this nicely.
> >
> > > There's only so much you can make from support contracts.
> > > If we're going to enable GM to make or save an extra 10 billion
> one
> > > year, as a side effect of getting the software we need to save our
> > > collective skins, it's hard to see how it would be wrong to get a
> > > slice of that, so we can do a better and faster job of (hopefully)
> > > saving our skins. On the other hand, for some reason the open
> source
> > > standard seems to have completely ruled out that option, even
> though
> > > it appears to me, on the surface at least, to be completely
> reasonable.
> > > Do you have any insight into how that decision was reached? Do you
> > > know of any good sources that give a rationale for it?
> >
> > ESR and RMS, help me out here... you're more qualified than I am to
> > answer this.
>
> I think the question you're asking is why community practice (and the
> OSD) excludes "semi-open" licenses that have restrictions or fees
> attached to commercial use, but not to noncommercial use or
> development.
>
> There are at least three reasons:
>
> 1. "Commercial use" is not a category for which there is a legally
> accepted
> bright-line test. Thus, "semi-open" licenses with conditions on
> commercial use
> entail legal exposure risks that many potential users and codevelopers
> have
> great difficulty evaluating. These risks and the concomitant
> uncertainty
> exert fatal chilling effects on many kinds of behavior the open-source
> community would like to encourage. As a concrete example, consider a
> CD-ROM packager making decisions about what to include on a CD-ROM
> anthology.
> If he includes software with a "commercial-use" restriction and makes
> a
> profit on the sales, is he violating the restriction?
>
> 2. Semi-open licenses create privileges by which some parties to the
> development may profit from the software in ways forbidden to other
> parties. This sort of power asymmetry is flatly unacceptable to most
> open-source developers -- it feels like exploitation to them. This
> is a gut issue that generates a lot of anger in the community.
>
> 3. Non-fee restructions in semi-open licenses (for example, clauses
> assigning a privileged design role to a named organization, or
> forbidding forking) are felt to interfere unacceptably with the
> croitical peer-review process.
>
> The OSD reflects a strong community consensus, based on experience,
> that the putative benefits of semi-open licenses are simply not worth
> these costs.
>
> > > > If Sun had delivered Java with an open source VM code base on
> day one,
> > > > there would never have been this hord of over 100 slightly
> > > > incompatible reimplimented JVMs all over the place -- making
> reliable
> > > > Java code delivery to an arbitrary end user the nightmare it is
> today.
> > > > That is why Java is considered by many to be dead on the browser
> for
> > > > end users, and is now being used mainly in servlets. I use this
> as a
> > > > cautionary tale -- pick the wrong license and much effort and
> good
> > > > intentions may go for nothing and the wheel gets reinvented
> (badly)
> > > > anyway.
> > > >
> > > One wonders what the result would have been had the results been
> freely
> > > available to the "evil empire", without the financial resources to
> carry
> > > on a legal battle -- or to fund the small army of developers who
> have
> > > developed the GUI libraries, multimedia libraries, and other stuff
> for
> > > the platform. It would have been nice if it had been truly open
> source
> > > -- or would it. Would the result have been as useful for servlets,
> or
> > > any more standard for browsers?
>
> We actually know the answer to these questions from parallel cases
> such as Perl and Python where the code is open. In these cases, the
> languages (a) have not fragmented, (b) have in fact developed huge
> support
> communities and well-developed libraries, and (c) have spawned
> substantial
> money-making businesses who do, in fact, fund continuing development.
>
> Sun's Java strategy has therefore been a quite unambiguous failure.
> --
> <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a>
>
> Let us hope our weapons are never needed --but do not forget what
> the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An
> armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the
> final defense against tyranny.
> If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only
> the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of
> our rulers. Only the government -- and a few outlaws. I intend to
> be among the outlaws.
> -- Edward Abbey, "Abbey's Road", 1979
>
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