Developer here. We wrote Maria 6 years ago, and this fall I accepted a ClojuristsTogether grant to bring it back into active development. We hope to simplify/modernize the codebase to make it something people can hack on top of to add features & apply to new use-cases.
I see an effort like License Zero less as an encroachment on existing "Free and Open Source" licenses and culture, and more as an alternative to behind-closed-door development.
I want to _sustainably_ write software, not for donations but by having people who want to use it, pay for it. If I have to go closed-source to do so, then that's what I'll do. I don't have a big company behind me paying a salary.
But I would prefer to make things in the open, sharing my process; I'd like to allow students and other individuals to benefit from my work, either freely or very affordably; and I'd like to charge for-profit companies a fair price for what they receive.
The open source community tried to trademark the 'open source' label, and failed¹, precisely because it is _too descriptive_: it sounds like a generic way of describing source code that isn't private, not a specialized term with specific ethical and legal implications. But nevertheless the 'Open Source Definition' campaign has been rather effective in limiting use of the term. So I'm not even sure what to call what I want to do: maybe "open-source-ish"?
Some of my work belongs under OSI-approved licenses, but not all of it, and I appreciate that people like Kyle are working, creatively, on alternatives.
I can see how that is true for some kinds of software. For many examples, network effects don't matter.
The first license I can remember paying for was Metafizzy's 'Isotope', a jQuery layout plugin. Great documentation and performance. I can't remember the price at the time, maybe $40 (now it ranges from $25 - $320). It was totally worth it, I was making money and clients were happy.
I agree that price discrimination can be a useful thing, but question the idea that only very large or wealthy companies should pay anything at all. What if licenses are low friction and affordable?
If we had a nice repertoire of flexible licenses available to play with, developers could experiment and try all sorts of ideas, including what you describe.
Non-FOSS-licensed software isn't going to play the same role in the ecosystem as FOSS software, but it doesn't have to. Plenty of room for different kinds of people/companies/software to co-exist.
Many companies have no problem paying reasonable fees to license software they find useful. I don't see why they should stop paying, on some kind of ethical principle, if a developer decides to publish some or all of a product's source code on GitHub with a restrictive, noncommercial-use-only license.
Why should a developer be accused of greed for publishing code openly, but with paid licenses for commercial use? How is this not better, in absolute terms, than remaining closed source?
> I figured that if devs don't want software used by companies, they could use the CC-NC licenses.
From what I can see, this is exactly what L0 provides, with the added _option_ that if a company _does_ want to use the software for commercial purposes, they can pay for a license with a credit card.
> Customers who want permission for commercial or non-Open Source uses can identify, price, and buy licenses for all License Zero dependencies of their Node.js projects, in one checkout transaction, using a free command-line tool
I built this because I was totally new to writing parsers, and I liked Instaparse but wanted a faster feedback cycle. I was also excited to use CodeMirror with ClojureScript, two of my favorite tools. More broadly, I'm interested in the future of browser-based coding - I think there's a bright future in small, problem-specific coding environments in which the language, editor, and UX are carefully mapped to a particular problem.
Just as Excel is primarily graphical but allows power users to write formulas, with CodeMirror and Instaparse one can imagine designing a small language and mini-editor to expose advanced functionality within an app. (Here I expose options as an editable Clojure map instead of with a GUI.)
I spent last summer at Recurse Center and it was the most fun I've ever had programming. The team deeply understands how to create an atmosphere in which you can try things that would feel impossible on your own. After I left, I tried working from coffee shops again, and the difference was crushing. It suddenly felt terribly wrong to be surrounded by dozens of people, not one of whom understood what I was working on or cared. Yet outside of RC this has been my default mode of work and the reason why I've often felt like doing something else.
The one thing I felt lacking at RC was a greater sense of challenge: the emphasis was on personal development more than pushing the limits of the field itself. Building a research lab means that, with luck, RC can become a place where the world's best programmers will want to come to do their most interesting work - and all the better, in an open atmosphere where you can show people what you're building. I'm excited to see where this goes.
Eight years ago I was burning out in China and started a thread to ask for help. The comments were exceedingly insightful (the top-listed comment rang especially true for me): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=69097
Thanks! I took a screenwriting course a couple of years ago, and the first exercise was writing dialogue as a 17-year-old girl. It was rather mind-bending. While developing BrainTripping I was often surprised by word combinations that are second nature to me, but other people never use (and vice versa).