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Is there a License that requires the user to donate if they make revenue? (lemmy.giftedmc.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[+] [email protected] -22 points 7 months ago (1 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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 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?

[–] [email protected] -3 points 7 months ago (2 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

You can technically charge for FOSS, but that sort-of collides with the freedom to redistribute the software. You may have heard about that when the whole RHEL/Rocky Linux dispute happened.

Equal shares can also be kind-of unfair if your backend is using sqlx for the entire database communication and then you also use some small image-conversion library to convert the favicon from .png to .ico.

My last point may be a bit confusing, let's try to make it a bit easier to understand: In this case, you are a company, that is directly using a piece of code that is licensed under the license you've been thinking about, and you're also using a piece of proprietary software, e.g. some ERP-Software. The proprietary software is using a FOSS library that permits it to be used in a proprietary binary, let's say because it's BSD-Licensed. How do you know that the ERP-Software is using that library, and how would you determine how much you'd have to donate to them. You kind-of have to donate to them, because your ERP-Software wouldn't run without that library

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I can see that this for some kind doesnt work with the current state of foss. Its basically free work for corpos.

I will therefore implement 100% agpl in my projects and make them incaccessible for anyone who tries to put into proprietary software.

The equal shares are just one possible solition and since this community is full of trolls who cant just discuss something (you and a handful peeps excluded), I‘m not really in the mood to think about this anymore. I‘ll just use the most restricted license and call it foss just to piss people off.

To your last point I dont know what the misunderstanding is. As I read it, you‘re saying the proprietary software includes a foss library. I wouldnt know or care because I bought a product not a library. My idea was for using the code not for the end user of a derivative work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

The best use case for purchasing FOSS software is contractor work, specific modules for existing platforms and/or FOSS projects. I've done that myself in the past. The client pays for the custom software, it's written, and then they gets to do absolutely whatever they want with it. If the client wants to publish it, they're well within their rights. Most of the time it's too entangled with their internal company workflow to be useful to anyone else though.