New Essay - "FOSS Licences Wars"

[Shlomi Fish]

On Tuesday 01 September 2009 22:43:12 Steve Litt wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 September 2009 14:09:24 Shlomi Fish wrote:
> > So why am I still sticking with the MIT/X11? The main reason I think is
> > that as an open-source programmer, I'm not interested in worrying about
> > how people abuse my code. I don't like Apple, and am not fond of many
> > Microsoft products. But I'm not interested to prevent Apple or Microsoft
> > or any other developer of commercial and/or proprietary software for
> > Windows or Mac OS X or the iPhone or whatever from using my code in their
> > projects.
> 
> Even if they do monopolistic things with your code? See this:
> 
> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137291/Mac_clone_maker_sues_Apple_o
> ver_Snow_Leopard
> 

Sorry for breaking the URLs. It's a KMail boo-boo.

I've thought about it and I'd like to say what I feel about it. The first part 
of the answer is that I'm don't want my software to police Ethics. If I make 
my licence GPL or similar, then no one will be able to use it in "proprietary" 
contexts, including many small software developers, or many big and small 
benevolent organisations (both software and non-software related) that are too 
scared of complex copyleft licences, for many reasons. So I don't only 
discriminate against abusive companies such as Apple, but I also discriminate 
against many other perfectly innocent corpora - some of which won't ask me for 
permission before moving elsewhere or writing something themselves.

The second reason is that in accordance with:

http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/philosophy/guide-to-neo-tech/

I think that while monopolies are often inevitable, then given good market 
conditions, they cannot remain abusive for long, or else they won't be able to 
sustain their market-share. And the current economical situation in many 
countries encourages many monopolies or oligopolies by giving huge contracts 
(of the military, the education system etc.) to only one very large 
contractor. (We may be getting off-topic). Therefore, I think that we should 
let the market should speak for itself, and we should not worry too much about 
monopolies.

The third reason is that I think even the worst monopolies in history that I 
can think of were not as abusive as many governments:

http://vip.latnet.lv/LPRA/100MilVictims.htm

Corporations, while possibly being immoral and destructive are unlikely going 
to do something that stands against absolute ethics such as killing, 
stealing/theft or fraud, which governments have been routinely doing, even 
against their own citizens.  

Finally, let's say I'm writing a text editor called "My Enhanced Text Editor" 
or "METE" for short, and release it under a BSD-style licence. Someone 
(perhaps a single developer, perhaps a multi-million-dollar-corporation), 
takes it, enhances it and creates METE-Enterprise Edition, which becomes 
insanely popular and gains a near monopoly on the text editors' market. As the 
developer of METE, I can now work on integrating the good features of METE-EE 
into METE, so we will eventually regain some of the market share. And maybe 
some features are only of interest to METE-EE-Corp.'s customers and are of no 
interest to the open-source version, which can regain a substantial share of 
the market while still allowing METE-EE-Corp. to make nice sales. And 
naturally, as METE developers we're not standing still.

As the developer of Freecell Solver, I got some very good ideas from my 
competitors. For example, I implemented a randomised scan with a user-
configurable seed after seeing Freecell Tool, and I worked on a meta-scan for 
minimising the average solution length after some input from the creator of 
http://www.numin8r.us/programs/ ). Neither of them are free. 

Naturally, all of this is assuming there are legal problems such as software 
patents, but these may affect the original METE too, and are an even greater 
danger to commercial software than to gratis one. (Even Microsoft has been 
bitten by software patent litigations several times.)

I should note that also there's a place in the market for both FOSS and non-
FOSS alternatives. For example, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Bug_and_issue_tracking_software

There are several high-quality FOSS alternatives, but many commercial and/or 
non-free offerings are also doing fine. And there isn't a clear winner.

And in the software world there have been several historical transitions from 
one dominant alternative to a different one or to several alternatives.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

-- 
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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Best Introductory Programming Language - http://shlom.in/intro-lang

God gave us two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we
read.