DConf 2013 Closing Keynote: Quo Vadis by Andrei Alexandrescu

[Joakim]

On Monday, 1 July 2013 at 10:15:34 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling 
wrote:
> On Sunday, 30 June 2013 at 19:45:06 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> OK, glad to hear that you wouldn't be against it.  You'd be 
>> surprised how many who use permissive licenses still go nuts 
>> when you propose to do exactly what the license allows, ie 
>> close up parts of the source.
>
> Because people don't just care about the strict legal 
> constraints, but also about the social compact around software.
>
> Often people choose permissive licenses because they want to 
> ensure other free software authors can use their software 
> without encountering the licensing incompatibilities that can 
> result from the various forms of copyleft.  Closing up their 
> software is rightly seen as an abuse of their goodwill.
Then they should choose a mixed license like the Mozilla Public 
License or CDDL, which keeps OSS files open while allowing 
linking with closed source files within the same application.  If 
they instead chose a license that allows closing all source, one 
can only assume they're okay with it.  In any case, I could care 
less if they're okay with it or not, I was just surprised that 
they chose the BSD license and then were mad when someone was 
thinking about closing it up.

> In other cases there may be a broad community consensus that 
> builds up around a piece of software, that this work should be 
> shared and contributed to as a common good (e.g. X.org).  
> Attempts to close it up violate those social norms and are 
> rightly seen as an attack on that community and the valuable 
> commons they have cultivated.
There's no doubt that even if they chose a permissive license 
like the MIT or BSD license, these communities work primarily 
with OSS code and tend to prefer that code be open.  I can 
understand if they then tend to rebuff attempts to keep source 
from them, purely as a social phenomenon, however irrational it 
may be.  That's why I asked Walter if he had a similar opinion, 
but he didn't care.

I still think it's ridiculous to put your code under an extremely 
permissive license and then get mad when people take you up on 
it, particularly since they never publicly broadcast that they 
want everything to be open.  It is only after you talk to them 
that you realize that the BSD gang are often as much freetards as 
the GPL gang, just in their own special way. ;)

> Community anger against legal but antisocial behaviour is 
> hardly limited to software, and is a fairly important mechanism 
> for ensuring that people behave well towards one another.
I wouldn't call closing source that they legally allowed to be 
closed antisocial.  I'd call their contradictory, angry response 
to what their license permits antisocial. :)

>> Since you have been so gracious to use such permissive 
>> licenses for almost all of D, I'm sure someone will try the 
>> closed/paid experiment someday and see if which of us is 
>> right. :)
>
> Good luck with that :-)
>
> By the way, you mentioned a project of your own where you 
> employed the short-term open core model you describe.  Want to 
> tell us more about that?  Regardless of differences of opinion, 
> it's always good to hear about someone's particular experience 
> with a project.
I wrote up an article a couple years back talking about the new 
hybrid model I used, it's up on Phoronix and my project is 
mentioned there:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sprewell_licensing

Note that this article was written when Android had less than 10% 
of the almost billion users it has today, by using a similar 
hybrid model, and I was thinking up these ideas years before, 
long before I'd heard of Android.

My project was a small one, so it couldn't be a resounding proof 
of my time-limited version of the hybrid model, but it worked for 
its purpose and I'm fairly certain it will be the dominant model 
someday. :)