This is the opportunity to write a wish list

Posted Jan 8, 2026 17:08 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: This is the opportunity to write a wish list by paulj
Parent article: European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

Bear in mind, it's impossible to sell a licence for FLOSS software if you're not the copyright holder or appointed representative thereof. Which means it's pretty much impossible to sell a licence full stop.

But there is nothing to stop you offering support and maintenance contracts. And as mentioned elsewhere, if a company needs a "CE for software" mark, and you're the maintainer, brilliant (if that's what you want)! Sign a maintenance contract that says "you pay me £X, and I'll take care of the legal headache".

Which basically means providing a few important documents about how you intend to handle bug reports, how you will handle security problems, etc etc. Just remember that those documents (which you wrote) now have legal binding force over you. And the company will probably say "if you're not dealing with bugs, we expect you to deal with (our) feature requests".

Cheers,
Wol

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This is the opportunity to write a wish list

Posted Jan 8, 2026 17:33 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Well, the point is the service can be minimal and equivalent to what the buyer would get just downloading it. So the contract will be "I supply you with the GPL software for you to further develop and/or deploy in your own system, and I will support it for X time including giving you the updates on a best-effort basis". (This obviously doesn't preclude having other offerings, with more meaningful SLAs).

You don't have to do much. You just have to do something minimal, and fit in with standard corporate purchasing processes.

To wit: Signing off on spending (say) €200/annum to purchase some necessary software (inc. as per above) could be something a fairly low-level manager has the authority to sign-off on within the standard processes of the company. Where "donate €200 to a Free Software developer each year" would be something not covered in those processes and require an exceptional process to be followed, that ends up on the desk of a VP or higher.

Make it easy to do within standard corporate processes, and maybe more will do it?