Making money with licenses

Nadia Asparouhova · 14 Mar 2019

Others here said this too

The thing open source can actually sell is not the code but access to its maintainers’ attention and expertise.

Their wordsWhile everyone is focused on putting up tollbooths, opportunities to “price” maintainer attention, and access to maintainers, remain undervalued.

Also said by Filippo Valsorda

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Nadia Asparouhova did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
New licences are the wrong lever for paying maintainers: copyleft’s history shows terms companies ignore, and relicensing attempts get beaten back by their own communities.

Their wordsAs for my personal feelings on the matter, however, I’m skeptical that new licenses are the right approach on a systemic level, both in terms of feasibility, as well as where I think the world is going.
Our reading
The thing open source can actually sell is not the code but access to its maintainers’ attention and expertise.
Mental modelValue moves to what stays scarce

Their wordsWhile everyone is focused on putting up tollbooths, opportunities to “price” maintainer attention, and access to maintainers, remain undervalued.
Our reading
Free riding is not open source’s problem: the users who only download the code impose no cost on anyone.
Mental modelCollective action problems

Their wordsMost users don’t actually impose costs back to maintainers: they download the code and never interact with the project.
Our reading
A contribution is a cost to the maintainer, not a gift: it is taking part, not merely using the code, that consumes a project’s scarcest resource.
Mental modelTrade-offs

Their wordsIt’s only when users cross over to the production side (ex. report bugs, ask questions, submit patches) that they start to impose costs.
Our reading
Information once freely shared cannot be taken back, so charging for access to code is a pre-digital answer to a digital problem.

Their wordsInformation, once freely shared, is a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed again. It is very hard for me to imagine a world where we transition back to paying for access to information; these are pre-digital solutions to modern problems.

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The other pieces are the ones whose claims are worded most like this one's. That measures language, not agreement: they may argue the opposite.