rewrite status: November 2019 – open source, money, and craft
I'm going to get this out of the way right up front: I have very little progress to report. This is a philosophy-of-building-this-thing kind of email, not a look-at-the-shiny-demo kind of email. (The bits I promised in my last email, back in September, should be coming your way in a week or two.) For the last two months, I have been traveling—a lot, at least for me. Conference, team on-site, Thanksgiving… add in the fact that I’m pushing through a real slog of a task at my day job, and I just haven’t made a lot of progress on the programming front. That should pick back up in December, though: that slog of a day-job-task will be blessedly done, and I have a few weeks off where a big part of how I want to recharge is going after this. Here’s hoping. 🤞🏻
So, about that philosophical question. I’ve been pondering for a while how to handle the open- or closed-source question for this project. Closed source is basically the standard in apps that people have to pay for. Open source apps tend to be not only free-as-in-speech but also free-as-in-beer—so much so that people in the open source communities often seem to be outright angered by the prospect of an actual paywall for a given piece of software.1
There are a handful of exceptions and alternatives to the status quo:
- Linux distributions which are free but which ask for ongoing support
- any of a variety of crowd-funding solutions for open-source developers (Patreon, Open Collective, GitHub Sponsors, etc.)
- providing the software free but charging for hosting services (which is what Zotero, with whom I will someday be competing if when I actually ship this!)
- perhaps most interesting here—apps like Blink, which are entirely open source, and under a very restrictive license to boot, but charge for download on the App Store
I have a number of goals for rewrite. The first, and the most important, is simply to ship a good product, which makes the experience of research writing meaningfully better. Among the other goals for the project, though, I do want to do somewhat better than the status quo on the question of the openness of the source and the sustainability of the business. I take seriously Richard Stallman’s foundational frustration: at being unable to fix something broken in a piece of software. I have poked at this hard in the context of DRM on my podcast. I am deeply dissatisifed with the answers that have historically been on offer.
So I’m thinking about how rewrite might be a contributor—small, but maybe helpful—to this conversation. I want to preserve my ability to make a real living from this someday. I want to make sure that the license I choose doesn’t itself introduce incentives for e.g. large educational institutions to just go around the App Store in favor of building and distributing it themselves. (I recognze that in some sense I’m getting way ahead of myself: I still haven’t shipped anything to any App Store! But these things matter to me, and so I’m thinking about them now, not after the fact.)
The options currently in play, as far as I can see, are to do what Blink does, to keep it closed source entirely, to dual-license it—i.e. free-as-in-beer for personal experimentation, but closed for distribution of any kind, or to find something to charge for besides the service itself. I really, really want to find a way to manage the tradeoffs better than any of these. But I don’t know how. So: email me if you do?
There’s one other complicating factor in all of this. If I open-source it, then it tempts eople to contribute. And contributions are great! But then there’s a very real sense in which I want to make sure that people are justly rewarded for what is actually work. Our current approach to open source software tends to obscure this, leaning heavily as it does on unpaid labor, motivated by love of the craft. But it is labor! And if some day I am making money from this, it would seem very bad to be literally profiting from someone else’s labors without compensating them for their work. And when I say “very bad” I don’t just mean “I would feel bad”: I mean that it would be actually wrong. The obvious answer is to say “The source is open but I’m not accepting contributions”—but then that means turning away bug fixes! That seems… dumb. Again, if you have thoughts, email me!
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This remains one of the failures of the Free Software movement: for all its attempts to distinguish the kinds of freedoms they had in mind, in practice Free Software advocates have nearly always pushed software that is free-as-in-beer just as much as it is free-as-in-speech. ↩