Third wave (commercial) open source

An article describing third wave open source that I agree with the descriptions.

It actively focuses on licensing, and business usage, not on ideology or way of building software that I include in Three Definitions of Open Source.

The first wave was characterized by shrinkwrapping and commercial support. Peaking in the mid-1990s, Red Hat was the poster-child of selling support for software written by other people.

The second wave was characterized by Open Core products and, occasionally, dual-licensing. The term “Open Core” is harder to define than “Commercial Open Source”.

MySQL was one of the first products to employ dual licensing, capitalizing on the restrictive nature of the GPL. Dual licensing was a huge component of their 186-page2013 pitch deck. MySQL, while undoubtedly second-wave, wasn’t Open Core.

The third wave is weirder than both these previous waves. For one, most of the world now readily accepts that open source projects must be financially sustainable.

This is what I’ve pointed out with Permissive Licenses and Fenced Community:

Just because it is common to build open source in public does not mean community or social engagement or the entitlement of users have anything to do with it. And removing some of those things creates a revenue opportunity

Agrees with OSI as owner of the open source definition.

Actively disagrees with alternate license types like BUSL or ethical licenses, more in favour of dual licensing.

I wonder if non-commercial would be of interest? Probably not, because they’re not OSI-approved Open Source.

I don’t know that I’ve seen a push to AGPL — to me this is a strategy to keep ownership and dual license:

Most open source products I’ve heard people identify as third wave use the AGPL-3.0. Why? Permissive licenses eventually cause rot. …the AGPL-3.0 is the only license … ensuring that the rights of users cannot be stripped simply by providing software over-the-wire.

On Local First principles aligning with third wave:

I’d argue that the principles of local-first software…are about to become the new ideals of open source software. Yes, software must be beautiful and efficient and respect your privacy. But it should also keep working even when the manufacturer goes out of business.

The DWeb principles should be highlighted here too.