Prosperity Public License

Geoffrey Huntley

a personal monorepo of Geoffrey Huntley's software

Software produced and maintained by Geoffrey Huntley is typically dual-licensed under the License Zero Prosperity Public License and the License Zero Patron License. The Prosperity License limits commercial use to a 32 day trial period, after which license fees must be paid to obtain a Patron License.

A waiver may also be granted waiving the non-commercial clause of the Prosperity License without requiring a Patron License. These are granted on a case-by-case basis to friends, family, repeat contributors, folks who do good things in their community and usually when the person requesting one makes a compelling case about why the non-commercial clause shouldn’t apply to them.

Geoffrey thinks the definition of open source is in need of some reality checks. Without getting into too much detail, the open source community has a sustainability problem. As projects grow in size many maintainers burn-out or find themselves unable to satisfy increasing support and maintenance demands. Finding reliable, well-defined funding sources is extremely challenging (donations simply don’t work for the vast majority of projects) and while funding isn’t the only or exclusive way to address open source sustainability, it’s certainly one component of an overall approach. As a community if we’re going to try and improve the sustainability of the projects we rely on, and the health of their maintainers, then we have to expand the umbrella of open source to allow that maybe, just maybe, compensating maintainers for the large amount of time they dedicate to creating those projects, and placing restrictions on the use of those projects as an enforcement mechanism, isn’t such a bad idea.