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Post-Open Licensing Could Offer Software Devs Funding Alternatives

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 08, 2024,

updated May 08, 2024

Developer sitting

“I’ve actually always been accepting of non-open-source approaches as long as they complied with one rule: Don’t call them Open Source!” he told TechNewsWorld.

[...]

Schlemmer and Perens share common ground on companies ignoring or abusing open-source licensing. Perens is not giving up on open source and sees it continuing.

“What I’d like to do is meet some goals that open source hasn’t quite achieved. I seem to have agreement on that in general, as there has been surprisingly little push-back on this idea,” Perens insisted.

Similarly, Schlemmer thinks the biggest problem is co-opting the open-source title and associated language within the industry.

“Other not-so-open-source licenses are muddying the waters and causing increased confusion and uncertainty around what open source truly means,” said Schlemmer.

Perens, however, is adamant about not changing open-source licenses. He is mainly speaking for independent open-source developers whose goal is to help other people rather than run a corporate welfare program for the world’s richest companies he offered.

“Post-Open would have a different license and only one of them. Open source presently has around 100 licenses,” he noted.

[...]

If Post-Open gets up and running, it will take at least a year before companies report on its use and revenue starts flowing. Perens plans to provide support en masse for the whole Post-Open collection.

“The support folks would work with the customer, and the open-source developers would maintain their projects without having to deal with the end-user, which I think a lot of them would be happy with,” Perens predicted.

Open-source developers also have the option of dual-licensing with Post-Open. If they do, the Post-Open customers start paying them as part of the Post-Open instead of using the open-source license, noted Perens.

“That’s part of the Post-Open agreement they have. So, the developers start making money,” he concluded.

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