this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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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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[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 4 points 6 months ago (5 children)

You dont understand what FOSS means then. Free in FOSS means freedom, not free beer. You can absolutely charge someone to use it, which I'm not suggesting. I'm saying if a corpo uses software under my idea of a license, they have to pay fairly, thats it.

[–] twei@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 6 months ago (4 children)

I know what FOSS means, but it seems like you think a license only needs to comply with one of the rules set up by OSI to be a FOSS license. If you charge your users (corps are also users) licensing fees, then you're discriminating against specific fields of endeavor (users making money using your software). I'd argue you're also interfering with other software projects, as some projects are strictly refusing donations (uBlock Origin as a popular example). As a last point: how would a business know which software it's using and how do you define what project should get how much of their 1% of revenue? If a business is using proprietary ERP-Software, and that is using any random FOSS-Library, then how would that business know that the library is being used and, assuming they found out, how would they determine how much to donate?

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 4 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Many questions. Thanks for asking.

As I understand it, you can very well charge for your software under foss terms. otherwise it would he free beer, no?

Who would get how much is to be determined. I asked a question and since it doesnt exist, I proposed an answer. So far, I‘m at equal shares. 10 projects means 0.1% revenue for each. If one doesnt take donations, its more for the rest, etc.

If I use a proprietary software I am not liable to their licensing agreements upstream. Pretty easy actually. I dont care what deal micorosoft has with some other dude when I install windows. Thats just absurd. But yes, your vendor would have to pay since they used the code.

[–] Octorine@midwest.social 5 points 6 months ago

You can charge for FOSS, but you can't prevent the first person who buys your software from sharing it with everyone else for free.

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