[License-discuss] Thoughts on AAL and OSS vs FOSS

[Hillel Coren]

Hi again,

To follow up on my email yesterday... to start there many AAL projects on
GitHub.

https://github.com/search?q=attribution+assurance+license&type=Code

I think the larger point here is keeping a distinction been OSS and FOSS.
Our app is OSS but it isn't free. App development is expensive, it's
critical that independent developers are able to earn revenue to support
development of their software.

The idea 'make money in services' is often suggested, I'd argue it works
better at scale (ie, Redhat). For smaller developers an attribution based
license is the best way to ensure that you can create and share software
without a competitor simply using it to compete against you.

It's easy to assume that by deprecating attribution based licenses
developers will either choose a different OSI approved license or change
their software from being labeled 'OSS' to 'Source-available software'. I'd
argue in practice many developers (ourselves included) would instead choose
to share less code.

If attribution based license are no longer considered OSS we'd need to
change our model to offer our core app as OSS and sell closed-source
modules to generate income. This is worse for everyone involved.

With our current approach users have all the code, if they don't want to
pay to remove our branding they can simply comment out the code. With
separate modules that would no longer be possible.

I would guess one of the goals of your organisation is to give more people
access to more code, removing these license could have the opposite effect
by making less code open-source.

I have to add, I find it pretty ironic that your own site uses an
attribution based license, the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License :)

Thanks for reading and considering!
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