Over the past few years, a few companies have changed the licenses of their open-source products to more restrictive “source-available licenses.” Hashicorp, MongoDB, and others argued that the big cloud services, especially AWS, aren’t playing fair by taking products without contributing back. Critics, in contrast, pointed out that big cloud service providers contribute plenty of code to the ecosystem. They also note that most license changes occur around the company’s IPOs, and the executives only want to increase the share price.
Redmonk has analyzed the impact of license changes on companies’ financial performances. There seems to be no relation between the two. Thus, this is the perfect opportunity to dive into why corporate leaders should have expected this outcome.
What do Businesses Pay for in Software Licenses?
With software available as open-source, the biggest question from outside the commercial sector is often: “Why should people pay for open-source software?” Funnily enough, the reasons companies pay for open-source software are the same as why they pay for commercial software.
Companies pay for assured maintenance, guaranteed support, and legal protections like indemnification. These services allow them to focus on their core business and keep IT running smoothly. Thus, payments are for the peace of mind of having a supported and maintained solution.
Few companies pay for new features or the latest and most fantastic solutions. Most of the time, features and innovations are an afterthought in a project compared to reliability and business continuity.
Contributions are a Self-interest
Alternatively, to pay for support, businesses could keep support staff and developers on hand to fix issues themselves. Sun’s acquisition of StarOffice, the predecessor to OpenOffice and LibreOffice, is said to be purely on the finances, as it was cheaper than buying the licenses.
However, there is a downside to fixing bugs and issues in-house. If you keep the fixes to yourself, you will have many patches to apply to every upstream change. Maintaining that library of patches is expensive. Thus, it is in the best interest of anyone doing bug fixing and in-house support to deliver the fixes as high upstream as possible and integrate them into the actual projects. Not only will the solutions be available to the whole community, but it will now become everyone’s responsibility to ensure that the new code doesn’t interfere with the last patch. Naturally, that is only true if the contribution process isn’t too complex or requires the developers to jump through too many legal hoops and contributor agreements.
Commercial open-source projects should have a thriving ecosystem of revenue-generating sales and commercial contributors. It is vital to maintain an ecosystem that is both valued and understood.
Forks of Open-Source Licensed Software
However, the benefit of a diverse ecosystem of contributors is also the downfall of every relicensing. Workforce contributors, in general, do not want to contribute money. After all, for most companies, human resources are a lot more scarce than hard cash.
Yet, it is only a tiny step from contributing time to the original project to maintaining a fork of the open-source code. This is especially true if one can narrow the focus of the contributions or involve most of the existing community.
Even the threat of relicensing after an ownership change was enough for some communities to start maintaining a fork. MariaDB and LibreOffice came into being because the community was concerned about how Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems would affect their respective groups.
Give Up on Relicensing
With today’s communication and collaboration tools, rallying contributors around an open-source project is easy. However, a strong focus on the sponsoring organization’s bottom line can cause organizations to overlook the non-monetary contributions to the project. Likewise, they might ignore that they are building their new business on the shoulders of giants like the Linux Kernel. Changing a license can quickly destroy this community and the trust in the wider open-source world.
At the same time, most businesses pay for security, not features. Thus, anyone willing to pay is likely already paying for maintenance, support, and identification. Consequently, any license changes won’t add new revenue sources. They only destroy any feeling of community and fracture the open-source world.