Readings, blogs and publications I have enjoyed this week [in no particular order]:

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Finding a proper license for our BigData Software «i(2)»

Usually, all the hip web2.0 guys that recently got VC money start their first blog post with laying out their vision, telling the world that their invention will mean a revolution to everybody's daily life. I will not do so.

Instead, I am free to admit: I don't know what the heck I'm actually doing right now. To make a long story short: we are writing software that shall be a toolkit for data-driven software. Think of the role of Hadoop for processing unstructed data or RoR for developing web-apps. We aim to produce a toolkit and framework to really simplify the creation of advanced data-driven software — non-humbly speaking, the Ruby-on-Rails for data-driven apps.

Now this if far-off from being concrete enough to give you a basic understanding of what we do, clearly a topic for a future blog post. Instead, this post shall be about an obvious question: which license shall we pick for our software? 

Finding a proper license that matches our business model and is fair at the same time

Our business model is quite clear: make money by helping other companies making money with our software; comprising training, enhancing our software, writing custom data apps, etc. — all in all nothing spectacular.

But like every software company thinking about OpenSource'ing their core product, we have the fear somebody just takes the software and refuses to give something back (not necessarily meaning money) to the original authors or us as a company. Since our software is really interesting for companies making money by selling data or offering data-driven services, we think it is normal and fair to demand a fair share of the revenue that our software enables to earn.

What we have looked at so far, is:

• GPLv2 / GPLv3: well it's for a framework that GPL is not suitable
• LGPL: suitable but we are unsure how developers think about LGPL. Please use posterous's comment function so we can find out!!
• Apache License 2.0, the classical Berkeley license: both do not ensure aforementioned tit-for-tat

On the other hand, there is a more severe problem that we also don't know how to resolve right now: when we apply a tit-for-tat scheme on the i(2) software using companies, we also have to come up with a model to have developers benefit from i(2) when they have contributed 

The impedance mismatch between licensing code and business model

I come to believe, this is caused by a fundamental issue in the current OpenSource licensing regime. The abstract nature of current OpenSource software licenses is to manage actions on/for what is being licensed: software as a collection of binaries and its backing source code. Please notice, a business model has no place in the licenses. IMHO there is clear impedance mismatch between managing the rights around software as a IP problem and managing revenue as a business problem. 

Our current research result is: there is no "tit-for-fat OpenSource license" out there that fits our needs. Our neads are simple and not really new for any OpenSource company: enable developers to happily extend the software while a good enough revenue stream is ensured such that the community – at large – can benefit from the software it develops.

Fine. How have companies solved this issue in the past?

Companies hack the licensing regime. Certain licenses are chosen solely for their side-effects to ultimately secure a certain business model. GPL is the most prominent one as can be seen with MySQL AB.

But what is missing still? An OpenSource software license that takes sharing and the generation of revenue directly into account. The license of my dreams goes something like this:

« Do whatever you like with the software and its source code but do not hold us liable for anything. When you start earning decent money, pay us a fair dollar.»

A Call for an Honest and Sustainable OpenSource Software License

I'm not a lawyer nor an experienced OpenSource business person, so please don't shoot the messenger. Instead, please help us in our quest to solve this OpenSource and tit-for-tat problem. In my opinion, the current OpenSource landscape and ultimately the OpenSource licensing offerings, are simply not sufficient. We need a license that ensures that both parties can benefit from each other: software users and software writers. We need a license that makes sure developers and companies backing OpenSource software have a sustainable stream of revenue to keep the software alive, make a decent dollar with it.

Please help us getting such a license and leave your comment. Or contact me directly via martin (at) infinipool.com as well as @zeit_geist.