Hey OSS folk: we need to start thinking outside the conventional GPL licensing box. We need a rational ecosystem for paid plugins and themes (in WordPress) and analogous capabilities on other OSS platforms. I think we can create a much better arrangement for all involved.
I envision a licensing system that allows participation in an overarching governance system. If you want to take part in a project that uses this system and use its associated .org repositories and so on, you’d get a license for any internet-facing deployment. You’d pay a small licensing fee, let’s say five bucks a year, calibrated downward as needed to take differences in international buying power into account. Five bucks gets you a vote. For some number of sites, let’s say two dozen, a single five buck payment would get it done, but for big players, measured by sensible metrics but I’m not sure which, more cash would be involved. And bigger players would have more (but not infinitely more) votes.
It’s a board!
The main task for voters would be selecting a three or five-person board, but for really large issues (classic editor or blocks, to take an example from the past), direct votes might be called.
In a greenfield new project, I’d propose a mechanism where the project creator got a big block of votes, such that they could be benevolent dictator for a while (I think there’s value in this, early on—clarity of vision and so on), but as popularity of the project grew and more people acquired licenses, the control would naturally and gradually shift over to the community as a whole.
Who runs the thing that run the things?
Who would run this? I imagine a few pillars of the OSS world forming some legal entity that maintained the license sales and voting procedures. It would be possible, maybe even preferable, to run this on a purpose-built blockchain, but it’s hardly a requirement, as the community would just need to trust whoever was running it.
Now then, what about the money? All the things you might expect the money could be used for would be what the money was indeed used for, at the discretion of the elected board. And we’re talking about a substantial amount of money, the kind of money that drives early marketing campaigns, but clearly also full-on development in the form of sponsorship for core developers and, well, other things like a project’s training videos on YouTube…all the things.
Not GPL
To make it work, we’d need to step away from GPL licensing. That sounds severe and even ill-advised, but just because something isn’t running under a GPL or MIT license doesn’t in the least mean it can’t be open source.
With a non-GPL license, we could have the benefits of open source, but create ways for companies writing plugins and the like genuinely to keep control over how their code was used. The code could remain open, or mostly open, but no one would be in a position to simply take code and sell it as their own (something GPL expressly allows). If the takeover of ACF as SCF didn’t feel right to you, this is how to fix the rules that make it possible.
If we went this route, selling licenses for use of the governance services of new OSS projects, we could deal with problems such as though currently creating havoc in the WordPress community in a straight-up fashion. Under this kind of arrangement, Matt Mullenweg would have migrated out of a BDFL role years ago. We can’t undo the WordPress GPL license (if we even wanted to), but we could avoid wasting our time wringing our hands and making squeally noises. That’s right: squeally noises.