istiak101 / open-contributor-license

This tries to solve the problems of other "open source" license

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open-contributor-license

This tries to solve the problems of other "open source" license.

Problems with GNU licenses:

Every projects that is licensed with any GNU GPL family licenses and it's derivatives must use similar license unless re-licensed under a different license. And the GNU family of licenses are strict about making everything open. While the original maintainers can easily re-license or have a dual-license system in place. Forks/future maintainers most of the time don't have that luxury. In many cases when parent project simply dies because the maintainer have no time/money/resources or wish to continue the project(or died in a accident, no pun intended); if any potential (future) contributor want to fork the project and they do so. They may not have any incentives(be it money/resources or anything) at all to continue the project just because the main project is GPL(AKA shit) licensed. The copyleft license may have worked in nineties but they are no longer relevant(this is my personal opinion).

Problems with MIT/BSD licenses:

The problem with these kinds of license is a big companes like Apple can take codes from BSD operating system and make Darwin and never contribute anything back. The maintainers feel betrayed(well you should've pick GPL), exhausted. Thus the project may die based on maintainers frustration.

Problems with Open Source in general

  • It's free why should I donate to the project?
  • It's open source why are you asking money to give me the source code?
  • The maintainers must have lots of free time let's ask how to fix this instead doing some basic research.
  • Big company: Oh nice project. Let's take their code/concept and make lots of money. We won't contribute anything back.
  • Bugs? Let's bash the maintainers/developers without giving any proper bug report. I wasted my megabytes downloading this shit.

So what problem this license tries to solve?

This license tries to solve problems with other popular Open Source license problems that can not solve above problems. The license model is Open Contributor which means the source code will only be open to contributors and closed for everyone else. Anyone wanting to have the source code must contribute to the project any way possible. Be it money or other resources like designers can give graphics, programmers can contribute code, translators can translate in their own language, etc. Key takeway from this model is companies can't simply pickup the project and the source code is not open to evryone like other Open Source license. You want the source code? You conntribute to the project first.

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This tries to solve the problems of other "open source" license