A few days ago I agreed with Marc Fluery, observing that he knows “a thing or two about sustainable open source.” Unfortunately his latest post shows that he is yet to grasp that whilst he has learnt a great deal about one route to sustainable open source he still has a great deal to learn about others.
In this post Marc states that:
“the ultimate license scheme for OSS is still RHEL/Fedora: a proprietary distribution of OSS software.”
This is far too simplistic. What licence scheme is appropriate to your project is fully dependant on your sustainability plan. If you want to go down the support route the “proprietary distribution of OSS software” is certainly one route. It is the one that grabs the headlines with acquisitions like Red Hats buying JBoss (that’s where Marc earned his stripes) or Sun buying MySQL.
However, what if you don’t intend to make money from selling a proprietary version of the software? What is your objective is to reduce your internal costs? What if your objective is to have the most robust framework on which to build bespoke solutions for your customers? What if you don’t want to make money but drive standards adoption?
The figures speak for themselves (at least for OpenLogic in the states, I’m not aware of similar figures in the UK):
Apache, not the GPL, is most common license in packages used in enterprises today. 62% of the packages use Apache, 27% use some variant of GPL and 4% each use BSD, CPL, Eclipse, MPL and Perl licenses. Since packages may be released under two or more licenses, percentages total to more than 100%.
Read that again there is more than twice as much Apache licensed software in the enterprise as ther e is GPL licensed software. That’s alot of software to support, and you know what, people get paid to support and develop it. Some even build very successful businesses that are dependant on their use and support of that software.
Do you need evidence of successful business who use, support and invest in non-GPL code (as well as GPL code in some cases)?
Lets start with a pure play startup (there are many, I’ll pick one that is topical right now). Springsource is the company that creates and supports the Spring framework, one of the most popular Java/J2EE application frameworks. Spring is Apache 2 licenced. Springsource recently purchased Covalent a company who provide support for non-GPL software and which has “more than 50% of the Fortune 500 and more than 70% of the Fortune 100 companies” as their customers.
Need more evidence? How about a different sustainability model, one based on cost savings through collaborative development. For this one lets do a little research, go to the following website and search for the terms in brackets after the URL:
http://www.oracle.co.uk (apache eclipse)
http://www.sun.co.uk (apache)
http://www.ibm.co.uk (eclipse apache)
Whilst it is true you will not get rich by providing consultancy services to these big boys, you can be very sure that the projects they use, support and develop all benefit from the resources, experience and market expertise these players bring. The fact that the Apache Software Foundation is so successful proves this,. What other process can produce such a large body of high quality software with just a single paid staff member (and even that one staff does infrastructure support, not development).
I accept that most projects aren’t of interest to the big boys. But may well be of interest to other smaller players. People you can form strategic and collaborative partnerships with as part of an open development community. Such partnerships do not prevent you from making a profit if that’s your goal, but they do open up new avenues for sustainability.
Consider all options then make a decision
Marc, there are many more ways to reach sustainability and profitability in open source. Please, next time someone asks you “I am about to launch a project in open source, we have invested a good man year in developing it and I want to know what license I should use for the project”, do what OSS Watch do. That is, understand the objectives of the project and give guidance appropriate to the situation.
If you need real advice on what licence is best for your project OSS Watch provide a free (to UK HE and FE) non-advocacy consultancy service.
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