Post Open will develop the Post Open Collection, a body of software that is licensed to users, through two processes: direct licensing of new work under the Post Open license, and dual-licensing of existing Open Source work as Post Open. Mr. Perens is well-informed of how to operate re-licensing of large-scale projects, having consulted on the re-licensing of Wikipedia. Dual licensing preserves the Open Source license of the software, and paid Post Open users will pay for the Open Source as well. This provides a revenue source for present Open Source projects.
Post Open will license the entire collection, not individual programs. It will use its own zero-cost license, a newly-developed license, for individuals and small businesses. They will receive the software for free, as happens today with Open Source. The zero-cost license addresses the known abuses and loopholes of Open Source licensing.
Entities which have annual revenue of greater than USD$5 Million per year, and those that wish to embed the Post Open software in a commercial product or make private modifications to the Post Open software must use the paid contract, which includes the zero-cost license by reference. The paid contract requires an annual compliance process, including
- Payment of 1% of revenue per year.
- A machine-readable accounting of what Post Open software the company uses, embeds in products, and performs as a service and the degree of use (for example, the count of products sold that contain the software).
Although the paid license gives the right to make private modifications, there are strong incentives for a company with the paid license to publish modifications. First, published modifications are maintained, and those that are not published must be manually ported to each new version of a program. Second, the developers of Post Open code get paid for their contributions, and a company that publishes enough Post Open modifications and new software will not have to pay for Post Open. If they publish more, we’ll pay them.
The compliance information and payment are submitted to a CPA (certified public accountant) that is contracted to the Post Open Administration, under NDA (non-disclosure agreement). The Post Open Administration does not see the customer’s software-use information or the information about their annual revenue, including the amount that they paid. That is kept to the CPA, which provides the Post Open Administration with totals and the received funds.
Software-as-a-service businesses must also submit the identity of customers for whom they perform software in the Post Open Collection. Both the SaaS vendor and the customer are subject to licensing.
Revenue collected by the Post Open administration will have a portion withheld for taxes and operational purposes, and the rest will be divided among the developers according to the popularity of their software and the size of their contribution. To understand a developer’s contribution to the Post Open Collection, we will instrument git repositories. There is presently a company, Merico, that has produced software for this purpose, or we can produce our own. We will take the totals from the software use reports by companies under the paid contract, and the portion of the software produced by each developer which we derive from the git repository, and arrive at amounts to be apportioned to developers.
There are also going to be project staff who can not be accounted for by lines in git repositories. The initial development of Post Open will only pay developers and creators of documentation by software usage and the size of their contribution. Payment for other roles will be developed later.
Post Open presently requires funds for its development, and will require external financial support for its first several years of operation, before it is able to self-support from licensing and service revenue. The compliance process is carried out after the end of a company’s fiscal year during which it participated in the paid contract, thus the first year of operation of Post Open is expected to produce little funding.
Post Open will develop a service organization that services all of the Post Open collection, rather than one program. Post Open will contract or employ first-line service staff who deal directly with the customer. We will pay the software developers to fix their own software, but insulate them from having to deal directly with the customer. Service revenue in excess of cost will be distributed to developers using the apportionment process.
Post Open will maintain the canonical download site for the Post Open Collection, operate its own git repository (possibly contracting an entity like github), and will positively identify all participating developers (so far, we like CLEAR, the airport expedited security folks who also sell positive identification of net users, but there are many services for doing this). We will provide developers with cryptographic passkey devices so that they are not subject to password attacks (these are available for as low as $14 at this writing), and maintain the chain-of-custody of software each developer check-in to the user, so that our software can be trusted and any bad actors can be traced and prosecuted. Files made available for download will be cryptographically signed, to further support integrity of the chain-of-custody. (We like the Nitrokey HSM device and the rest of their devices for operating our own cryptographic certification authority.)
A portion of revenue will be set aside for enforcement of the Post Open license and contract. The Post Open Operating Agreement will include authorization of the Post Open Administration to enforce on behalf of any developer of a work in the Post Open Collection, and breach leads to termination of rights on the entire collection, not just the program in question.
As Post Open collects revenue, it will develop representation of the developers for lobbying and other purposes. This is sorely needed because Linux Foundation represents corporations, not developers, and is one of the few Open Source organizations that can consistently afford to lobby.
There will be other ways that Post Open supports the developers, for example we may acquire advice for them on how to handle tax and legal complications associated with their revenue from Post Open.
Organization
HamOpen.org, which has a 501(c)3 fiscal sponsor Non-Profit Accounting Service is carrying out the research into forming Post Open. We are in good standing with the State of California and the US Internal Revenue Service.
Once Post Open begins to operate, it should probably not do so under HamOpen, which is a 501(c)3 charitable non-profit. We will probably create a 501(c)6, which is the type often used for not-for-profit industry organizations.
Leadership
Bruce Perens is principal investigator on this project. He is one of the founders of the Open Source movement in software, and was the first to announce Open Source to the world. He created the Open Source Definition, the legal rule-set for Open Source licensing that has stood for 27 years. He created the discipline of embedded Linux when he created Busybox, which formed a complete Linux command-line environment and installation system which would fit on two 3.5” floppy disks at the time. He is the architect of the modern Linux distribution through his early work on Debian. He developed the economic understanding of Open Source with his paper The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source.
Mr. Perens was recognized by the International Benchmark Council as the #2 greatest contributor to Open Source for the period of 1960-2021 (Richard Stallman was awarded #1). He has published in wireless communications, computer science, economics, law and licensing. He has held research roles for New York Institute of Technology, George Washington University, and University of Agder. Pixar, HP, and others have employed him.
Since Mr. Perens created the present rules for Open Source, standing on the shoulders of Richard Stallman, who did the earlier work on Free Software, one might blame the present issues of Open Source on Mr. Perens. However, given the incredible success of Open Source in taking over the software industry, it might be that most of the factors of its creation were essential to bootstrapping it. Here we are, 27 years later, with an opportunity to learn from our history and make positive change.
Risks
Mr. Perens is 67 years old. He will strive to develop additional leaders.
This is a very ambitious project. Possibly the largest risk is that it simply won’t be accepted by sufficient developers, another is that it will fork several ways, making it impossible for anyone to succeed. There will eventually be significant push-back, although the community has been very encouraging so far. There are simply too many companies like IBM, and organizations like Linux Foundation, that profit tremendously from the present paradigm, and 1000 people working in Open Source compliance departments that could be rendered unnecessary over time. In addition, there is a portion of the developer community that will hold to the Open Source / Free Software paradigm with religious fervor. Funders may experience negative publicity from various hostile entities.