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I'm a lawyer in private practice, so my job is to serve my client's interest, and if they wanna pick a proprietary model, that's their right to do it, and I will help them do it. That's my job. My main goal in doing that is making sure that they're calling it open source when it's not, because that would actually be pr... |
Then there are other sort of hybrid models where it's like, "Well, something is released under a proprietary license, but it transforms to open source after a certain amount of time." Okay, that's definitely a hybrid model, but it changes from one to the other very clearly. One thing I would point out is that you don't... |
If you take a larger view and say, okay, all you're really doing there is releasing something under a proprietary license and then later releasing it under open source terms, that's a time-honored tradition in the technology business, where companies will put a lot of development into code and they will give it sort of... |
There are infinite variations, and when you're in the proprietary area, not open source, as I mentioned as we were discussing previously, by definition there are infinite variations, because there's no standardization in proprietary licensing. I'm fine about all these models as long as people are clear about what they'... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[51:47\] Right. So there's this practice - and I won't name any companies by name - by which a company will put out software under the AGPL; any contributions that come into it will come under a CLA, so that the company retains some rights to that. And essentially what they do is they allow everybod... |
**Heather Meeker:** What you're describing - I'm just saying this because obviously you understand it, but for the benefit of others listening - is kind of a classic dual license model, maybe with a twist of limited enforcement. A company will release something under a copyleft license, and today the most popular one i... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, this is exactly what MySQL did, right? People would have to modify MySQL in their proprietary... |
**Heather Meeker:** Yes, they pioneered this model; they used a slight variation of GPL too, but essentially what it means was if you wanted to distribute the software in a proprietary product, you had to go and buy a commercial license to the code. This has been around for quite a while. It enjoyed, I would say, a gre... |
Then, I think also what you're describing is that if the assumption is that most commercial enterprises couldn't use the code without violating the open source license, the company would not go after them until they thought they were making enough money to make them interesting as a licensing target. And that, they hav... |
I spend a lot of time trying to resolve issues like this in the context of transactions. When a company is being sold to another, lawyers like me spend a lot of time doing due diligence on licenses and so forth. This comes up a lot, so here's the canonical situation that happens. A company has developed a product and t... |
The thing is that those issues are not hugely difficult to resolve, and the reason is twofold. One, clearly there's a proprietary alternative available. Two, you can usually buy the proprietary license at basically a list price. The list price doesn't tend to be hugely expensive because there's essentially a free alter... |
\[56:13\] There is a certain aspect of this dual licensing that it's kind of introducing a "license bug" into the world. So if you take a library that's GPL and you put it out in the world, people can use it internally, but as soon as they distribute it, it's a license bug, basically. If you're gonna do that and create... |
There are some people who really look negatively on dual licensing; actually, I think it's got a fair amount of acceptance in the free software community because the notion is "Well, you have to make your money somehow." But for me, working out issues practically with clients every day, it's really about transparency, ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** You mentioned that it's less popular today than before - why do you think that is? |
**Heather Meeker:** You know, I think it was not a hugely profitable model, because as I say, the prices for software like that tend to not be very great. One of the things I've said already is one of the great things about open source is that it's standardized. What that means is if I wanna use code under an open sour... |
By the way, when I say the licensing model was popular, the way that happened was the venture capitalists started to warm up to it, and I think they viewed it pretty favorably for a while, but it fell out of favor probably because it just wasn't all that viable from a commercial point of view. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[59:54\] You had a nice line a little bit ago, "People need to make money somehow", and that kind of tracks back to this general topic of sustainability that we've been talking about. GPL licenses have tried to inject some sustainability by requiring contributions to come back in and modifications t... |
**Heather Meeker:** I think that we're really at the point where what is working these days for sustainability are these big community projects. I mean, Linux is a poster child case. Many companies involved, many individuals involved, sufficient funding for the project, mostly from the corporate interest that are takin... |
The traditional wisdom on this is that if you're gonna run an open source project on your own, as a business, you have to be selling razor blades, meaning that you're selling something you're making money on - traditionally, that's the razor blades, and you're giving the razor away, which is the open source. So if you'... |
It is also sustainable to get many people in the industry to participate and cooperate in a big open source project, and have it be funded by the members - that's probably the more popular model now, to have these community organizations like OpenStack and Cloud Foundry and Linux Foundation, where they're running big p... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that's interesting. When I think about that in the kind of startup case, it's like, you know, startups are releasing libraries and framework all the time, and contributing to them, and all of those underlie how they're building their product, but at the end of the day they're making money on th... |
**Heather Meeker:** That's exactly right. They have to reserve something on which they're going to leverage their assets to make money and it's quite possible to do that, but they're never releasing whatever is their core value for their company. |
\[01:03:43.05\] Now, there is a model which is like a pure services model. I kind of put Red Hat into that category, and some other companies that have come and gone... So you can make money doing maintenance and support and custom development and so forth around an open source project, but the -- I mean, Red Hat aside... |
A lot of the companies that tried to make money doing Linux development services, they kind of came and went. They may have been successful in the short run, but I think in the long run it just wasn't considered the kind of business that would be funded by outsiders. It might be perfectly viable as a personal business,... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's a good way to wrap things down. Before we close out, I just wanna see if there's anything else that you think people should know around emerging or interesting legal issues that we haven't yet touched on today. |
**Heather Meeker:** For me, things that are interesting include... If you read in the media about open source -- it's pretty amusing to read in the media sometimes about open source, because people come up with a new open source thing every month. Things like "open source yoga", you know... \[laughter\] I can't remembe... |
There are really interesting ideas in open data, open hardware, the intersection of open source software licensing with standards licensing, and so-called open standards. These models are very nascent. People have been trying to figure out how they work, but they're very challenging to even structure, much less impleme... |
I think that a lot of what's interesting for me -- I like the newest ideas of course, and those models have not sorted themselves out yet, so there will be lots of interesting things happening in the next decade or two about open hardware, open standards, open data, and I think that's where the frontier of some of this... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** An exciting future to look forward to! |
**Heather Meeker:** Yeah. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Thanks for talking to us, Heather. We really enjoyed this conversation. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's been great. |
**Heather Meeker:** Thanks, this was a lot of fun. Thanks very much! |
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