“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair
As the calendar turns over and the world takes its first stumbling steps into 2025, one prediction seems safe: there will be a controversy associated with open source licensing. This prediction is safe because there is always a controversy with open source licensing. Not only can the existence of controversy be predicted, its substance is likely to tread well worn paths as well.
Before the industry sees its first open source licensing fracas of the year, then, it’s worth taking a step back to understand why the controversy and its patterns are eminently predictable. And to do that, it’s necessary to understand the individual archetypes participating in these discussions and their priors and incentives. Once these are internalized, open source licensing conversations become straightforward, even mundane.
- Developers
Developers, as has been discussed before at length, do not care about licensing as a rule. They advantage the open access and availability of open source licensing over proprietary alternatives, to be sure, but by and large that’s as far as their concern goes. The specifics of what is and is not open source, and more particularly distinguishing true open source from alternatives like source available, is about as much interest to the average developer as the standard warnings about forward looking statements in slides are to anyone looking at slides.In a cruel twist, this apathy is ironically a direct consequence of the success of open source and its principles. Developers don’t care because open source has ensured they’ve never had to care (much).
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Open Source Project Author
In the early stages of a non-personal open source project with broader ambitions, before it’s seen wide adoption, the average maintainer(s) is most interested in widening distribution. Beyond the personal satisfaction of seeing their work embraced at scale, widespread usage is the most likely path towards broader commercial opportunities, improved compensation and greater industry recognition and praise.These incentives, coupled with the developer’s typical lack of interest in licenses, is what has led many projects to simply follow in the lead of popular projects at the time. Two decades ago that led to the selection of the GPL with Linux and MySQL at their respective heights of influence. Today, it’s more typically permissive alternatives such as Apache and MIT as the CNCF’s influence peaks.
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Commercial Open Source Vendor
Once a given project has crossed a certain popularity threshold and becomes monetizable, the most common path forward is to attempt to accelerate its growth via additional capital investments towards business capabilities like community, devrel, marketing and sales – and naturally a new commercial entity to house all of the above. Occasionally projects will bootstrap this process, but typically these investments arrive via outside third parties taking interests in the company in return for capital seeking a return.The investors, being investors, have no wider interest or concern than the return on their investment. To the extent that they exert influence within the company they have invested in, this singular focus on the project’s growth – potentially at the expense of community, industry norms and so on – becomes part of the commercial open source organization’s as well, regardless of how it may or may not align with the project’s original goals, governance, etc. Unsurprisingly, those belonging to this category have a different attitude towards licenses, in many cases, that the original project authors.
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Open Source Conservationist
Open source is a big tent, incorporating millions of projects, developers and other actors. Among these are unaffiliated individuals who sit outside (or can distance themselves from) the individual needs and wants of a single project, but take a wider view towards the open source landscape and do not view issues like open source licensing controversy in isolation, but what they may represent and manifest in the aggregate.Much like conservationists might sit in opposition to various industrial concerns, then, this class of individual is typically seeking a balance between specific, narrow commercial interests and opportunities and the broader health of the open source ecosystem itself.
There are other participants, of course, but these are the most common groups you’ll hear from in discussions of the next inevitable, upcoming open source licensing controversies. Understanding the groups and their respective motivations will not lead to material or even any improvement in your ability to reason with the groups you may disagree with. But if you can root yourself in an understanding of where the person you’re talking to is coming from and why they might hold the opinions they do, you may at least save yourself the frustration of trying to persuade people that cannot and will not be persuaded.
In some cases, because their salary depends on it.
