Re: Funding GPL projects or funding the GPL?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 01:09:32PM -0300, Federico Ferreres wrote:
> I'd love to see a new license, that could be called the fGPL. That would
> be the "Funded GPL". To be able to use fGPLd programs you'll HAVE to
> contribute some small amount of money to the fGPL foundation. You'll not
> be required to pay for any individual fGPL software, just a plain simple
> yearly $10 or $20 charge. And you will be able to distribute exactly
> where that money goes, among all the different projects. If you can't
> pay $20 a year it will be no problem, just a bit penalty: all fGPL
> software would be free as in beer once the year passes (old releases).
> 
> This is my opinion. I'd gladly pay the $20, as long as EVERYONE ELSE
> pays their $20. That's why we don't see many donations now: because you
> have this felling everyone else is just waiting for a fool like you to 
> contribute to project X in order to save it.

If this model could be enforced, i.e., everyone had to pay, then this
would indeed be a revolutionary change to how software is developed.
It would bring in more than enough money.

One problem I see is that you'd be talking a huge amount of money,
potentially money on Microsoft scale.  Managing that money, making
it go to the right places, without it sticking to the fingers of
management, isn't likely to happen.  You'd need a real corporate
structure to do this and I suspect it would fail because noone would
trust them to do the right thing.  There are plenty of people who
don't trust the FSF now.  Imagine what the feeling would be if 
$2B/year were headed their way.

One possible answer is to make each program its own profit and loss
center or corporation.  But now you have to send $20 to the kernel.com
people and $20 to the apache.com people and $20 to ...

Another problem is that GPLed software is essentially software in the
public domain.  Many people in many parts of the world will not obey
the license and will just stop shipping the source.  Yes, you can 
catch and pressure some of them, but you'll not catch the majority
of them, just the dumb ones.  We found this out with BitKeeper, 
people downloaded the source and promptly removed the openlogging
feature, even checking in a changeset with comments like "Disable
that stupid openlogging feature".  You couldn't find a more blatent
violation of our license if you tried, but that doesn't stop people
from doing it.

The problem looks pretty intractable to me.  I'm glad you are thinking
about it, I'd much prefer a world that was closer to open source than
to Microsoft.  I've thought about it a lot and my attempts have pretty
much failed, so it's encouraging to see someone else thinking hard 
about this.