I do appreciate you all being very careful to point out that you respect my position, it's not coming from a place of passive aggression, etc. I don't read any of it that way, I think we're all being very respectful and understanding here, and that's great. <3

All of these points are totally understandable, and I do have a lot empathy for the position this puts you in. And with the utmost of respect and good faith, I have to say, it doesn't change anything.

I agree that devs going off half-cocked and writing jokey or amateur licenses is a problem. BlueOak is not such a thing. It's a license that was thoughtfully crafted by professional lawyers who understand this space extremely well, and had been working in it for many years. It expresses exactly my intent with the code that I release under it, more than MIT or BSD do, and in clearer language that is more accessible and straightforward.

The only downside is that it does not belong to an arbitrary set of licenses approved by a governing body, making it a challenge for institutions that have substituted the judgement of that governing body for investing in their own investigation into the code that they harvest from OSS developers. Offloading that judgement may be a perfectly rational thing to do! I'm not taking issue with that. But also, why is that any concern of mine?

For most of my adult life, I have created software and given away most of it, free of charge, and with basically no restrictions on its use. I do this because I enjoy the process, and I enjoy the altruistic nature of open source, and the autonomy of creative freedom. It fills my soul. Like those companies that pull in code from the OSS commons and offload their judgement to the OSI, I am seeking to maximize my own benefit, as we all are.

I will keep using my precious lifetime to create useful and beautiful things, and I will keep giving them away for free. But if I need to do so in a way that conforms to arbitrary rules and restrictions imposed on my autonomy by some other party, well, that's not a labor of love anymore, that's a job. I'll do that job, but not for free.

I said at the top of this post, and it is 100% a legitimate offer, if a company has a problem with any of the OSS licenses I've chosen, I will gladly license it to them under different terms for a reasonable fee.

So really, "This license is inconvenient for us!" kind of becomes a feature rather than a bug. You can all already use the code pretty much however you like (assuming you provide the license with any distribution or fork, and don't hold me liable for what you decide to do with it, which is effectively the same in practice as MIT/BSD anyway). I don't believe that any individual person would read the BlueOak license, and conclude that they don't have that permission.

The only problem is for some of the companies that have been profiting from my work for decades, and offering nothing in return. I don't particularly mind them offering nothing in return. I haven't asked for anything, after all. But I also don't see how I owe them anything.

I am not a supplier in a supply chain. I am a random artist making stuff and tossing it out into the world. A corporate entity becoming addicted to my handouts is not a mortgage on my freedom. It is completely divorced from reality to imagine that this would matter to me.

If the BlueOak license is a problem, and you aren't willing or able to pay for a license, then use another path walking library, or another glob matcher. There are plenty out there. If the pushback is "oh, those aren't as good" or "this one is too popular", ok, cool story, good luck working that out. My bad for making something useful and giving it away for free, I guess 🤣

This whole category of issue of makes me want to just license all my code as "free for noncommercial use, paid license for everyone else", tbh. The only thing stopping me is that the overhead of managing and enforcing licenses seems like it wouldn't be very fun.

License isn't OSI approved. #7

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