Open Products, Part 2

[chadwhitacre]

Here is part 1, from 2013.

Coming here from chadwhitacre/howtoshare.software#1, I am conceptualizing Open Products as Fair Source licensing plus communal governance.

[chadwhitacre]

It's contextual though. Commercial use restriction on sqlite? Sqlite becomes untenable. Commercial use on Sentry? No one cares.

https://twitter.com/zeeg/status/1755001306476126668

[chadwhitacre]

Maybe bring in "Corporations, and Open Ones"?

[chadwhitacre]

Probably the place to bring in single-source, which is a worse framing for essentially the same thing:

Upon reflection, I’ve come to realize that the relicensing trend towards non-compete licenses has exposed single-vendor Open Source software for what it truly is: proprietary software in hiding (or neo-proprietary, as Dirk Riehle said a few years ago). This post will go into detail on how I came to this conclusion.

https://opensource.net/why-single-vendor-is-the-new-proprietary/

A ‘single source’ open source project is where a single, for-profit, company dominates the project roadmap and maintainer status as its main revenue generator for ‘open-core’ or ‘dual-licensing’ revenue streams.

https://github.blog/2021-03-18-whats-up-with-these-new-not-open-source-licenses/

When the Open Source Initiative defined open source, it focused only on the license, and ignored the process. Smart entrepreneurs quickly discovered that they could provide to the world their product as open source code and benefit from it, while strictly controlling the process to keep competition at bay. This is called single-vendor open source.

https://dirkriehle.com/2020/03/12/please-help-keep-our-language-precise-single-vendor-open-source-is-neo-proprietary-source-not-closed-source/

In this article, we classify software product firms into three main categories: Traditional closed source firms, single-vendor open source firms, and open source distributors.

https://dirkriehle.com/publications/2011-selected/control-points-and-steering-mechanisms-in-open-source-software-projects/

[chadwhitacre]

I am now thinking that Open Products are entities that combine communal governance with Fair Source licensing, to democratize economic participation.

I think Blender is an app, ecosystem, and community to study. IMHO it stands on its own as a consumer product first.

https://twitter.com/_msw_/status/1758252792043786292

Afaict the open source project is subsidized by subscriptions for educational content. I.e., it's a traditional Open Source-subsidizing business model, not an Open Product.

[chadwhitacre]

Thierry's FOSDEM talk