A historic view of the practice to delay releasing Open Source software: OSI’s report

The Open Source Initiative published today a new report that looks at the history of the business practice to delay releasing their code under freedom-respecting licenses. Since the early days of the Open Source movement, companies have experimented with finding a balance between granting their users the basic freedoms guaranteed by Open Source licenses while also capitalizing on their investments in software development. One common approach, albeit with many different flavors, is what this report calls “Delayed Open Source Publication” (DOSP) — “the practice of distributing or publicly deploying software under a proprietary license at first, then subsequently and in a planned fashion publishing that software’s source code under an Open Source license.”

The new report titled “Delayed Open Source Publication: A Survey of Historical and Current Practices” was authored by the team of Open Tech Strategies (Seth Schoen, James Vasile and Karl Fogel) based on crowdsourced interviews. Their research was made possible through a donation by Sentry and the financial contributions of OSI individual members. 

Like the authors, I found that the historical survey revealed numerous surprises, and what I found even more intriguing are the new questions raised (see Section 7) that beg for more dedicated research. 

I encourage you to give it a read and share it with others. We encourage feedback from the community: I hold office hours for OSI members and you can discuss this on Mastodon or LinkedIn.

Download the report.