Do we really need another non-open source available license? Way back when we loaded software with punch cards and magnetic tape, all programs were "free software" and "open source." Then along came proprietary software, and everything changed. But programmers rebelled and developed the first formal definitions of free and open source software. Today, code that's not open source is the …
You remember Microsoft's Monkey Boy ? Ballmer. The one who said Open Source was a cancer.
He's metatstased. This is the result.
The only thing is, it's not important. The only ones who will subscribe to this are companies who had no intention of actually respecting Open Source, but are keen on paying lip service to it. For the creds. Before fucking it all over.
Nobody paying attention will run along with this. This is just Big Capital pulling the wool over the unwary.
Unfortunately, there's one born every minute, eh ?
I posted my first "open source" code back to the early days when I was installing ZCPR on S-100 systems and saw the first ZCPR keyboard buffer fail if terminal (I was using a VT-100) was using control-S ... I just fixed if and gave it away. We didn't call it "open source" in the early days, we were just helping other programmers.
"Nobody paying attention will run along with this. This is just Big Capital pulling the wool over the unwary."
The concern is that it will spread. When someone announces something open source, there's no way of knowing whether it's about to change license or not. If there's any corporate structure, then someone could buy or otherwise gain control of it and completely change the terms. If people start to avoid anything that looks too much like a company making open source software, you run the risk that larger open source projects get fewer users and developers. While it's always been possible for open source software to die, it usually happened by a slow loss in continued updates rather than an overnight switch to proprietary.
You remember Microsoft's Monkey Boy ? Ballmer. The one who said Open Source was a cancer.
To be fair to fester, he said the GPL was cancer, due to it's requirement to licence code it touches under the GPL.
It was a pejorative term, but the point is valid.
All this overlooks the fact that companies are making millions and billions on the back of unpaid gullible developers who believe in "open source".
It's all great if developer comes from privileged background or still lives in parents' basement living spoon to mouth lifestyle.
But then the reality comes crashing down when they learn the bank won't accept their GitHub stars as a deposit for a flat nor the company that is building yet another space rocket, won't hire them, because why would they if they already got what they wanted for free.
Developers getting paid for contributions to open source projects has always bedevilled open source; I wonder if Stallman hadn't been in academia and didn't retain his post and income through writing software, whether he would have promoted the GNU license.
Personally, I would like to see some means for businesses (backroom and larger) to charge for their open source products and have some form of commercial protection from either being undercut or being exploited by the majors, particularly by those such as the cloud service providers who don't sell the software but a service based on the software. Perhaps this is some fusion of Open Source and FRAND.
Someone else who seems to be under the impression that 'Open Source'='Some Kind Of Business Model'.
'FLOSS' is exactly about NOT being 'Some Kind Of Business Model', so the code is released from bindings, except that it be 'freely available to be used and shared'.
If you release your code on that basis you are wilfully releasing yourself from any temptation to whine about not being paid.
“Freely available” does not mean available for £0 ie. Free. See GPL.
Also this release model looks interesting
“UTM is a free download from Github, but if you get it from Apple's macOS App Store, it costs $9.99, which helps to fund the program's development.“
[ https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/29/utm_apple_hypervisor_foss_fest/ ]
It would seem the walled gardens and their app stores might mean that open source projects get slightly more income than at present, just a shame Apple will be taking 30% of that $9.99…
'“Freely available” does not mean available for £0 ie. Free. See GPL.'
The thing is, whether you pay money for the 'product', or not, under the GPL the 'code' must be made available on the same basis that it is received. You are not obliged to make it available in turn, but if you do it must be on the same terms, under the GPL, in which you received it, i.e. 'freely available'—in the sense of 'freedom', not 'money'.
As I said, 'Open Source' does not equal 'Some Kind Of Business Model'. It is the antithesis of that mindset and purpose, albeit that it can exist within a 'business model', so long as that model enables it.
The 'FLOSS' philosophy doesn't owe anyone a living.
> What question gets asked on nearly every job application? "List your Git repositories"
I don't doubt that job applications ask that - but, huh? Isn't that just another clueless HRbot question whose major value is to warn you that you are applying to become Faceless Drone #52372 (the third - not worth the cost to print up a new id badge)?
What possible other value does that blanket question provide anyone, on either side of the table? Do you get bonus points for having dozens of GitHub repos[1] of "me too" libraries (forked but never edited after the first week) and old student coursework, but nothing for having had accepted five major improvements to Large And Important Projects who repos are in no way "yours"?
[1] presumably GitHub is what they would really mean to ask about, not the dozens of repos on your NAS for tracking local config files[2], managing your important personal docs and scripting your train layout? Which aren't even using Git for those repos anyway.
[2] although talking about that would actually tell you something useful about the person
Gullible? Not really.
I contribute code to open source projects and I make money supporting people that use said open source projects. I even donate when I can afford to make a decent donation.
In fact the vast majority of my income exists because of open source.
If not for open source, I'd still be paid peanuts for supporting crappy Microsoft Active Directory environments and Cisco network kit along with a gazillion other similar techies. A fate worse than death if you work in tech. I know, I know...a lot of you exist in this pit of despair and apparently "like it"...but believe me, there's a whole wide world out there outside of supporting this small cluster of shitty vendors where there is more money and actual job satisfaction.
Do you really think the billions they make comes solely because they save money on licensing and development?
The likes of Amazon etc are not in the business of selling software, they are in the business of renting hardware the more people they can rent that hardware to the better. They employ legions of people to extend, modify and support their open source based platforms.
Open Source developers aren't producing a cheap way for large businesses to make billions, they are producing a way for millions of people to be employed because open source software is cheap to mess around with and learn. It is not locked behind some gate keeper certification programme or expensive licensing.
Historically, if you wanted a job in tech, you'd have to go out and get some kind of vendor certification which usually required an expensive course on which you'd get exposure to the tech. With open source, you can just download it and deploy it to a cheap machine to learn how to use it. The barrier to entry is very low...which means there is likely more talent out there focused on open source technology than proprietary technology...if you're a business like Google or Amazon and you want the man power to support a huge system, you're better off with open source tech simply because of the sheer number of people that you can hire to support it and the low cost of training if it is required.
If you want to learn how to build a scaleable web server setup, it'll cost you $20 for an SBC (or anything that can run a bunch of containers) and a weekend if you want to figure out Apache...or potentially thousands of dollars if you want to deploy Windows and mess around with IIS and its full feature set...because you can't run IIS in a container, you need kit that can either run several virtual machines, or you need several actual machines.
There are more benefits to Open Source than just it's price.
Hell, most open source projects are built on top of other open source projects...you'll be hard pressed to find an open source project that didn't have dependency or two that isn't itself a third party open source project.
I personally have made a career out of supporting open source products and I continually add new products to my repertoire...and thanks to a lot of those projects, I gained an understanding of certain technologies that just wouldn't have been possible if I'd gone down the proprietary route.
Open source is a whole massive ecosystem that is far bigger than the sum of it's repos.
The way I see it, it's very common for someone to come up with a product that can do something cool in isolation...but it takes someone like Brunel to understand the sum benefit of all these components and figure out how to build an impressive bridge out of it.
Being pissed off about companies making billions using Open Source tech is like the person who made pencils for Da Vinci claiming that Da Vinci would have been nothing if not his pencils. Man, that Da Vinci...I'm here slaving away making pencils while he's there using them to produce works of genius...what a wanker.
You could also use the Californian gold rush as an analogue to the way large tech companies work...during the gold rush, it wasn't the prospectors that made the most money and it wasn't the gold in the ground that brought the money...it was the people selling services to the prospectors that made the most money and the investors in those prospectors that brought the money. Bars, brothels, tool hire shops etc...tech companies are just this...they make billions not because they're trying to produce the next Facebook...but because they know thousands of other people will pay for the resources in their attempt to build the next Facebook and they will likely use someone elses money to fund it...they don't have to build a successful world beating product if they have a continuous supply of idiots willing to pay for the chance to try it themselves and rent their kit...tech companies win whether you're successful or not and it has nothing to do with their choice of tech, if open source didn't exist, they would just use whatever is available...just like the bar at the end of a day of hard mining from a prospector...he's going to buy a few glasses of whisky (whatever is available) whether he found some gold or not and if his shovel is fucked, he's going to buy a new one (again, whatever is available)...and he's out there probably alone...so he's going to want a hooker (ugh, whatever is available)...whether he's found gold or not.
Open source is just often the path of least resistance and fortunately also, usually, the better technology...but if it didn't exist, it wouldn't stop large tech companies from being a thing...just instead of Amazon or Google etc...we'd have different massive monoliths instead.
> All this overlooks the fact that companies are making millions and billions on the back of unpaid gullible developers who believe in "open source".
This is wrong on so many level.
First, Open Source Softwares are common goods, not a private lucrative property where you have to pay a rent to the one privileged enough to own it. And you can still be paid for your work without this rent.
Second, their is business models to be paid for your work with Open Source Software. And when someone choose to do it as volunteer, it's their choice.
Third, as the Open Source Softwares are common goods, and its immaterial, it's already available for everyone: So if someone is getting paid for a product or a service, is not for the common good bot for their own work. In the same way as the developer can be paid for their work.
What you defend is the same as what the bosses do when they own the working tools. Like what the landlord do when the own the roof above the head of others. Like the patents owner do they own the knowledge.
You are either one of these highly privileged bourgeois or you have internalized their way of viewing software and knowledge.
what kind of a stupid thinking is this??? are you serious? people need to live in order to contribute for open source. this hivemind mentality is the cancer thatt's killing open source.
"You are either one of these highly privileged bourgeois or you have internalized their way of viewing software and knowledge."
lmao, "you are either with us or against us". really love the partisan mentality here
No, people don't see that as non-free, as it's trivially accomplished by not having a contributor license agreement that reassigns copyright or gives unrestricted rights. Linux, for example, doesn't have the copyright to every part of the kernel, and therefore can't change the license without some difficult effort. This might lead to a backlash against CLAs. At one point, a CLA made some sense because it allowed a central project lead to control the project even if you, the part-time contributor, got bored and left. Now that the concern is that the central project lead will switch to proprietary, giving them that control seems less desirable.
You don't get bored of kernel development and leave. You realise that kernel developers are usually insufferable wankers that are impossible to work with, then you leave.
I did a very short stint with the Arch Linux team for a while many, many moons ago...for the most part, the people I came into contact with were actually quite cool...but there was this one guy who was some kind of kernel developer, and he was an absolute cock. He had to stick his nose into everything.
I volunteered to help with infrastructure stuff, they needed someone to tidy up their deployment processes and scripts...but this one guy kept sticking his face in and it was essentially impossible to invoke any meaningful change. So I just stopped communicating with them.
I lasted about 3 weeks...I went from "yay, I'm helping the Arch team" to "Ugh...that guy" incredibly quickly.
>but there was this one guy who was some kind of kernel developer, and he was an absolute cock. He had to stick his nose into everything.
That's the nice thing about working in commercial corporate software development, everybody pulls together for the good of the shareholders. The efficiency of the market means that anyone not contributing surplus value is weeded out by ruthless capitalism
> You realise that kernel developers are usually insufferable wankers that are impossible to work with, then you leave.
> there was this one guy
I came across a nurse who was horrible; nurses are usually horrible, you should leave and avoid them.
I came across a puppy who was a biter; puppies are usually biters, you should leave and avoid them.
I came across an apple with a maggot in it; apples usually have maggots in them, you should avoid them.
I take your point. However, I'm not the only person with this opinion and he is not the only kernel developer known to be a wanker. Many of them actually are...I simply cited one example above all my other examples.
Incidentally, I've only ever tried one tin of surströmming, which is fucking awful, I'm pretty sure I'm unlikely to find that one tin that isn't...I don't need to taste every tin to draw that conclusion.
Idea creation and idea exploitation sit uneasily together.
Simple open-source licences are merely reminders that persons using the code - partially, wholly, or derived from - have no proprietorial claims over it, and that it is good manners to acknowledge the source(s) of code until such time as the code is so widely known as to be considered common programming knowledge.
Further complicating the licence stipulation pushes it into the realm of carpetbagging financial concerns, potential litigation, impracticability of 'rights' enforcement, and ambiguities among jurisdictions. As it is being found in different areas where people seek to make ideas (and their expression or application) proprietary, there is increasing pushback from a broadening body of other people demanding that 'content' be shared, and its production financed by patronage instead of a ramshackle body of 'rights' understood solely by specialised lawyers who never once have created anything of value to humanity.
Open Source has always been about free for personal use.
The commercial aspect has been tacked onto it by unscrupulous corporations who figured out how to make money on someone else's work, without paying for it a penny.
Some businesses even using this illegally to bypass employment laws and rules around apprenticeship - where for profit organisation has to pay at least minimum wage.
Rather than taking an apprentice, they can publish "open source" project and let the public contribute. Then often if they like the work of some contributors they offer them work.
If they wanted to do it right, they would have to take them on as apprentices and pay wages.
Basically everything you said is wrong.
"Open Source has always been about free for personal use."
Most licenses, the ones that go back decades, specifically include the fact that you can sell the code, you can sell the use of the code, and various other clearly commercial rights. It's not new. They restrict how viable a commercial product can be, since you can't be the only one to sell the code, but they very clearly include it.
"Rather than taking an apprentice, they can publish "open source" project and let the public contribute. Then often if they like the work of some contributors they offer them work."
This has a right and wrong part:
Right: This is a way to get free work.
Wrong: There's any problem, legal or moral, with that. The only free work they get is from people who deliberately choose to do so. Nobody is making anyone do that. If nobody is interested in solving their problem, they don't get their problem fixed. They can hope that someone comes along and takes a liking to their code and they can snap that person up, but if that's their plan, it's not going to work too well.
No, you are completely wrong my friend.
Refer to Richard Stallman, “Four Freedoms”.
There is nothing about commercial use.
What you write about is how corporations appropriated open source for their own benefit, without any "trickling down" to people who actually done the work.
Wrong: There's any problem, legal or moral, with that. The only free work they get is from people who deliberately choose to do so. Nobody is making anyone do that. If nobody is interested in solving their problem, they don't get their problem fixed. They can hope that someone comes along and takes a liking to their code and they can snap that person up, but if that's their plan, it's not going to work too well.
That's quite a shallow view. Let my try to unpick this:
Legal - at least here in the UK it is illegal for for profit organisation to not pay wages. Use of open source without paying its contributors can be viewed as wage theft in the UK, however, there seems to be no appetite for regulators to enforce law nor I am not aware of any contributor taking companies using the software to court.
Moral - as I mentioned earlier, open source is dominated by people from privileged background, who can afford to "donate" their free time and skills for big corporations to use freely. On the surface, sure, it may look harmless, but many employers when hiring look if people have any contributions to Open Source and so more experience. They may be hired over someone equally talented, but without such contributions. This comes back to the problem we had in the UK with apprenticeships. There was a period when it was legal to take on apprentice without pay, but this created a situation where placements at sought after businesses were filled with middle class rich kids and giving them better prospects than people from disadvantaged backgrounds who can't afford to work for free. This contributed to widening of the wealth gap and caused other social issues like you wouldn't see minorities working at these firms.
This is the same problem with open source. It is not inclusive and is exploitative.
The notion of "freedom" is like a gold wrapper on a turd.
Have some self respect people.
That article is not the only source on what open source means. One major source is the licenses that implement it. Commercial uses are specifically mentioned in them.
"Use of open source without paying its contributors can be viewed as wage theft in the UK, however, there seems to be no appetite for regulators to enforce law nor I am not aware of any contributor taking companies using the software to court."
The reason they don't is that it's not wage theft unless you have some agreement that I'm owed wages. If you use the code I made available for free, I am not owed wages. If I do some work that is useful to you, but you didn't agree to pay me for it, I am not owed wages. I am owed wages when we've agreed that wages are to be paid or when I am mandated to work. Neither applies if a company uses available open source or if someone contributes to their open source software.
> as I mentioned earlier, open source is dominated by people from privileged background, who can afford to "donate" their free time and skills for big corporations to use freely.
You can be paid for you contribution to Open Source. Their is different business models available. It is not reserved to "privileged who can donate"
> but many employers when hiring look if people have any contributions to Open Source and so more experience
Employer look for experience, Open Source or not. And they choose someone with more experience. It has nothing to do with Open Source.
> This is the same problem with open source. It is not inclusive and is exploitative.
It is, as much as any kind of software can be. You can fix some things with a licence, bot some things are beyond what a licence can reach and you will have them with any kind of softwares.
No, you are completely wrong my friend.
Refer to Richard Stallman, “Four Freedoms”.
There is nothing about commercial use.
It's right there, in the very first clause of your own reference. "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose." In other tracts he has expanded on this, he really means what that implies. Personal, academic or, yes, commercial, use? Fine. Military or polictical use? Also fine. I don't recall him expanding further but if you actually read his arguments it's clear it goes equally for either side of the abortion debate, fighting for human rights or enforcing an opressive regime, Big Oil, Tobacco or Pharma or indeed anything else of which you might disapprove. In Stallman's view the use of free software must be completely unrestricted as a first principle, it is free for all as a common good.
Stallman's talked a lot of crap over the years and I don't agree with his position on many things, but that's no excuse for misrepresentation.
> Open Source brought that popular feature of the creative industry, the unpaid internship, to the software world.
Brought?
As the article points out, Open Source has been there from day one, if not earlier (algorithms and programs were shared and discussed before the machines to run them existed): it begat the software world.
It was only later, when the software grew large enough, that anyone needed to even bother naming it Open Source.
For "unpaid workers", go read the stories of the "hackers" from the early days, the kids and students who hung around underfoot in the college terminal rooms until they were drafted in to help out. You should blame Open Source for that as much as you should the youngsters who lifted and carried for the early film makers and wormed their way in, or the kid who hung around the farrier.
The explicit use of this by current day megacorps is their later invention and naming of "unpaid interns" as a class of people to grow and abuse - which happens in every bit of commerce, not just the "creative industry" and the software world but all the dreadfully tedious places as well.
"Elastic has spit in the face of every single one of 1,573 contributors, and everyone who gave Elastic their trust, loyalty, and patronage."
Couldn't somebody take the source just before the licence change when the open licence applied, fork it, and effectively cut Elastic and their nonsense out of the loop?
Amazon OpenSearch Service makes it easy for you to perform interactive log analytics, real-time application monitoring, website search, and more. OpenSearch is an open source, distributed search and analytics suite derived from Elasticsearch. Amazon OpenSearch Service offers the latest versions of OpenSearch, support for 19 versions of Elasticsearch (1.5 to 7.10 versions), as well as visualization capabilities powered by OpenSearch Dashboards and Kibana (1.5 to 7.10 versions). Amazon OpenSearch Service currently has tens of thousands of active customers with hundreds of thousands of clusters under management processing hundreds of trillions of requests per month.
amazon . com / opensearch-service
Couldn't somebody take the source just before the licence change when the open licence applied, fork it, and effectively cut Elastic and their nonsense out of the loop?
Erm, yes: it's already been done. The fork was initially called Open Distro for Elasticsearch, and is now just OpenSearch. It's Apache v2 licensed. They forked Kibana too, as "OpenSearch Dashboards"
This was done under the stewardship of AWS, who obviously have a vested interest in selling Elasticsearch-as-a-service (the thing that the BSL expressly forbids), but they also invite community participation.
It's fully functional, so these days there's no reason to use ElasticSearch - just go straight to OpenSearch.
Yes, that can happen, and it has for most of the big cases. Amazon forked Elastic's products and made OpenSearch. Terraform has been forked to make OpenTofu. Basically, the quick switch to proprietary is not necessarily going to bring the cash the companies want, but it is virtually guaranteed to cause chaos in the community of users and contributors who now have to decide which fork to use. In Elastic's case, they deliberately introduced breaking changes to try to prevent OpenSearch from being compatible with their version, which caused some extra chaos for both projects.
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"After that period, the code refers to either the Apache 2.0 or MIT license"
I think the author meant that the code *reverts* to the Apache 2.0 or MIT license.
"For more, you can look at the company FSLed versions of Apache and MIT. As far as I'm concerned, neither is an open source license."
The code which has reverted to Apache or MIT is fully unrestricted and true open source. However, it is 3 or 4 years out of date, hence obsolete, and probably has lots of exploitable security holes.
The time period, by the way, is a red herring reason for changing the BSL to the FSL. For example, Cockroach Labs use the BSL but their code reverts to Apache after 3 years, not 4.
> hence obsolete
Ah yes, totally obsolete, all the wheels have fallen off, you just can't get the compilers any more, it will never be runnable again.
> and probably has lots of exploitable security holes
Maybe, maybe not; and if they are there, they are old hat and you likely know what they are (cue first set of fixes).
And all that new code over the 3 to 4 years hasn't introduced lots of new holes, nope, not a single one.
It's not. It's considered a fully open source license, at least based on the OSI definition. Things like the BSL do not comply with that definition, but you can see and modify the source, so that's why they categorize that as semi open source.
The part about not being allowed to use the software in a way that competes with the business. It's in this license. It is not in the GPL V3, AGPL V3, or any other version of the GPL, AGPL, or LGPL. That's the difference, and that's the point we're all discussing.
“ It's considered a fully open source license”
But from the context, it and other open source licenses are not considered open source by the articles author…
” Neither do any of the companies now using "source-available" or other semi open source licenses. They all began as open source companies…”
GPL is a “source-available licence”.
What has changed is back in the 80s and early 90s open source was provided as source code for the user to compile, over the years things have changed and now the normal is to download the free binary.
The “race to the bottom” means that whilst GPL allows for there to be a price/fee to be paid, this hasn’t happened, in part because the GPL itself gives no commercial protections to the originator of the source.
I don't think we're reading the article the same way. The article is talking about open source licenses, including the GPL, which do not restrict your use of the software. It is also talking about semi open source licenses, like the FSL and BSL, which do restrict your actions. That is what I see the writer saying, and it agrees with the definitions with which I am familiar.
You have unilaterally defined GPL as source-available, even though the definitions the writer is using would categorize it as among the open source ones, not the source-available ones. I agree that the tendency has been to provide binaries, but nothing says that anyone has to and there are many projects where building it yourself is expected. And although GPL and basically every license allows you to sell it, one of the points of open source is that the user has so many freedoms that relying on being the only one who is allowed to sell it is not an option.
Rereading the article, the issue isn’t the licence the “product” is released under but the CLA. It seems the CLA is a fully open “do as you want with my contribution” licence, rather than “my contribution can only be used for a product that will be released under a recognised open-source licence”. Hence why “businesses” can start an open-source project, the CLA assigns all rights to them without any downstream licensing and code release obligations.
What is also confusing matters is that what many now regard as “open-source”, I would regard as in-public development and public source, ie. The source code, its development and maintenance is wholly in the public domain.
"Today, code that's not open source is the rare exception. "
Here is a list of the top 20 biggest grossing software companies as of 2019 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_software_companies
It doesn't matter that it's slightly out of date or that the numbers are disputed or that services are lumped in there, the biggest companies are all in there.
So tell me which ones make most of their money from open source ?
And then tell me that they aren't cool and nobody uses them anymore .... facts say otherwise
Google & IBM wouldn't make any money without open source software. Oracle would make rather less.
I'm pretty sure all of them rely on open source software for a large part of their revenue.
zlib genuinely is absolutely everywhere, there's a huge array of standards that rely on it.
Most "cloud" runs on Linux. Owning the hardware is the main way a lot of places make their money.
I'm pretty sure all of them rely on closed source software for a large part of their revenue as well. Even Google, the Android project is open source but Google Android contains the closed source Google Play. We can argue which Google rely on more for their revenue from their ad business, but there can be no argument it relies on both open and closed for that revenue.
Anyway the claim was not about relying on open source, it was claiming that closed source code is rare, so rare as to be an exception.
If that was true then all programmers employed by the software companies mentioned are rarely if ever paid to write code that is not open source. That the vast majority of their software development budgets even Microsoft's is for creating open source software. That's simply not true even for Google.
Close source code is not an exception it is not even rare, I have spent the last 30+ years as a programmer and I have never once been paid to write open source code.
Interesting rosy eyed view on working practices in the decades before the rise of the PC.
I suspect much depends on whether you worked within the academic community or in industry.
Whilst the Unix source was distributed for free - apply and AT&T/Berkeley would send you a set of mag tapes, compiling it and making it run on your platform was your problem, it was licenced. Hence the court battles and the motivation for GNU and Linux.
"Today, code that's not open source is the rare exception."
Microsoft Windows; Microsoft Office; iOS and ilk; Oracle; whatever Cisco call their router OS; MYOB; Xero; the list of proprietary software is all but endless and hardly the rare exception. I wager that more people knowingly and willingly use Microsoft's propriety slop almost every day than knowingly use OSS.
Anyone remembers the jokers who wanted "eat your own dogfood" -license, so that open source folks would get open source license, free software people would get free software license, commercial folks would get commercial license, microsoft would get their own microsoft store license etc..
Recardless to say, all these attempts that making incompatible licenses acceptable by the community are kinda failures. The software that tried the eat your own dogfood license have turned their license specification adventures to choosing one of the existing ones and went with LGPL/GPL combination. But every developer needs to try their skills in legal area, given that it's important parameter for selling software to customers.
Not really. You can use open source as a model for anything licensable, and licenses don't exist to do development, they exist to do business. F/LOSS was conceived to get round access and usage problems, and in order to do that it had to open up both the business and the development models. You can have open availability alone, and you can have open development alone but, as RMS never tires of pointing out, to be true F/LOSS you need both.
Today, code that's not open source is the rare exception.
IS there any actual evidence for that?
I'd be very surprised if that was true. Most of the software people use isn't running computers, it's running 'things' or 'companies'. Most of that isn't open unless I've really missed something.
I've also worked as a developer for 25+ years now, have never worked on open source software as part of my work. I've worked with open source software, sure, and a large portion of the work I do is built using it, but the code I write isn't, and at work, never has been.
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