You can put up a non commercial license and write that if this is for a commercial application they can get in touch with you and you can discuss together a new license for their use case.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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Yeah, I'm thinking of a more easy to understand thing. "Get in touch" is too much of a barrier imo. "Agpl but you need to pay 1% of your revenue to FOSS software"
They would have to get in touch to figure out how to pay 1% either way, no?
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Generally, a free software license has to grant the 4 freedoms to be compatible to the gpl and co.
Freedom 0 is running the program however you wish, for any purpose. Imagine if that wasnt standard for free software, and having to read every license of every program you are using to find out if you are allowed to run it!
So your funny license would sadly be incompatible with other free software. Consider dual licensing it instead, with agpl + a propriatary license for businesses that hate free software, and make them pay through the nose for it.
I dont know why my license idea would be funny but thanks for elaborating. I‘ll read up on dual licensing.
They meant funny "different", not funny "haha".
Oh, ok. Yeah, different is kind of my forte.
yes, sorry for the unclear wording.
We do have funding models for open source and free software. The linux foundation for example takes donations from big players. Its not a forced donation like you suggest, but enough companies see the benefit to fund software they use, so it works. The fsf works a bit like that too, a foundation that, among other things, provides funding for important software. So we do have a way do this, but stuff slips through the cracks, like xz.
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If you want to sell proprietary software, why not just write and sell it? Or as others have suggested, dual license it? Hell, even the old shareware model could work for what you’ve described.
Unless you’re paying enforcers, how would you know if a corporation paid the right amount to use the code? How would your union determine distribution amounts to projects? How far upstream would payments go? How will disputes among developers be resolved?
I dont want to write proprietary software. I write foss software. But i dont want you to make money off of my invention without giving back, easy as pie.
The rest would obviously have to be determined. A union is a separate entity, same as the linux foundation seems to distribute donations (from another comment) it would have to be discussed and agreed upon.
Still, those who use foss, make money and dont donate upstream are scum imo.
i dont want you to make money off of my invention without giving back
Why do you think that you're interested in writing FOSS software? Nothing you've posted here supports that claim. You do, however, speak like a textbook entrepreneur who wants to be paid for their innovation.
Their concern is obviously solving the dire problem of FOSS maintainers not getting compensated for their work, not getting rich themselves.
Obviously. With this much “I/me/my” in their rhetoric, it’s clear that they’re thinking about everyone else.
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This is not FOSS then. FOSS puts no restrictions on downstream use of your software other than that you acknowledge and credit the original authors.. This is "Open Source" with strings attached. It's no different than being forced to sign an NDA to see your code.
You either make it free for everybody, or then it isn't free software.
Wrong. Free in FOSS means freely distributable, not free of cost. My idea of cost is just different than "pay for download".
It does mean free of cost if the person downstream from you decides to not charge for it after getting it from you and forking it. That's why you're not finding a FOSS license that allows this. Because again, that's not FOSS.
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By definition, if the user of the software is not free to do as they wish with the software, the software is not free/libre. It could fit the definition of open source, but it is not free/libre if you are restricting what the user can do with your source code.
And starting comments with "Wrong." Is just rude.
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Here's Stallman's/FSF's view on requiring ~~loyalties (lol)~~ royalties (read the whole section, it's explicitly stated at the end), and here's similar requirement in OSI's Open source definition.
You are free to use whatever license you wish, but don't call it FOSS/Open source if you don't agree with their definitions.
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
So, if I understand this correctly, open source means free beer, just not if you sell the end product.
its all a scam for free work for corpos then. Very disappointing.
So, if I understand this correctly, open source means free beer, just not if you sell the end product.
Yes, once you give the beer to someone, you can't require any further payments no matter what they do with it. Free software philosophy says users are free to use the software however they wish and for whatever purpose they wish without any barriers (like having to pay for commercial use).
its all a scam for free work for corpos then. Very disappointing.
I'm sorry you feel that way, and it's becoming a not-so-rare sentiment lately (or at least I've started noticing it more), but I don't agree. Look at (A)GPL and how many companies are doing their best to avoid such code - like when Google made their own C library for Android and even stated that its main goal was to avoid copyleft licenses. I've also seen plenty of people say that GPL code is pretty much useless for their work due to their company's policies forbidding its use.
I also think that revenue-based loyalties screw over small companies the most - sure, you get the donations from the massive companies that can work with 1% of their revenue gone while also keeping it free for non-commercial users, but in my view you also help those same massive corporations by making the software less viable for their smaller competitors who don't have the economies of scale on their side, and for whom that 1% might legitimately break the bank.
And to be clear, I don't mean any of my arguments as some kind of "gotcha! Look, I'm right and you're wrong", I just thought I might share my reasoning for why I don't think your statement is fair.
Thats a very reasonable answer, in brutal contrast to all the childish trolls in this community that flooded my inbox and are blocked now.
I‘ll probably just leave it at that. Its probably agpl forever for me since I‘m not giving my work to anyone who thinks they can just fuck over the little man. If we cant work out a foss version that is fair to devs then it is copyleft.
Still very disappointing. Thank you for providing the explanation though. I appreciate it.
You should not be a mod here.
Yeah, that's cool and all, but your software isn't FOSS if ppl have to pay to use it... Just license it under the AGPL and call it a day
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Sounds like you're an asshole that doesn't want to write free software
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No, there isn't and there won't be any since what your saying is absolutely against FOSS values. You are in non-commercial/commercial license territory, give a look at winrar's/unity's and the like, gpl is not for you.
Could you elaborate how it is against foss values to keep people from being exploited?
Another user, toothbrush, has already posted a link to the 4 freedoms, I'd recommend reading that entire page for a most thorough explanation.
But basically your plan goes against three of them (assuming you're going to release the source code, if you don't your not granting any of them). Freedom 0 says you can use the software however you like, for any reason including for profit. You can charge the users but once you give them the (Free) software it's completely theirs. Freedoms 2 and 3 state they can redistribute copies or distribute their modified version in any way they want provided that the give their users the same freedoms they were given.
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Technically those wouldn't be freedom licenses because it applies restrictions based on use and scale and profits. Such a license would be incompatible with open-source licenses and it turns it more into a source-available license. It's basically a "free for personal use" license.
This is why Elastic, MongoDB, and recently Redis are changing their licenses, to stop big companies freeloading on them for profit without contributing upstream.
Whether this is okay is a matter of opinion and there's good arguments going both ways.
Also, just as an example of how your license could be problematic: lets say AWS uses XZ compression internally for their S3 object storage service: 1% of monthly revenue would likely be millions if not billions. What does the XZ project do with this much money, and who gets it? All the contributors based on total lines of code attributed to them? What about those who disappeared or whose identity beyond their screen name is unknown? What about downstream sellers? If I sell an Ubuntu ISO on a DVD, do I now need to calculate how much I owe every project in Ubuntu?
Also of course it would automatically be incompatible with the GPL and even MIT/BSD licenses. So now if someone wants to use your software, it also can't be GPL or any other open-source licenses.
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Fauxpen source licenses such as this are the answer to the wrong question.
"Other people making money with my stuff" was never a problem in the software-freedom community. Whether this means "selling my stuff" or "using my stuff in a commercial setting" ("commercial use" restrictions are confusing in this way). In the free-software world we just accept that our work belongs to the community and the community can use it in ways we don't approve of.
(Edit: Likewise, it has never been an issue to sell copies of free software, although I should point out the very nature of software freedom makes it more difficult to guarantee a revenue stream in this way)
Rather, this is a symptom of the proprietary software world's reaction to free software and co-option of it (in the form of the open source movement). Tom Preston-Werner, founder of GitHub, opined that proprietary software companies should open source almost everything - "almost everything" being anything that does not "represent business value." In other words, open source cost centers but keep profit centers proprietary. Ideally, these companies would cooperate on widely used components (and some do!), but practically they spend as little as possible because capitalism. This is also why we see so many projects turning fauxpen source lately; these companies imagined they were developing cost centers and then realized they could be profit centers instead.
What was (and still is) a problem is people making proprietary derivatives of free software, and copyleft is the solution to that. If you want to extract license fees from proprietary software developers you can dual-license under a strong copyleft like (A)GPL for the free software community and sell proprietary licenses. Believe it or not, Stallman explicitly does not object to this - mainly because, if selling GPL exceptions to enable proprietary development is wrong, then releasing under a permissive license must also be wrong because that also enables proprietary development.
I think this has been the best explanation together with the least condescending attitude in this whole thread. Thank you very much for making this easily understandable. I feel understood and can now grasp this a lot better.
If more people were like you, this world would be a much better place. You have my deepest respect.
Have a nice day.
I want to say that all this backdoor incident (s, not the first and certainly not the last) only shows how well the FOSS model works. Not only for catching it promptly before it even was released, but these attacks which require a good amount of skill and time, and therefore probably money, demonstrate that some bad actors are fearful of FOSS. Also I want to point that voluntary FOSS contributors are not exploited even if some big corp uses their software without paying anything, as long as they respect the freedoms they have to give to their users. Also many (maybe most idrk) contributions to FOSS aren't made by volunteers, but through foundations/donations models paid professionals or companies putting developer time to them (I suspect this could be the case here with the guy from Microsoft that caught it).
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You may be looking for the Big Time Public Licence: http://bigtimelicense.com/
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Yeah its called an End User License Agreement.
If you pull this shit, nobody will use your application. And don't pull that double dip like Redis is doing, all you're doing is dooming your project.
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Reminds me of this one : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beerware and the fact that some projects have dual licensing like https://www.qt.io/licensing/open-source-lgpl-obligations Not what you are asking for but I can imagine that a project can make commercial companies pay for the usage of the source code and have it free to use for non commercial purposes.
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