Jusletter IT

Open Source Software (OSS) is free¹ software in human accessible code. If and once you have decided to publish² your software as OSS, you need to decide under which license to do so. There are many OSS licenses available. It is recommended using one of the approx. 90 licenses that have been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI)³ as they are widely used and accepted. The bandwidth of OSS is broad and ranges from permissive to copyleft. A permissive OSS license is a non-copyleft license that guarantees the freedom to use, modify, and redistribute, but also permits proprietary derivative works.⁴ MIT⁵ and BSD⁶ are two popular permissive OSS licenses that basically allow you to do whatever you want with the software. OSS with a strong copyleft effect refers to licenses that allow derivative works only under the condition that the modified version be licensed under the same license.⁷ GPL⁸ and LGPL⁹ are popular copyleft OSS licenses.

How can you boost innovation, increase popularity and promote dissemination of your software, and still earn a buck? How can you have your OSS cake and eat it?

OSS undisputedly fosters dissemination of code, especially if it is royalty-free. Why would anyone (e.g. company) pay you a license fee for your software if others (e.g. university) get it royalty-free under an OSS license? Could the company not just ask the university for a copy of your software – after all, it is open source? Yes, it could.

The trick of an OSS business model is to dual-license the software.¹⁰ This requires the choice of the appropriate OSS license. It might seem counter-intuitive, but the OSS license used for dual licensing cannot be permissive. The software needs to be released under an OSS license with strong copyleft effect. This will ensure that the software is improved and remains open-sourced.

The viral copyleft effect will prevent any owner of proprietary software from integrating any derivative work of the OSS in her proprietary software because the entire code would need to be released under the same OSS license.¹¹ If the software is interesting for the owner of proprietary software, she will likely agree to trade-off the unwanted copyleft effect of the OSS license against a license with a license fee. You achieve the best of both worlds: Profit from the advantages OSS gives you and still earn royalties.

Daniel Ronzani