[ruby-talk:9203] Re: Licensing issues

Dave Thomas <[e-mail]> wrote:
>Robert Feldt <[e-mail]> writes:
>
> > BTW, my impression from the relatively low "traffic" in this thread is
> > that it is kind of tabu to think in terms other than GPL/Ruby/Artistic
> > licenses. Or is it simply that people dont care? Please share your
> > thoughts! I'll summarize all points and put them on a web page for 
>future
> > reference.
>
>OK, you've shamed me out of hiding.
>
>1. Exactly who collects the 80% that goes back to the Ruby
>    community? Who decides how it is spent? This strikes me as being a
>    large problem where there is no organization that "is"
>    Ruby. Someone (Ben?) suggested a Ruby Institute or somesuch, but
>    that seems to me to suffer from the same problems.

I didn't suggest it.  And attempts to do similar things in
other languages have hit this issue.  yetanother.org has
come up with a solution, set up a grant system.  (Damian
Conway has received the first grant.)  This will, of course,
fund only a small portion of the effort.

I came up with a more complex possible solution a while ago
but never pursued for a number of reasons.  That solution
was a pyramid in reverse.  You would need an organization
to administer this.  But with this organization anyone who
wants makes donations to any open source person they want.
Each recipient is only allowed to receive (per year) $100 +
a third of what they were given, and must redirect the
remaining to other developers who are getting less.  Who
then have to redirect etc until it falls into those pieces.

The benefits of this system is that it makes giving quite
easy.  Give to Matz and assume he knows who is doing stuff
worth rewarding.  Also there is a possibility that this
could qualify as charity with both a tax benefit for the
giver and with the gift possibly tax-free as well.  (I
was told there was an outside possibility of that, I don't
know details.)  It could therefore be realistically cheaper
for a company to fund development through donating than by
hiring people.

The drawbacks include administration and questions about
how money would distort the process.  Administration is
not so easy.  For instance what stops a developer from
registering as devlopers his wife, first-born, cat,
dog...keeping track of this becomes a headache.  Also as
soon as you have the leaders of projects handing out money,
you then change the dynamics in interesting ways.

>2. $30 is way too low. For most companies, this is well below the
>    radar: in fact it probably costs them more than this to get th
>    check written.

Absolutely.  In fact just brief conversations explaining
the need for the fee adds up very quickly when all involved
are making decent salaries.

>3. You'll need to have an invoicing system in place to deal with
>    purchase orders.  Unless you have a fairly sophisticated payment
>    receiving system in place, it'll probably cost you a significant
>    portion of the $30 in fees to get the money banked.
>
>So, my recommendation would be to decide whether or not you have a
>commercially viable product. If so, charge for it accordingly. Then
>offer a version of the product for free for non-commercial or for
>individual use.

If you want a dual license GPL/something else, then your
market is inherently limited.  You need to make money
from services and/or from people who want to embed your
project in commercial software.  End users will just use
it under the GPL.

Conversely if you are not compatible with the GPL, you
have just substantially limited your potential users.

(To a large extent these barriers are the result of
intended policies for the FSF.)

>If you want to make a contribution back to the community from your
>profit, then you'll be a hero!
>
>
>I'm not trying to put you off posting your work. On the contrary, the
>more stuff out there the better. I'm just suggesting that there may be
>more to is than asking for a small amount of money for each license.

I have a possibly inflamatory thought for consideration.

The Lisp world has usually had better technology, first, with
a better design.  They have also usually had the attitude
that this fact was going to make them all wealthy.  Yet
somehow they never seem to succeed in changing the world...

Cheers,
Ben
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