Another day, another company announces it changed its license away from open source while claiming “We Believe In A Model Of Sustainable Open Source.”
I’m not sure about you, but this rings to me as similar to an alleged quote about the Vietnam War: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
What Lightbend’s CEO and Founder, Jonas Boner, really means is that they have decided that they do not believe an open source license (Apache 2.0) suits their business goals best any longer, and a proprietary, source available license (BSL) will be a better fit.
As an entrepreneur and business founder myself, I understand business is hard. Often, your choices are limited, especially if you’ve taken other people’s money and hence have high growth and return expectations. You might be forced to choose from a variety of imperfect options, and the real question is how honest and transparent you are with the community of your open source project.
Do you respect your community?
Community is an interesting beast because unlike your customers, which have a legal agreement with you, a community is usually relationship-based. You do not owe them anything and they do not owe you anything either. Participating in a community though, especially when done for years, comes with certain expectations. I help you by promoting the project, speaking at conferences, reporting bugs, contributing code, and improving documentation — and in return, you get to freely use it, improve it, and share your changes as governed by the open source license of the project.
Licenses don’t have to be open source – there are a number of companies (Apple, Microsoft, AWS, and others) that built successful communities around their software even though their software is mostly proprietary. In those cases, though, those who get involved do not have expectations of an open source license to begin with, which makes it very different from a license change.
Whatever you call it, unilateral license change will be seen as breaking an unwritten contract with your community, a sign of betrayal. Was it really required for company survival or was it required so investors in the company get 100x return rather than 10x? Really, you never know.
Bait and switch business models
The other thing which worries me is the rise of bait and switch business models which are coming to businesses around open source after being tested in other areas. If you use Uber, for example, you may have noticed how inexpensive rides were in certain locations – sponsored by Uber, using massive amounts of capital. Until, of course, Uber is the only game in town, and they raise the prices to capture the profits and recoup their investment in sponsored rides. I argue the same is happening with open source software, in many cases. Software is started under an open source license, often without an “Enterprise” version, so everyone is excited about the wonderful future and helps the software to be successful and widely adopted. Once critical mass is reached, though, the license is changed (often under whatever pretense is required) to maximize monetization.
Why is this pattern dangerous for open source? Because it erodes trust. Rather than thinking open source projects are started in good faith to continue being open source, the expectation changes for it being open source only during the early stages of development and, if successful, transitioning to be fully or partially proprietary software.
Business and open source
Let’s face it – doing business while using an open source license is hard. And it has become harder for many older open source-based businesses. The rise of the cloud means they are being disrupted in ways they have not anticipated. Many non-commercial, community-driven open source projects, though, have flourished in the cloud as they became easier to adopt.
Note, however, that the open source movement is not about making it easy for you to do business, it is about freedom for users of your software. The vast majority of software businesses in the world are not using only open source licenses for their software, they never have and most likely never will be. These challenges, though, are not limited to open source; if you want to focus on delivering “public good” – caring for the environment, animal welfare, and your community – rather than purely profit motives, it makes it harder to do business as you have to say no to some of the tools to make such a profit.
While of course there is no shame in running a business around proprietary (including source available) licensed software, you provide more value to the world by embracing open source as much as possible.
Keep open source… open source
What I am struggling with is not choosing a non-open source for the project, but rather attempting to redefine what open source software means because you want to have your cake and eat it, too. Everyone loves open source because of the freedom it provides, but those same freedoms can make it hard to do business around open source. They prevent the possibility of creating a monopoly by anyone (including the main software author). If you need to abandon open source do it – but call it what it is!
Is it all doom and gloom?
Let’s face it. Open source software is having a massive inflow of capital over the last decade, and projects that aspire to provide great returns to investors are getting funded. “Romantic” open source companies which put open source values above profits often remain unfunded, creating quite a significant, but a lot less known, “indie open source” ecosystem. In these conditions, games with business models surrounding open source and attempts to redefine open source will likely continue to increase. It will remain our personal responsibility to be educated on the values of open source software and spread the word, so the next generation of engineers continue to understand and appreciate what open source is about!