Open Source Beyond Licensing - The Evolution Ahead
Open source is no longer a radical act. From legal innovation to ways of working remotely and collaboratively, the past 20 years have integrated it as a common baseline.
Can we get maintainers paid, make open source a job, and work alongside new tools like AI?
What new licenses, ways of working, and principles power the next 20 years?
This ended up being perhaps a bit licensing heavy, but people seem to enjoy the material and learn a bit of history, emerging licenses, and so on.
Presented June 26th, 2024
Part of a mini open source series.
Resources
The presentation below is exported from Keynote and the links are clickable, but you can also explore the links I've mentioned directly:
- Ted Leung, Explaining Commons Based Peer Production
- Open Source Definition by the OSI. See also my take on OSI-approved Open Source
- From Kyle Mitchell, Copyleft Intolerance and the Defining-Open Mind Trap
- Parity License
- Prosperity License
- My general Open Source Licensing page has more on this
- 996.icu
- Big Time License
- Polyform Standardized Licenses
- Blue Oak Council, including their "gold" list of permissive licenses
- Dries Buytaert, Balancing Makers and Takers to Scale and Sustain Open Source
- Still working on this, but Permissive Licenses and Fenced Community
- Examples of commercial open source with some form of enterprise license or other restrictions:
- Tools you should know about for collecting fees, donations, license sales, consulting, etc.
- These two articles are relatively brand new, and what I'm sharing for thinking about AI and software development:
Not included in the presentation, but Open Source is a restaurant is a useful related read on how think about paying for open source.
The concept of open source as a job is predicated on more global participation in software.
In discussion, I mentioned Situational Awareness set of essays as American propaganda, but important to understand for AI future directions.