title: The Future of Open Source categories: - opensource tags: - licensing - BSL - Hashicorp - MPL - OSI#

BM: I am experimenting with combining blog posts with deep links into my Digital Garden notes. The tags in the right column link to terms in my notes, and I've also prepared an overview note here that pulls together a lot of my thoughts on <a href="{{ "/notes/open-source-licensing/" | relative_link }}" class="internal-link">Open Source Licensing.

The recent move by Hashicorp to change their code license to Business Source License (BSL) has kicked off another round of both condemnation and support.

The bad guys are "vendors who don't give back", so this is an Ostrom "fence" But maybe we do need better "collaborative" licenses that share both the maintenance and upside of OSS

The Cross Collaborative License (XLC) is a "shared copyright" where everyone who contributes can independently make revenue and is expected to share back profits GPL is a single owner copyright. Where only one individual or organization can choose to change the copyright or do anything else with it.

Condemnation because it's "not open source". It's not an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license. BSL can add prohibited usage, which is in this case is Hashicorp saying that businesses can't use their software for free if they directly compete with them. 4 years from release, the code becomes available without restriction under the Mozilla Public License (MPL).

Support because despite what the OSI has to say, many different businesses and people are looking for something more than the classic open source licenses. Ethical licenses, non-commercial licenses, and various other fair licenses are all not OSI-approved, because they add different kinds of restrictions.

I very much see these sorts of actions as evolution. As experiments that are happening as part of the future of open source.¹

The Subconscious Noosphere Discord hosted a chunk of discussion around this. It started with some general discussions around governments recognizing or supporting open source, and I brought up Hashicorp and we went down a licensing rabbit hole.

My big question is: how do we normalize end users supporting software directly? How do we normalize building software together? A lot of people are telling me this will never work Which is exactly what I was told WRT open source software in 2003 Which means it will only take 20 years to normalize and reach the next crisis!

what this reminds me of is the confusion and FUD in the 00s over implications of FOSS licenses for users and their code.

Hence my request for some respected entity to make a tight BSL style FOSS license. Clear up the confusion and all these one off licenses.

Again, not OSI approved FOSS, but FOSS none the less

— @TheSteve0@data-folks.masto.host

The biggest challenge right now is to do movement building around a term other than OSI-approved Open Source™️. But maybe that's not even the right approach.

FOSSY 2023 had a track dedicated to Software Worker Co-ops. This is great to see! Worker co-ops like this are typically focused on consulting labour, not licensing revenue, but I think co-ops can be made to see that the labour of maintenance, support, docs, community might very well be fenced not just with hours sold to one entity, but as direct required payment into a common pool.