Our great sponsors
-
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)
If I understand the synopsis of that article correctly, I don't think that concept applies here. Unless I've got my history wrong, our dominant standard for what's considered free software or open source, the Debian Free Software Guidelines (later repackaged as the Open Source Definition, wasn't the result of some kind of broad consensus among developers, users, and/or distributors. As badsectoracula pointed out [1] [2], source-available licenses with restrictions used to be more common. But Debian was always strongly aligned with the FSF's ideology; if I'm not mistaken, it was originally funded by the FSF, and of course, the full name of the main Debian distro is Debian GNU/Linux.
> The unusual foibles and preferences of specific people who are firmly in the history of FOSS are not relevant factors here. The relevant factor is drawing and maintaining a strict definitional line
My point is that this strict definition reflects nothing more than the MIT AI Lab hackers' elevation of their freedom (even at the expense of others, as in chapter 5 of _Hackers_) to an ethical absolute. Of course, most of those hackers outgrew that, but Stallman didn't, and he successfully spread the idea that all generally useful technical information, including software, should be freely available. And, if I'm not mistaken, that's where the DFSG came from. Since I didn't spell out part of my logic in my original comment, I will here: given that his nearly-forgotten campaign against passwords was obviously hopelessly naive, we should be open to the possibility that the same holds for the idea that software should be free for everyone to use.
> There's been a massive push in recent decades towards permissive licenses
Fair point. And I admit that this has made me stop and think about my choice of license for my own primary open-source project, AccessKit [3]. I was quick to permissively license that project from the beginning, before I considered funding. As it turned out, most of my development on that project so far has been funded by Google, which also specifically requested the Apache license (I went with the Apache/MIT dual license common in the Rust world). But in any case, I think a permissive license is actually the best choice for my goal with this project, which is to encourage and help developers to make as many GUI applications as possible accessible to disabled users. So yes, I want frictionless adoption above all else, but I think it's for a good reason. If a massive company used my project without paying me, I think I would consider it a net positive, because at least more applications would be accessible. But then, it's possible that by choosing a permissive license, I'm further poisoning the well, because I'm making more software available to freeloaders who would otherwise be obligated to pay someone (not necessarily me). FWIW, I'm thinking about developing an AccessKit-based module that has more of a niche use case (a screen reader for platforms or embedded devices that don't already have accessibility support), and for that, I might go with a dual copyleft/commercial licensing scheme.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29928956
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29928945
[3]: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit