MySQL founder tries a new software licensing model
This interesting given I brought up a similar model talking to people here. I agree with the founder that licensing trumps support agreements in terms of supporting development of the product. He didn&#x27;t even mention amassing patent portfolios or defending patent suits. These are relevant given big tech uses them to stop competition. Development, sales to increase amount of it, and legal investments all take <i>much money</i>. Licensing from paid users is best way to get that.<p>So, how to balance that versus wants of OSS community that might test, contribute code, and so on? One thing I posted was that the license would come with source, allow fixes, allow local extensions, and simply block redistribution unless its to paying customers. Covers most OSS benefits. To address lockin, I suggested provisions to cap what they can charge for given software and (relevant here) make it go GPL if it&#x27;s abandoned.<p>Only got two reviews on this so far. I&#x27;m interested in getting some more. I think I&#x27;ve gotten pretty close to getting almost all benefits of OSS software while ensuring it stays paid for. Btw, one can also give out free or supported-at-cost copies to those help out in docs, debugging, whatever. One could also do free, AS-IS licenses for small businesses or startups so long as their revenue is below certain point.<p>The only thing I didn&#x27;t try to do is restrict by number of CPU&#x27;s, servers, whatever. It seems natural in mainframes, clouds, enterprise, whatever. I&#x27;m just concerned about its effects on how product is used in terms of innovation or robustness. One example is desktop virtualization at level of individual apps for security or failure isolation purposes. Your user experience at OS level is still about the same given you&#x27;re using same OS to run same apps. The deficiency of OS in isolation means you had to add a virtualization solution. So, should people be charged an extra $100+ an instance to make up for that deficiency? Or same thing in high-availability setup where extra nodes don&#x27;t contribute to throughput? So, I&#x27;m undecided on usage licensing.