In 2003, a small software company called Jahia put an unusual license in front of the world, and a small non-profit called the Collaborative Source Initiative was formed to explain it. The Jahia Collaborative Source License tried to hold two ideas at once: the source code should be open to everyone, readable and modifiable like any free software, and yet the people who used it commercially should still pay, or contribute work of equivalent value back. Contribute or pay was the slogan.

The idea did not survive. But it is the reason this address once carried the initiative's pages, and it deserves a careful sheet in the binder, because it anticipated almost every licensing argument of the following twenty years.

The instinct behind it is still the ordinary one, visible anywhere code is written for money: a French software consultancy billing for its engineering time asks the same question the license did, which is simply who pays for the work.

The bargain on the page

The Jahia text granted broad rights: anyone could download, study, and modify the source, and the community could develop it together in the open source manner. The difference appeared in the conditions for commercial deployment. Companies using the software to run their business owed either a license fee, scaled to use, or a contribution: code, documentation, testing, or other work the project accepted as equivalent.

The definition of commercial use was the soft spot, and the drafters knew it. The site carried pages of explanation trying to draw the line between a hobbyist and a paying user, because the whole model turned on that distinction being readable. A student running the CMS for a club site owed nothing; an agency deploying it for a client owed the fee or the equivalent work. The intention was fair; the difficulty was that fairness had to be encoded in clauses precise enough for a stranger to apply without asking.

Why it felt necessary

It is worth remembering what the alternative was. A company releasing code under the GPL in 2002 had no mechanism for asking commercial users to pay for it, and the support-contract model only worked for software complicated enough to need support. The collaborative source authors were looking for a third thing, and they were honest enough to write it into a license rather than leave it as a complaint.

The authors were not cynics. They had watched the dot-com crash kill companies whose code was genuinely open, and they believed open source had a sustainability problem it refused to name. Development costs money; a license that forbids asking for any of it leaves the builders unpaid. Collaborative source was an attempt to keep the collaborative development style, the public source, the community process, while attaching a modest obligation at the point of commercial use.

The same instinct drives a great deal of software craft today, from small studios to large vendors billing for their engineering time: the work is real, and the license is where you decide who pays for it.

Where the definition pushed back

The trouble was structural. The Open Source Definition forbids requiring royalties for redistribution, and forbids discriminating against fields of endeavor, which includes commerce itself. The Jahia license was candid about this: it never claimed to be an open source license, only a collaborative one. But the market mostly heard open and not open. A license that is neither fully free nor conventionally proprietary asks users to learn a new category, and new categories are expensive to explain.

What happened to the experiment

Jahia moved on to other licensing arrangements as its content management business grew, and the Collaborative Source Initiative faded quietly; the domain kept the old pages until the middle of the 2010s, when they finally slipped into the archive. The contribute-or-pay formula never became a family. But its diagnosis, that open source needed a mechanism for commercial users to fund the commons, kept resurfacing in different clothes.

The descendants on the shelf

The dual licensing model took one half of the idea: keep the code open, charge the commercial users under a second license. The Business Source License took another half: restrict production use until a change date releases it into open source. The wave of source-available relicensing in the late 2010s, when companies like Redis and MongoDB rewrote their terms to keep cloud providers from monetizing their work, is the same argument wearing a modern suit. Every one of those texts is a descendant of the question Jahia asked.

What the binder keeps from it

The sheet is filed not because the license succeeded but because it asked the question honestly, early, and in public. Read the old pages and you find a group of people who believed in the commons and also believed the commons had a cost. The binder's judgment is that they were right about the cost and wrong about the mechanism, and that the twenty years since have been one long attempt to find a better one. That is worth keeping on the record, because the question has not gone anywhere.

The old pages are also worth reading for their tone. They do not promise disruption or rail against the commons; they describe a working company trying to keep the code open and the lights on at the same time, and the modesty of the ambition is part of why the sheet still reads as honest.

What the text grants

Open access to source and community development, paired with a duty to pay or contribute when the use turns commercial.

What a reader should check

How the license draws the line between free and paying use, and whether that line survives contact with real deployments.

The limit of this reading

The original pages survive through web archives; the binder reads them as a record, not as a living offer.