Advantages of a Sustainable Software License

This is a major and fundamental switch in the software industry. Users or partners may now be part of the R&D process from a functional as well as from a development point of view. The evolution of the software is driven by user's needs and not by a marketing or worse, financial department as new enhancements may be directly  financed by the users request in a way (direct contribution through in-house human resources) or another (sponzorizing a new feature).

Thanks to customers paying in cash, the editor can afford to hire developers and can assign them full-time on developing, documenting and maintaining the product. License based revenue streams will also help finance indirect software expenses such as lawyers, infrastructure, administrative, marketing or promotion costs.

• Customers will have all the benefits of a program managed and supported by a professional editor. This includes a dedicated full time R&D team, some level of free support and assistance, patches and bug fixes that could be developed rapidly,...  
  
  
• Customers will be able to contribute to the new generic features they needed to the original project. This means that the code will be maintained, upgraded and/or debugged afterwards by the whole community and not only by the customer.
  
  
• Thanks to the "fair compensation" paradigm, customers will not increase their overall project TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). They can use their license budget either to recruit or assign internally development resources or either to mandate another contributor to the project that better know the existing code base.
  This is the fundamental principle of Sustainable Software Development : thanks to this philosophy, an active contributor will pay only part of his royalty or, according to the value of his contribution, no royalty at all, reducing the cost of ownership for the license part to the cost of standard open source projects that's to say zero. Larger contributors may even earn money by receiving shares or stock-options in the software company as a compensation for their work.

• Free and unlimited access to the source code for all the latest stable releases and to the new version under development. No delayed open sourcing. No kind of "maintenance subscription" required to get access to the latest stable build number or to the development documentation. Developers get immediately a free access to all the development resources they need as the license charges is only on certain limited type of execution (e.g. production server only)
  
  
• Similar to any classical open source project, developers are able to adapt the software to their own needs without all constraints generated by a proprietary code fully controlled by a software editor. Then if it's important for your company or your project, you don't have to wait for the editor to develop the needed updates or patches.

• The software editor is now able to finance his company thanks to revenues coming directly from license and maintenance royalties. He can then avoid inventing crazy business model, often difficult to explain to customers (let's thing about dual licensing models based on a "viral effect for derivative work", restricting access to the technical documentation to paying customers only, reselling closed source add-ons inside a professional edition that include mandatory modules in order to use the software,...).
  
  
• As there may be some limitation on the software sales, the software editor may also better control the network of authorized resellers and vendors. This avoids having companies without a real knowledge of your product being able to resell any kind of services while using your product notoriety.
  
  This also allow the software editor to better control OEM, VARs or other type of software vendors that will embed part or whole of your technology for their own benefits.
  
  
• As the main architect of the technology and through the mechanism of payment in kind, the software editor may also act as the main R&D lab shared among customers. Of course, in opposition to proprietary software, the editor has not the exclusivity of developing new features. However in practice customers will often mandate him to enhance the software.
  

The partner (e.g. a system integrator) has full access to the source code. He can then better solve problems for his direct customers (bug fixing code, adding a new features) without having to rely on the software editor in term of pricing, delay,...

The partner may get some license sales commission as it is usually the case in the industry to cover his first training, marketing and promotion costs

The partner can finally offer a wider range of services from consulting tasks to support agreements. The mechanism of payment in kind is also valid for partners and is a clear business advantages. The end-customer may directly mandate his regular system integrator in order to develop some new generic extensions that he will contribute back to the community once developed in exchange of a software license or some other form of fiar compensations. This creates a win-win situation for every actor: the customer gets the new extension he wanted, the partner can resell more value added development services, the editor and the community gets a better program.