Sustainable Software Paradigm

From Open Source Software advantages and weaknesses came the idea of building a new form of software development, protecting the benefits of Open Source Software philosophy while adapting OSS principles to commercial constraints.

The objective is to create a software development model where all users HAVE TO CONTRIBUTE in a way (=CASH) or another (= CONTRIBUTION IN KIND) to the evolution of the code pro rata their respective usage of the technology.

This development model enforces a philosophy of "quid pro quo" ("something for something") while keeping most of the advantages of open source projects (free access to the source code, free rights to modify, free rights to distribute)

Sustainable Software development answer to two key and complementary questions:

• Why are you still paying for a software you contribute to develop ?  
• Why would software developers provide for free the result of all their work ?

The goal is to obtain the best benefits of each world (Open Source and Proprietary) with :

• Free, total and unlimited access to the code of the software, free rights to modify the code and free rights to distribute the program

but allowing:

• Imposing royalties for any valuable use in order for the editor to afford to hire developers and have them work full-time on developing and maintaining the product.
• Allowing a fair treatment of any active contributors in the community by accepting license payment in kind or by granting to them some other form of compensation (shares, stock-options, etc...).

Most of the "Out of the box" enterprise software stays usually proprietary : Indeed, many software editors are not interested in freely giving the result of their work and investments without any kind of limit. You often hear such comments from software editors' CEO  while speaking of open source: "Having competitors able to take all our work and code, to distribute it for free while making a lot of derivative business without giving any kind of counterpart back to us is not a sustainable business model for our company". That's exactly in answer to such comments that we developed the sustainable software philosophy. In our opinion it is better to have more programs under some kind of sustainable software license rather than keeping them proprietary because the standard OSS business models are too restrictive to allow a sustainable business model for the software editor. This goes in the right direction which is to say, providing to the users and especially to all the developers full, free and unlimited access to the whole program's source code.

How to practically create such a license?

First we propose the split of two types of rights :

• the right to freely access to the code
  
• the right to execute the program 

Secondly, we  enforce a community based development paradigm where users have two possible ways to pay their licenses :

• In cash : as a standard software acquisition
  
• In kind: as a new way to "finance" their software by directly involving themselves in the community (give some of their time) or by mandating existing contributors in order to develop certain new features (sponsorizing a new functional enhancement).

This is the fundamental principle of the Sustainable Software Development : thanks to this philosophy, an active contributor will not pay any license fee reducing his licensing cost to the cost of any other standard open source projects which is to say zero.

This pinciple also provides incentives to users to participate in the community. In place of just being able to contribute if they want to an open source project they are perhaps using on a daily basis, they now HAVE TO involve themselves or they will be "taxed" as a passive user by a license fee. This paradigm (which we call the "No Value Added Tax") helps the original authors to create and maintain a stronger community of active developers on the long term.

Of course and similar to any open source project, this model of license also privileges community based code sharing, code reuse and code maintenance. As all the community members are acting under the same project umbrella, each user, for each new features he will add (or sponsorize), at one moment or another, will also benefit of the enhancements financed by others contributors.

That is why we are calling such programs Sustainable Software.