Yeah open source monetization sucks in the corporate world. Maybe there could be a license that goes something along the lines of “you may use this for free as long as your company’s yearly revenue isn’t over X €”
I think a better enforcable solution would be taxing the shit out of these corporations, then give state grants to open source projects. I actually looked into licenses that would allow me to force corpos to donate, but they’re unenforcable.
Tying it to revenue wouldn’t work that well due to inflation. Metas AI has a license that basically says that, but with a user number. Both ideas however would mean that the project isn’t open source anymore
Quote from the Open Source Initiative definition of Open Source:
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.
In practice, open source stands for criteria a little looser than those of free software. As far as we know, all existing released free software source code would qualify as open source. Nearly all open source software is free software, but there are exceptions.
First, some open source licenses are too restrictive, so they do not qualify as free licenses. For example, Open Watcom is nonfree because its license does not allow making a modified version and using it privately. Fortunately, few programs use such licenses.
Yeah open source monetization sucks in the corporate world. Maybe there could be a license that goes something along the lines of “you may use this for free as long as your company’s yearly revenue isn’t over X €”
I think a better enforcable solution would be taxing the shit out of these corporations, then give state grants to open source projects. I actually looked into licenses that would allow me to force corpos to donate, but they’re unenforcable.
Ultimately, the solution to many problems caused by corporations abusing their positions is through taxation
I mean, the obvious solution is to use a strong copyleft license like AGPL and sell private licenses for closed-source projects.
Called “Fair use” or “ethical software” but people hate it and lawyers tell you it is not enforceable for… some reason
Which is extra funny because that’s literally how the unity game engine license used to be and lawyers were fine with it.
Tying it to revenue wouldn’t work that well due to inflation. Metas AI has a license that basically says that, but with a user number. Both ideas however would mean that the project isn’t open source anymore
Open source doesn’t mean free for everyone for every purpose
Quote from the Open Source Initiative definition of Open Source:
Source
Not everyone agrees:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html
True, I don’t think there’s really a good solution to this (other than getting rid of capitalism)