When free software comes with a few plugs

As open source software becomes more and more popular and important, developers are faced with an existential question: how to make money with something you give for free?

The Open Source Initiative standards bodies said that an open source license should allow users to view the underlying source code, modify it, and share it as they see fit. Independent developers and large companies now regularly release software under these licenses. Many coders think that open collaboration gives better software. Some companies open their code for marketing purposes. Open source software is at the root of many technologies, from operating systems for smartphones to government websites.

"The whole world works with open source software and we do not know how to do it without destroying people", essentially asking them to work for free, says John Anderson, vice president of technology at Infinity Interactive.

Companies that publish open source software generate revenue in different ways. Some are selling support, including Red Hat, which IBM has acquired for $ 34 billion earlier this month. Others, like the HashiCorp cloud automation company, sell proprietary software based on open source components. But with the rise of cloud computing, developers are seeing their open source code embedded in services and sold by other companies. Amazon, for example, sells a cloud-hosted service based on the open source Redis database, in competition with a similar cloud-hosted service offered by Redis Labs, the sponsor of the open source project.

To protect against such scenarios, companies involved in popular open source projects restrict the way others can use their software. Redis Labs started the trend last year by relocating several add-ons for its main product to conditions that essentially prohibit offering these add-ons as part of a cloud-based service. commercial. Thus, Amazon and other cloud providers can not use these add-ons in their competitor Redis services. Companies wishing to use the features provided by these add-ons must either develop these features themselves or obtain permission from Redis Labs.

"We felt that if we continued to use all this innovation under open-source liberal licenses, cloud providers could start hosting it as a service, without bringing anything back to the community, and make a difference. High economic value of the ecosystem, "Howard Ting, Marketing Director of Redis Labs, states," In this case, we would not be able to finance this investment and give back to the community. "

The Confluent badysis company and database maker CockroachDB have added conditions similar to their licenses, preventing cloud computing companies from using all or part of their code to create services. competitors. By adopting a slightly different approach, MongoDB redefined the license of its flagship database product last year under the new "Server-Side Public License" (SSPL) that requires companies that sell the database system as that cloud service to publish the source code of any additional software that they include. Customers can also purchase a commercial license from MongoDB.

Offering the same software under two different licenses, called "dual licenses," is controversial in the open source community. The Open Source initiative does not consider that the SSPL, nor any of these recently adopted licenses, are open source licenses.

Ting, from Redis Labs, says the new approaches work. For example, earlier this year, Google announced revenue sharing partnerships with several open source companies, including Redis Labs, Confluent, and MongoDB. But the new licenses did not stop Amazon from selling its own services based on open source projects marketed by the three companies. For example, in January, Amazon launched DocumentDB, a database service compatible with an earlier version of MongoDB, which included more permissive license terms.

Amazon says that it's a friend, not an enemy, open source software. At a conference on the occasion of the Oscon Open Source Conference in Portland, Oregon, earlier this month, the technician at Amazon Web Services, presented the contributions from enterprise to open source, such as the Amazon Firecracker virtual machine management system released last November. Gupta also pointed out that Amazon had provided code for external projects, including encryption software for Redis released last year.

At the same conference, Adrian Cockcroft, vice president of strategy for cloud architecture of Amazon, explained that the company's cloud services favored open source projects, through 39 revenue-sharing agreements, including that with Chief, the open source cloud management company, or by simply giving credibility to the products. offering them a service.

Ting says Amazon has only entered into revenue sharing agreements with a small number of companies and minimizes Amazon's contributions to Redis. He said Amazon's only contribution was the encryption code, which he said should be included in a future release of the Redis database software.

Some open source advocates decry the trend towards more restrictive licenses. They see the bickering over open source reuse as a conflict between small and big businesses, without much concern about open source principles or individual developers. Companies that use restrictive licenses want to redefine open source by simply saying that code is available, not necessarily that other users can use it as they wish, says Bradley M. Kuhn , president of the non-profit Software Freedom Conservancy. "There is a concerted effort to eliminate the definitions of the Open Source Initiative," he says.

Such efforts are not new, notes Danese Cooper, who has launched open source initiatives at Sun Microsystems, PayPal and the NearForm Irish technology consulting firm. Sun Microsystems released the Java programming platform under a license limiting the possibilities of platform modification by others, which resulted in a prolonged legal conflict between Oracle, which acquired Sun, in 2010, and Google, which has created its own Java platform for Android system. Finally, these types of non-all-open-source licenses fell into disuse because they limited the utility of the software released with them and that could contribute to a project. "The new generation makes the same mistakes as the old," Cooper said.

"Moral indignation [of the smaller companies] It's bullshit, "said Adam Jacob, co-founder and former chief CTO, during a speech at Oscon, companies like MongoDB may be small compared to Amazon, but they're still MongoDB has recorded a turnover of $ 267 million ending January 31 and has a market capitalization of about $ 8 billion.

Jacob says that open source companies can generate revenue without adopting more restrictive licenses. Long before Amazon entered into a Revenue Sharing Agreement with Chief, Amazon was offering a service based on Chef's open source software. But, he says, Amazon's service has not met the expectations of many Chef users. Thus, to meet the demands of its own customers, Amazon has worked with Chef to create a better service, a truly profitable service for Chef.

Others think that the debate obscures the needs of small projects that can not pay developers to develop or maintain software. A lack of funding for open source projects can have real consequences. In 2014, security researchers revealed serious security vulnerabilities in OpenSSL and Bash, which are part of several major operating systems, potentially leaving many users exposed. Both OpenSSL and Bash were run by volunteers who could not afford to engage security auditors.

Efforts are being made to fund smaller projects, including non-profit organizations such as Software Freedom Conservancy, which raises funds to pay developers, and startups such as Tidelift, which aim to sell support to developers. sets of open source projects that may not be able to market their work. theirs.

Jacob says that there is often tension between the business models of open source companies and the communities that are growing around these projects. Developers may want open source software to be as efficient as possible. But a company that hopes to make money selling proprietary extensions of this software may want to make it just good enough to attract customers to its proprietary offers. If the open source version is too good, customers will not have to pay for the add-ons.

He says there is nothing wrong with a company wanting to make money from its open source software and trying to prevent others from doing so. But he thinks that these expectations should be established from the beginning, so that developers know what to expect. To that end, Jacob created a Web resource called Sustainable Open Source Community, which lists different business models for open source projects, as well as principles for guiding sustainable open source communities. In a true open source spirit, the content of the site is open source and the others contribute to it. Jacob hopes that he will end up hosting various "social contracts" that open source projects will be able to adopt, as today they can adopt different standard licenses and even codes of conduct.

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