I tried a couple license finders and I even looked into the OSI database but I could not find a license that works pretty much like agpl but requiring payment (combined 1% of revenue per month, spread evenly over all FOSS software, if applicable) if one of these is true:

the downstream user makes revenue (as in "is a company" or gets donations)
the downstream distributor is connected to a commercial user (e.g. to exclude google from making a non profit to circumvent this license)

I ask this because of the backdoor in xz and the obviously rotten situation in billion dollar companies not kicking their fair share back to the people providing this stuff.

So, if something similar exists, feel free to let me know.

Thanks for reading and have a good one.

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[–] mark@programming.dev 4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Interesting idea. A couple questions:

How would it work if the open source maintainer is a commercial company?

AFAIK there are no restrictions on when an Open source maintainer can change their license. They can do it even after their work has already been used.

So couldn't a company like, Facebook (since they own open source React) just change their React license to this one and all of sudden start charging everyone for it? 🤔

[–] crmsnbleyd@sopuli.xyz 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The old version will still be available under whatever license it was released with

[–] mark@programming.dev 1 points 7 months ago

Sure but new versions are released pretty often, which essentially means they can change their license whenever they want.

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