[License-review] For Approval: License Zero Reciprocal Public License

[Tzeng, Nigel H.]

On 10/23/17, 8:55 PM, "License-review on behalf of Kyle Mitchell" <license-review-bounces at opensource.org on behalf of kyle at kemitchell.com> wrote:

    >If OSI succeeds in holding up to all its most rigorous,
    >self-imposed standards, but fewer and fewer developers care,
    >either because they dismiss OSI's claim to define to "open
    >source", or because they hitch their identities to some new
    >turn of phrase, I think the community as a will have
    >suffered a very great loss.

To a certain extent it’s happening given that CC0 hasn’t been approved by the OSI and is still considered open source.

Still waiting to hear on NOSA…
    
    > This rings very near to the sentiment that set off License
    > Zero.  The immediate moral response to industry abuse of
    > community was a license addressing the _source_ of the pain,
    > a noncommercial license.
    
    > It was only talking to friends and fellow devs still holding
    > on in the copyleft camp that lead me to write L0-R.  The
    > core realization there was that commerce was just the most
    > visible symptom of the underlying disorder.  The fundamental
    > difference is in values, in a lack of reciprocity that makes
    > a one-way valve between producer-community to
    > consumer-users, to the benefit of the latter.

Permissive licenses are “one-way valves” in the same way that gift giving is “a one-way valve”.  

We don’t make things permissive because we intend to receive anything in return.  We make things permissive because we want folks to use the code we wrote.

And the evil industry you rail against ended up paying for a lot of that code to be written.

    > So I asked devs what kind of deal they'd want with users, if
    > they could write their own.  It boiled down to "share what
    > you do with my code as open source, or support me if you're
    > stuck in a place that can't or won't do that" plus "I want
    > to keep working on GitHub, distributing on npm, and using
    > the other current-generation code services".
    
    > That's a harder copyleft bargain than AGPL, mashed up with
    > permissive distribution permissions.  L0-R was born.

Reciprocity is nice but doesn’t pay the rent.  Which is likely why your developer friends wish to get paid in cash for commercial use of their code.

Which is fine but this seems like a very complicated way to accomplish what a CC-BY-SA-NC style of license would do…but isn’t considered open source.