Source First License 1.1: https://gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/grayjay/-/blob/master/LICENSE.md
This is a non-open source license. They were claiming to be open source at one point, but they’ve listened to the community and stopped claiming they were open source. They are not trying to be Open Source™.
They call themselves “source first”. https://sourcefirst.com/
They’re trying to create a world where developers can make money from writing source first software, where the big tech oligarchy can’t just suck them dry.
I’m not sure how this license would foster community contributions to the codebase, assuming that was an objective. When I say “contributor” I mean both individuals as well as corporations, in the same way that both might currently contribute to the Linux kernel (GPL) today.
As written, this license grants the user a non-exclusive license for non-commercial use. But that implies that for commercial users – like a corporation – they’ll have to negotiate a separate license, since Futo Holdings Inc would retain the copyright. So if a corporation (or nation state entity) throws enough money at Futo Holdings Inc, they can buy their way into any sort of license terms they want, and the normie user can’t complain.
This is kinda like the principal-agent problem, where the userbase and individual developers now have to trust that Futo Holdings won’t do something reprehensible with the copyrights, be it licensing to certain hostile countries or whatever.
Whereas in the GPL space, individual developers still own their copyright but license their code out under a compatible license. So even Linus Torvalds cannot unilaterally relicense the Linux codebase, because he would need to seek out every copyright owner for every line of code that exists, and some of those people are already dead.
I’m personally not a fan at all of forcing individual contributors from the community into signing over copyright (or major rights thereto) or other stipulations as a condition for making the codebase better, with the exception of an indemnity that the code isn’t stolen or a work-product for hire. I used GPL in the comparison above, but the permissive licenses like MIT also have similar qualities.
EDIT
Thinking about it more, would corporations even want to contribute? Imagine CorpA decides to add code, having already paid for an existing commercial license from Futo Holdings. But then CorpB – who is CorpA’s arch nemesis – pays Futo Holdings an absurd amount of money and in return gets a commercial license that’s equivalent to the WTFPL. That means CorpA’s contributions are available for CorpB to use, but CorpB has zero obligation to ever contribute a line of code which CorpA could later benefit from. It becomes a battle of money, and Futo Holdings sits as the kingmaker. GPL abates this partially, if CorpA is both using and distributing code. But the Source First License v1.1 has zero mitigation for this, apart from “trust me bro”.
I don’t think that’s the main objective of the FUTO license. I believe the main objective is to incentivize developers to create great software that respects individual users and fights back against the big tech oligarchy.
Yep. That’s the point.
I don’t quite see the issue here. Can you explain a little more? A third-party would just get a license to sell the software, not to develop it.
Isn’t this currently possible with Open Source™? Like the whole point of Open Source™ is that anyone can use the software for anything, right? ICE probably uses Linux now to manage people in internment camps in the US. If anything, wouldn’t the FUTO license be better for potentially preventing this?
Isn’t this exactly the case in Open Source™? Google may contribute something to Linux, but my company will never contribute anything. Seems like Google is ok with my company benefiting from their work.
That’s fair. I stated my assumption because perhaps they have different objectives. That said, history is quite clear: the greatest success of open-source software development is that it pools efforts from anyone – truly anyone – that is willing and able to put in the time, be it individuals or workers hired by a corporation.
When a license is heralded as an alternative to open-source – as the title of this post does – I think said license needs to be evaluated against the historical success story that open-source projects like Linux, BSD, Blender, etc have demonstrated. Not having the quality of attracting community contributions is a negative, but all licenses have some sort of tradeoff and ultimately that’s what people evaluate when picking a license.
This is a laudable goal, though I think the ACSL is more direct at doing the same. It too is a non-open source license, but IMO, I give credit to them for being upfront about that, rather than pointless muddying of the term “open source” that Futo attempted (and ultimately failed at).
More dogmatically, I don’t see how elevating Futo Holdings Inc (or any other company that will manage software licensed under Source First v1.1) into a “benevolent dictator company for life” will fight against the tech oligarchy. It might act as a counter to FAANG specifically, but there’s no guarantee that Futo Holdings doesn’t end up joining their side anyway, or gets bought out by the oligopoly. Which would then put us all worse off in the end.
Futo Holdings Inc, as the assigned owner of copyright over a software project, reserves the right to license their software however they choose. They can absolutely issue a license to allow a company to privately develop an in-house fork. In copyright speak, the Source First license being “non exclusive” means Futo Holdings can issue someone else a different license. History shows us examples, such as Microsoft’s non-exclusive license of DOS to IBM, which was quite handy since that allowed MS-DOS to be sold with non-IBM PC clones.
And for an example of licensing that allows in-house edits and recompiling, see the source code license offered by AT&T Labs to various universities, which included one UC Berkeley that eventually developed BSD Unix.
Use, yes. Distribute? Absolutely not with GPL. If ICE wants to create an OS designed to optimally coral unlawfully-detained people in barbaric conditions, then they – just like you, me, the DPRK, or Facebook – can fork Linux and do that. But if ICE then wanted to distribute that CruelOS to another country’s border patrol or secret intelligence or to a private defense firm, they would be obliged by the GPL terms to also offer whatever source code they modified in the Linux kernel to produce CruelOS.
GPL is about making sure the same rights perpetuate for all of time, for all future users, always. If Linus Torvalds turned evil today, the remaining kernel devs would just fork. Whereas Futo Holdings makes no guarantees, and they themselves can turn evil one day. This isn’t even a contrived example. See IBM/Hashicorp’s Terraform and the FOSS OpenTofu that spawned after they tried to change the license.
If Google contributed to Linux, it would be GPL licensed. Google knows that this means the playing field will always be level: no one can built and distribute that code in a way that Google couldn’t later benefit from.
Think of it like this: Google buys everyone in the tavern a beer. Everyone’s happy. But part of the deal is that if anyone else buys for themselves a beer, they have to buy for everyone as well. Google is fine with this, because it means that Microsoft wearing the dark suit will also have to pony up if he wants another drink. As will Netflix in the skinny jeans sitting at the booth. As would Ericsson, the Swede dancing jovially to a tune.
With the Source First license, Google has no guarantees that Microsoft won’t use his manly charisma to charm Futo Holdings into giving him a better deal than what Google got. Google is bitter at that prospect, and decides not to buy everyone a beer after all. You, me, and Bob who fell asleep in the corner now need to pay for our own beers, but the bartender won’t give us a group discount anymore. We are now all worse off.
In closing, I had this to say in an earlier post:
If you’re not building (software) communities, the struggle will not succeed.
It does inherently lean into the concept of corporate forks over community forks. A byproduct of prioritizing monetary gain. I think the license is really just a foot in the door to allow for community audits. Realistically I don’t see anyone wanting to contribute to something like this unless the product has slim to no real competition.
Community audits sound great on paper, but it’s something which the FOSS licenses (eg GPL, MIT) also provide. As a practical matter though, auditing has a two-fold objective: 1) identify risks so they can be quantified, and 2) mitigated. For non-commercial users in the community, an audit is high-effort with low return. And further, this license disincentives mitigation even if the audit does turn up something, because of having to sign the copyright away just to submit a bug fix.
For commercial users, auditing is more palatable, being part-and-parcel to risk management. And these commercial operations have the budget to do it, but then this license means the best way to keep improvements out of their nemesis’s hands is to maintain an internal fork that never returns code to the public repo. So commercial users will have to pay more to obtain that sort of license.
All this seems harder than just using MIT code (or even GPL), if such is available. And that’s exactly why I can’t see myself using source-available software in a personal or professional capacity, when there’s any other choice available. It seems worse off for everyone except the owner of the public repo. The license stinks of vendor lock-in, and even if I’m not the one who will pay the rent, I dogmatically will not support rent-seeking like this.
Im pretty sure the objective is not to get contributions. You talk like contributions could actually replace actual full time maintainers of the software. They cannot. If a payment of corpB is large enough to completely buy out the software, then the objective is completed in the sense that this should provide enough money to maintain the software by paying maintainers or even hiring new ones, there is no need to beg for corpo contributions then.
The objective is not to make the most community friendly licence, it is to pay the people who do the actual work.
A lot of my response was already rendered further down the thread. So I’ll only comment on this part:
If this is the singular or main objective that Futo has, then the basis of OP’s post is entirely dead. The title of the post is very clearly “FUTO License, an alternative to Open Sourd”. But if we take your submission as fact, then there is no comparison whatsoever.
Open Source – whether using OSI’s definition or including FSF’s – has almost never focused on the financial aspect, for better or worse. It’s why commercial entities like Canonical and Red Hat are so rare, because software engineers prefer spending their free time working on great things rather than doing admin.
Futo sounds like they want to be a commercial entity like Red Hat but without the limitations that Open Source or Free Software would impose on them. And they’re welcome to do that, but that endeavor cannot honestly be called comparable to the mostly community-driven projects like BSD, GNU, and Linux, or commercial ventures like RHEL and whatever cloud-thingy that Canonical is selling now.
If the goal is to pay for professional talent, with revenue from B2B sales, and only non-commercial users get a free-bee, then that’s just a shareware company with more steps. Futo trying to dress themselves up like Red Hat remains as disingenuous as when they tried to misinform open-source folks about what open-source is.
I’ll be frank: my interest in software licensing is about finding licenses that strike a sensible balance. It’s about distributing rights and obligations that are equitable and sustainable, while perpetuating software uptake and upkeep. It’s a tough cookie. But I think the Source First license alienates too many potential audiences and its financial model falls apart under any game theory analysis. So I’m not keen on looking down this avenue anymore.