Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/10/16/open-core-shareware.html

[ I originally wrote this essay below centered around the term
“Open Core”. Despite that even say below that the terms is
somewhat
meaningless, I
later realized this term was so problematic that it should be
abandoned entirely, for use instead of the clearer term
“proprietary relicensing”. However, since this blog post was widely
linked to, I’ve nevertheless left the text as it originally was in
October 2009. ]

There has been some debate recently about so-called “Open
Core” business models. Throughout the history of Free Software,
companies have loved to come up with “innovative”
proprietary-like ways to use the FLOSS licensing structures.
Proprietary relicensing, a practice that I believe has proved itself to
have serious drawbacks, was probably the first of these, and now Open
Core is the next step in this direction. I believe the users embracing
these codebases may be ignoring a past they’re condemned to repeat.

Like most buzzwords, Open Core has no real agreed-upon meaning. I’m
using it to describe a business model whereby some middleware-ish system
is released by a single, for-profit entity copyright holder, who
requires copyright-assigned changes back to the company, and that
company sells proprietary add-ons and applications that use the
framework. Often, the model further uses the GPL to forbid anyone but
the copyright-holding company to make such proprietary add-on
applications (i.e., everyone else would have to GPL their applications).
In the current debate, some have proposed that a permissive license
structure can be used for the core instead.

Ultimately, “Open Core” is a glorified shareware situation.
As a user, you get some subset of functionality, and may even get the
four freedoms
with regard to that subset. But, when you want the “good
stuff”, you’ve got to take a proprietary license. And, this is
true whether the Core is GPL’d or permissively licensed. In both cases,
the final story is the same: take a proprietary license or be stuck with
cripple-ware.

This fact remains true whether the Open Core is under a copyleft
license or a permissive one. However, I must admit that a permissive
license is more intellectually honest to the users. When users
encounter a permissive license, they know what they are in for: they may
indeed encounter proprietary add-ons and improvements, either from the
original distributor or a third party. For example, Apple users sadly
know this all too well; Apple loves to build on a permissively licensed
core and proprietarize away. Yet, everyone knows what they’re getting
when they buy Apple’s locked down, unmodifiable, and
programmer-unfriendly products.

Meanwhile, in more typical “Open Core” scenarios, the use
of the GPL is actually somewhat insidious. I’ve written before
about how
the copyleft is a tool, not an end in itself. Like any tool, it can
be misused or abused. I think using the GPL as a tool for corporate
control over users, while legally permissible, is ignoring the spirit of
the license. It creates two classes of users: those precious few that
can proprietarize and subjugate others, and those that can’t.¹

This (ab)use of GPL has
led folks
like Matt Aslett to suggest that the permissive licensing solution
would serve this model better. While I’ve admitted such a change would
have some level of increased intellectually honesty, I don’t think it’s
the solution we should strive for to solve the problem. I think Aslett’s
completely right when he argues that GPL’d “Open Core”
became popular because it’s Venture Capitalists’ way of making peace
with freely licensed copyrights. However, heading to an Apple-like
permissive only structure only serves to make more Apple-like companies,
and that’s surely not good for software freedom either. In fact, the
problem is mostly orthogonal to licensing. It’s a community building
problem.

The first move we have to make is simply give up the idea that the best
technology companies are created by VC money. This may be true if your
goal is to create proprietary companies, but the best Free Software
companies are the small ones, 5-10 employees, that do consulting work
and license all their improvements back to a shared codebase. From
low-level technology like Linux and GCC to higher-level technology like
Joomla all show that this project structure yields popular and vibrant
codebases. The GPL was created to inspire business and community models
like these examples. The VC-controlled proprietary relicensing and
“Open Core” models are manipulations of the licensing
system. (For more on this part of my argument, I suggest my discussions
on
Episode
0x14 of the (defunct) Software Freedom Law Show.)

I realize that it’s challenging for a community to create these sort of
codebases. The best way to start, if you’re a small business, is to
find a codebase that gets you 40% or so toward your goal and start
contributing to the code with your own copyrights, licensed
under GPL. Having something that gets you somewhere will make it easier
to start your business on a consulting basis without VC, and allow you
to be part of one of these communities instead of trying to create an
“Open Core” community you can exploit with proprietary
licensing. Furthermore, the fact that you hold copyright alongside
others will give you a voice that must be heard in decision-making
processes.

Finally, if you find an otherwise useful
single-corporate-copyright-controlled GPL’d codebase from one of these
“Open Core” companies, there is something simple you can
do:

Fork! In essence, don’t give into pressure by these
companies to assign copyright to them. Get a group of community
developers together and maintain a fork of the codebase. Don’t be mean
about it, and use git or another DVCS to keep tracking branches of the
company’s releases. If enough key users do this and refuse to assign
copyright, the good version will eventually become community one rather
than the company-controlled one.

My colleague Carlo
Piana points
out a flaw in this plan, saying the ant cannot drive the
elephant. While I agree with Carlo generally, I also think that
software freedom has historically been a little bit about ants driving
elephants. These semi-proprietary business models are thriving on the
fundamental principle of a proprietary model: keep users from
cooperating to improve the code on which they all depend. It’s a
prisoner’s dilemma that makes each customer afraid to cooperate with the
other for fear that the other will yield to pressure not to cooperate.
As the fictional computer Joshua points out, this is a strange game.
The only winning move is not to play.

The software freedom world is more complex than it once was. Ten years
ago, we advocates could tell people to look for the GPL label and
know that the software would automatically be part of a
freedom-friendly, software sharing community. Not all GPL’d software is
created equal anymore, and while the right to fork remains firmly in
tact, the realities of whether such forks will survive, and whether the
entity controlling the canonical version can be trusted is another
question entirely. The new advice is: judge the freedom of your
codebase not only on its license, but also on the diversity of the
community that contributes to it.

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¹I must
put a fine point here that the only way
companies can manipulate the GPL in this example is by
demanding full copyright assignment back to the corporate
entity. The GPL itself protects each individual contributor
from such treatment by other contributors, but when there is
only one contributor, those protections evaporate. I must
further note that for-profit corporate assignment differs
greatly from assignment to a non-profit, as non-profit
copyright assignment paperwork typically includes broad legal
assurances that the software will never be proprietarized, and
furthermore, the non-profit’s very corporate existence hinges
on engaging only in activity that promotes the public
good.