COL(Commercial Open License)

[unixguru88]

Digital computers are everywhere now and most of the worlds revenue is through digital trade. I mean 0's and 1's have the highest value in the world now and that is precisely my problem. Most of us would love to have the latest radeon 4850x2 but only a small fraction of us will be willing to steal it from a store. What if the store was completely unguarded and left open? I guess a lot of cards will dissappear but still, for most of us, the very thought of stealing will not occur. Why? It is because the card is a physical entity. An object which can be perceived by the senses and felt(especially in crysis). But the very same people who would shudder at the idea of stealing AMD's master-piece will have no hesitation in ripping the complete collections of Eminem or Shyamalan. Some people pirate stuff worth more than their yearly income(think autodesk). It's not because people are immoral, it's just because people belive Eminem does not lose a dime if you listen to his rhymes(I am getting really good!). In a way they are right. What the hell is autodesk going to lose if I use the 30 day trial 30 times(Surely by that time they will release a new version and a new trial). That is hitting the nail, nothing. The cost of manfucturing a radeon 4850x2 will be atleast 100$(understatement, I just want a lower bound). Whereas the cost of making one more copy of the full collection of autodesk software products will also be $100(A 500 GB hard drive). Whereas if you were to buy all those products, I guess you will have to pay your life time income. That is the paradox here software companies do not charge software based on the manufacturing fee(I hope AMD does) because there is no manufacturing cost other than hardware and the programmers pay. So there is no way to estimate software price. And most software products are extremely specialised and sales figure is going to be very less compared to a graphics card and hence they are forced to charge a lot. But the prices become very unreasonable and some companie makes an unbelivable amount of money(M$) and I guess in this case the company really does not lose anything at all. All those figures about losses amounting to billions of dollars are meaningless when those capitalist pigs do not know what to do with the millons(billions!?) they already have. I guess if products are reasonably priced then people will stop piracy automatically on their own. Have only one version of windows for thousand rupees with free upgrade to the next version under an open source license should be just fine. But if distributed under GPL software companies cannot make much money as people will generally get the software legally from third parties and also there is the danger of a new company forking the software and making minor cosmetic changes and stealing the crowd. To prevent all this I am framing a new license which will make it easy to sell commercial open source software. I need the help of all you guys in this endeavour.

[QwertyManiac]

A nice post in quite a while, but there would be a difference to an "Open" license and an "Open Source" license.

I don't get the part where you say you get upgrades to a software for free once you've purchased it. What's the need of having the upgrades via an open source license? You can do the same closed source. Market will have alternatives, code is not unique but functionality can be.

Yet when you follow the idea of free upgrades, you might lose out in a couple of years (If the software is still in active development and is your main source of income). What you can additionally try is to offer incremental discounts on each upgrades and may lead this way to the free upgrade ultimatum.

Many companies already do the free one-or-two times upgrade thing already, and some even do the incremental bonus. But they still fail, cause price is a hindrance in the first place.

In my opinion its best to release a software under a commercial open source license, wherein the customers may download source code after purchase for free or for additional cost. But when you want to earn and earn, you got to be GOOD and deliver in time.

This way you can source code from other OSS projects and develop quickly and yet earn the same way. Its your idea, keep it strong and active and spawn other projects while at it so there exists a big enough income at all times.

However, your point wasn't all that clear to me, could you come again at the difficulty of current licenses? When your source is out, there's hardly you can do anything to avoid a fork spawn, if not with the same code, with parts of it.

The problem with people is that they think GNU GPL advises the use of giving away programs for free. The common thinking of "free beer" instead of "free speech" is set into their minds when they hear "open" or even "free" related to a software.

This page should help clear those doubts.

[unixguru88]

The primary limitation(advantage?) of GPL is that anyone who receives the software gets the right to redistribute it and surely someone will redistribute it for free. I do not know any company which makes money by selling OSS. Redhat and others mainly make money through their support system offering free and quick security updates and are mostly targeted at enterprise users. GPL will not work for software such as a chess interface(there is no good open-source chess interface) as not many will be willing to pay for it when you can get it legally for free and security updates are not very critical. That's why, free upgrade atleast to the next major version is a necessity. More over I think it is the duty of software makers to offer the free upgrade as software gets outdated very quick. My objective is to create a new license which will not be compatabile with GPL and allow the commercial distribution of open source software. I have some ideas on how to do it, which I will share as soon as I remove the huge number of loop holes.

[QwertyManiac]

There are products that have "source-available" than "open-source". Windows is one among them.