Hive Commons License

Discussion

Luke Duncan:

"The introduction of a novel license could help bridge this ideological gap by providing a more balanced way to enforce on-going contributions to the commons than the all or nothing approaches of copyleft and permissive licensing respectively.

In order to provide a practical middle ground between copyleft and permissive licenses we need a legitimate way to assess the value of proprietary derivative works and provide compensation for any negative impact the work may have on the commons. The challenge is that it can be difficult to assess the value of something like intellectual property, which is non-fungible and rarely changes hands, in both a fair and efficient manner.

An elegant solution to this challenge was proposed in the context of property taxes by the economist Arnold Harberger. Harberger’s model for a self-assessed tax required individuals to set the value of their property and pay taxes based on their self-assessed valuation. To ensure that it is in the interest of the individual to self-assess accurately, they are required to sell their property at their self-assessed valuation if they are approached by a buyer. This mechanism generalizes well and is the basis of Posner and Weyl’s proposed common ownership self-assessed tax or COST that they describe in detail in their paper “Property is only another form of monopoly.”

If we apply this type of self-assessed taxation in the context of an open source license we might end up with a license with the following basic provisions:

Software under this license can be used freely so long as any derivative works are provided open source and under the same license.

Software under this license can be used while keeping derivative works proprietary, but such derivative works are subjected to a self-assessed tax so long as they remain proprietary.

If a proprietary derivative work’s owner is paid their self-assessed valuation they must immediately open source the propriertary derivative work. (For clarity throughout the rest of this post we can call this hypothetical license the Hive Commons License or HCL)

The first provision would create a viral quality to the license similar to existing copyleft licenses, while the second and third provisions provide an alternative means of compliance that allows for use of the software for proprietary commercial applications while still ensuring that such uses fairly and consistently grow the commons. Even if the revenue from such taxes are completely ignored, the cost of keeping works proprietary as opposed to releasing them open source would incent users of the license to include their derivative works in the commons rather than keeping the work proprietary. Or at least provide an accurate valuation that allows interested parties to pull the work into the commons if they desire. However, as the commons grows the revenue generated from taxes may become significant, and so its important to consider how such revenue would be allocated."

(https://medium.com/1hive/harberger-taxation-and-open-source-58dcdbab140d)