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Discussion on: Let's talk about open source

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benhylau profile image
Benedict Lau

COMPOST magazine and its publishing tool Distributed Press are both released with copy-left licenses CC BY-SA 4.0 (for content) and AGPLv3 (for code) respectively. Here is what one of the repositories look like with its license file in the code base.

While I generally use copy-left licenses that don't differentiate between commercial and non-commercial use for my open source projects, I think there are good reasons for licenses that do make that differentiation such as Prosperity, as well as ones that don't have copy-left requirements such as Apache 2.0 and MIT.

In these decisions, I tend to ask myself what my goal is for the project, and make a distinction about the many good reasons for "opening" the source. Do I want the code to be open for public audit, in order to keep security components honest? Or is it to allow everyone to use it for free, or to allow people to build upon to keep myself from building a monopoly? How mad will I be if Amazon decides to operate a lucrative business based on my free labour? Or do I want to define a protocol/schema that hopes to gain adoption from as wide an audience as possible? Answering these questions will point me to some direction on which license to use. I hope this is helpful.

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jsenyak profile image
Josh Senyak

Hi Benedict - these are great questions and I'm especially intrigued about the profit/not-profit divide - under what circumstances does one just plunge in and say "ANYBODY can use this (even Amazon!)"?

Checking out your project, I see that Compost is also a magazine about digital commons... and so I expect there will be great resources in the mag itself. When do you think Issue 01 will hit the ether?

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benhylau profile image
Benedict Lau

plunge in and say "ANYBODY can use this (even Amazon!)"

I think most open source software actually say exactly that. GPL, Apache, MIT, all the mainstream stuff really.

This article may be an interesting read navigating all this, and filling in some historic context around the never ending quest to "monetize open source". I think some of the new licenses used by Redis, MongoDB, and especially Mapbox (open source and non-permissive), are quite interesting. Of course, whether such licenses can be considered "free" software is questionable, but to be free you have to first exist.

RE: COMPOST, we are working with authors now to hoping get the first issue out in February :D