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TwitterI don't understand software licenses
Or rather, I believe that software licensing can stifle large-scale productivity.
Software-as-a-service is a great business model. Build something awesome, charge people to use it. I have no problem paying 37Signals, Wufoo or Pingdom for the use of their services. They all put out great products that solve problems. If they don’t solve your problem, or you wished they did so in a different way, use one of their competitors, or start your own.
I think selling software to developers is also a great model. Designers do this all of the time, with stuff like iStockPhoto or numerous fonts repositories. You can buy Helvetica and a silly vector graphic, change some colors, save an illustrator file and sell it to me as my new brand.
Open source is great, you can browse Freshmeat and find any kind of crazy project written in a language you’ve never even heard of by an insanely talented and devoted coder. And you can also find some offshoot written by another group who had some difference of opinion with some decision the original author made. These people are making the world a better place, but have essentially martyred themselves to their cause. Go look through some “support forums” for open source projects and get ready to hit yourself in the face.
I do freelance work for clients. Occasionally those clients have clients as well. Clearly I don’t need to hire a photographer when I can easily buy a photo of an old man laughing.
Likewise, its obvious to use a free, open source library or framework for a project. There are many great places out there to purchase pre-made templates or components for use in a client project, like Themeforest (with a license to do so) or Ben Curtis of Railskits fame, who sells starter kits to solve certain types of typical web-app setups. His software includes a pretty great license, allowing you to use his work as part of your own client work.
You may not redistribute the SOFTWARE to anyone and via any means other than to your customers as a part of a purchased, integrated solution, that includes functionality above and beyond that provided solely by the SOFTWARE.
Lastly, here’s a rather prohibitive license from MachForm, which I’m pretty sure prohibits distributing derivative works or assigning the license to a client.
Anyway, whats the solution to this? How can I buy something – use it, improve it, then re-sell it?
I can do this with a car or a house, but how do I do this with code?
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So… you’ve found the great divide between tangible property and intellectual property. You’re torn because logic tells you that you can buy, use, improve and sell both, yet the current state of the law doesn’t jibe with that logic.
I have to assume that you really do understand the difference. That along the way, we (society) have realized that tangible and intellectual property are valued differently and as a result, sold differently. But that doesn’t mean it has to be that way.
Paintings, sculpture and other works of “real” art can be bought and sold like tangible property, even if they’re protected by intellectual property laws. And, in fact, they can be “improved” so long as whatever government’s laws protecting that work don’t also protect so-called “moral rights” – or the protection of the integrity of the work as presented by the original artist/author.
But as a developer, you are 100% free to create a software sales agreement – to develop code that you actually sell, lock-stock-and-barrel. To do so, however, would require a little bit of license language wrangling, though, to get over the reverse hump – that you would now be prevented from “re-inventing” your prior work. So you’d still not really be selling the code lock-stock-and-barrel. Rather, you’d be selling it with a hold-back perpetual license for yourself to do with as you pleased. (Or, put another way, you could retain ownership, grant a perpetual license to your buyer to do with it as THEY pleased.)
In the end, it’s possible. See me for details if you’re really interested in doing it.
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