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I’ve seen a lot of people talking about free/open-source software given the recent Mozilla news, and I think all that discussion is super valuable, but to me, the heart of the “problem of open source” has always been the difficulty of non-commercial licensing.
I’ve never really bought into the idea of “free software” in the FSF/copyleft sense. I think it can make a lot of sense for application software, where you want the end product to be a collaborative effort, but for tools and libraries it seems misguided and self-defeating.
As a tool/library author, I absolutely want my work to be used as much as possible, and I’m fine with it being used to create proprietary software. The problem is that doing that work takes time and effort, so when someone makes money with it, I am effectively doing unpaid labor.
This is the deep unfairness and privilege of open source. Open source authors are exploited, their labor mined for profit of which they never see a cent. This makes open source accessible only to those privileged enough to be able to afford working without pay.
“Free software” does not in any way solve this problem. It chooses to reject the capitalist system outright, but it supplies no *economic* alternative. People still need to pay rent and put food on the table, so free software is no less exclusive than open source software is.
It’s only to be expected that open source has been completely coopted by corporate forces because no alternate funding system has emerged. You either work for free, or you participate in this modern pseudo-feudalism, pledging your allegiance to some corporate interest.
Any solution to this problem needs to tackle the economic problem of individual contribution to open source software. The ideal seems like non-commercial licensing with the option to pay for a commercial license, but this is notoriously difficult to actually implement.
First, what is “commercial use”? If I make a blog using your library or tool, and I put ads on my blog, do I have to pay for a license, even if the ads don’t even fully cover the hosting costs? Second, for projects with hundreds of minor contributors, how is funding apportioned?
Intuitively, you just want people working on open source projects to have “a slice of the pie,” but it very rapidly becomes unclear what that means when you consider real-world scenarios. The end result is a form of value our economic system struggles to adequately model.
I don’t think throwing the whole system out is practical, so I would love to see some work towards a solution that is at least an improvement on the status quo. I think it’s possible to make small steps in that direction—but it’s challenging, expensive work to get there.
