licensing
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#BuildSoftwareTogether is a tag I’ve been using to mean that people should collaborate with developers and each other to build software … together.
And support and maintain it over time, too.
That may seem obvious but in many cases the construction of software is all by the maker, with limited input or support by people who use it.
And that in fact, the users of the software should take more responsibility as well, especially in the context of when they aren’t actually buying the software as a product.
My best suggestion on licensing is that non-commercial forms have the best trade offs: usage by those who make money with it fund the maintainers, anyone else can use it at no charge.
This article goes further to say that the corporate form of software itself is the issue:
Quirky, personal software that is aggressively unscalable & focuses on delivering human needs in human time over machine needs in machine time is nicer to write, nicer to use, and difficult for capital to subvert.
A response to:
Open-Source Needs a Reckoning, Greg Kennedy
See, the core problem with all “free” software licenses is this: they are aimed at only protecting the Product, and not the People who make or use it. The goal is to produce the best software, not the best community.
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Single CLA - a contributor licensing agreement (CLA) that an individual dev only has to sign once & keep in their own git repo.
Great work by Kyle Mitchell, more in the forum forum.artlessdevices.com/t/project…
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A lot of thanks are owed to Kyle Mitchell for his amazing work in pioneering, evolving, and plain English improving various open licenses.
He has just published a round up of the licenses he has worked on.
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Licenses Alone Do Not Govern Behavior in Open Source by @MWeinberg2D covers a recent case where the maintainer didn’t want to have to handle increased support — but then also didn’t want to be forked.
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Here’s a really great people-centric view thinking about open source maintainers by Evan You, founder of VueJS.
The context is a thought experiment: what if only sponsors could file issues?
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Kyle writes about the evolution of @LicenseZero as an Indie Code Catalog. The tag line is “gainful open software development” — for developers looking to thrive.