[ThenAsNow]

> If you want people to pay then be paid software.

It seems like source available type licenses (e.g., Kyle Mitchell's Big Time license: https://bigtimelicense.com/ ) are a reasonable middle ground for being paid software without giving up many of the benefits of open source.

I'm hoping there's a notable uptick in adoption of licenses like these.

[josephcsible]

They're not reasonable at all. They deceive users and leach off of the good name of open source while preventing any actual open source projects from incorporating any of their code. I'm hoping there's a notable drop in adoption of licenses like them.

[Someone]

>> It seems like source available type licenses (e.g., Kyle Mitchell's Big Time license: https://bigtimelicense.com/ ) are a reasonable middle ground for being paid software without giving up many of the benefits of open source

> They're not reasonable at all. They deceive users and leach off of the good name of open source

I disagree. Source available licenses are reasonable, but not “a middle ground for being paid software without giving up many of the benefits of open source”.

Reading the https://bigtimelicense.com/ and https://bigtimelicense.com/versions/2.0.1, though, I don’t think that’s a source available license. It doesn’t mention source code at all.

It’s a license that allows small entities to use a binary for free, and promises larger companies to give “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms” (I guess that’s in the license to ‘guarantee’ smaller companies they will be able to get such a license and that they will be able to afford it. IANAL, but I think the “nondiscriminatory” guarantees the former, but “fair and reasonable” doesn’t fully guarantee the latter)

“Source available” is more or less the reverse: it guarantees you can view the source, but doesn’t necessarily give you the right to modify or even compile it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software)

[ThenAsNow]

> They deceive users and leach off of the good name of open source

How do they do that if they don't call themselves open source (or "Open Source (TM)" if you prefer) in the first place?

Regardless, something needs to be done about the sustainability gap in open source other than writing messages like what's linked. The inability of your project to incorporate someone else's code shouldn't consign the rest of us to not have the benefits of access to that someone else's code outside of a proprietary binary.

[Schnitz]

They are very reasonable and they solve a real problem. A big corp won’t use a library from a tiny 1-5 person shop if when they get acquired or go under the library dies and all they ever got was binaries. A source available license solves this because the big corp knows they can maintain the library themselves in that case.