Fission Fragments is our weekly links roundup. You can also subscribe by email.
Weekly Links
Tomorrow, Thurs, June 11th, our weekly video chat is going to cover Open Source and Money, in a fireside chat style discussion with Erlend Sogge Heggen. So what better time to share a number of links related to open source – many of them sourced from Erlend directly!
We’re skipping the forum permalinks this time. If you want to discuss any of these items or add your own – we’re happy to include them in future fragments – visit us in chat or on the forum. Or hit reply to tell us what you think about the format and content so far. Have a great week!
The Fair Share Clause: A Thought Experiment for Sustainable Open Source, Erlend Sogge Heggen, Oct 2018
We added the article link to our forum way back in August 2019, so I’m really glad we’re going to get to chat with Erlend live about these topics. The article considers a kind of “fair trade” certification for open source:
My intention is not for this to be a legal document, but rather a social contract. Similar to how the Fairtrade certification leaves it up to consumers to make informed decisions with their purchases, this clause would leave it up to open source maintainers to make an informed decision on which company they should invest their time in. For companies however, should they choose to honour it, the Fair Share Clause will function much like taxation.
Discourse Gives Back 2017
2017 was the first year that Discourse, the open source forum software and company, grew big enough financially to “earmark funds to contribute directly to the projects [they] rely on most”, with over $50KUSD donated to various open source projects. It’s a great thing to aspire to, and also serves as an example of “fair share” – Discourse’s financial success means they can directly support other projects.
Does your company give back to open source projects it uses in a formal, regular way? We’d love to hear of more examples like this – leave a comment in the forum.
Kyle Mitchell’s Blog - Open Source, Licensing, and more
Kyle Mitchell is a prolific dual class software engineer - lawyer, who specializes in licensing, with a sub-specialization in open source licensing. You should read his blog if you like those topics.
License Zero is one of Kyle’s projects, which is a toolkit for supporting open software developers through selling licenses. That may sound strange, but I encourage you to check out the Parity open, share-alike license (pay for closed source usage), and the Prosperity non-commercial license (pay if using for profit).
The Secrets of Successful Open Source Business Models, Imran Ghory
This is a recently published post by Imran Ghory of Blossom Capital that focuses on venture scale business models to go along with open source licensing. It does a good job of outlining the (current) four business models and example companies that used them successfully:
Over the last few decades we’ve seen the open source world converge to four fundamental open source business models that can achieve [+$100M in annual revenue]: open-core, professional services, hosting, and marketplace.
– @imranghory
Open Values
Moving on from open source as code + license, Erlend published on Meilisearch’s values, which in turn leads us down an (excellent) rabbit hole of other organizations and their values and principles.
The Mozilla Manifesto states that “we should more explicitly set out our aspirations for the human experience of the internet”, and goes on to list 10 principles that are worth reading and thinking about which of them resonate the most for you or your company or project.
Created by Red Hat, the Open Organization Definition lists these five characteristics: Transparency, Inclusivity, Adaptability, Collaboration, and Community.
Other organizations listed as inspirations are the World Wide Web Foundation and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Go back and read Erlend’s post on Meilisearch’s values for the full picture.
Mozilla Builders
Speaking of Mozilla, check out Mozilla Builders, which is their “fix the internet incubator” for supporting projects and businesses aligned with their goals. The Builders Slack is open to everyone, and has lots of people building great projects in it already. Say hi to Boris & Brooke if you join the channel.
Fission Updates
Watch the video of Brooke’s talk to the Berlin Functional Programming Group, Full Stack Web Apps without a Backend, which covers Fission’s architecture, foundational tech, and vision. The slides are available on Notist.
Our ipfs-haskell library got a minor update to work with the 0.5.x release of go-ipfs. That’s not very exciting, but now you know there’s an IPFS library for Haskell!