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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Hi @[email protected],

fyi icymi due to this thread someone posted this other thread asking "Is it appropriate for someone to be a mod here when they don't understand open source, and insult users in the community?".

I don't have time to read all ~200 comments in these two threads, but I do think that being a moderator of /c/[email protected] requires knowing what FOSS is to be able to remove posts promoting things which are not.

Hopefully the replies here (again, I have not read even half of this thread...) have made you better informed?

In case you haven't yet, I would highly recommend that you read these two documents (you can start with their wikipedia articles and follow links from there to the actual documents):

In short, the answer to your question ("Is there a License that requires the user to donate if they make revenue?") is yes, there are many such licenses, but they are definitively not FOSS licenses (despite what some people who haven't read the above definitions might try to tell you).

I won't enumerate any of the non-FOSS licenses which attempt such a thing, because I recommend against the use of such licenses or software licensed under them.

BTW, I saw you wrote in another comment:

By now I get that FOSS mostly implies free work for corporations. I‘ll just go with agpl to ensure they get nothing from my work.

While corporations benefiting from FOSS while failing to financially support it at all is extremely commonplace, I vehemently disagree that that is what FOSS "mostly implies". In fact, the opposite is more common: the vast majority of free software users are not paying anything to the companies who have paid for an enormous amount of the development of it. A few hundred companies pay tens of thousands of individual developers to develop and maintain the Linux kernel, for instance.

Regarding the second sentence of yours that I quoted above, in case you haven't understood this yet: the AGPL does not prevent commercial use of your work. If you write a web app and license it AGPL, you are giving me permission to run it, modify it, redistribute my modified version, and to charge money for it without giving you anything.

What the AGPL does, and why many companies avoid it, is impose the requirement that I (the recipient of your software) offer the source code to your software (and any modifications I made to it) under that same license not only to anyone I distribute it to but also to anyone using the software over a network on my server.

If the software were licensed GPL instead of AGPL, I would only be required to offer GPL-licensed source code to people when I distribute the software to them. Eg, I could improve a GPL web app and it is legal to not share my improvements (to the server-side code) with anyone at all because the software is not being distributed - it is just running on my server.

By imposing requirements about how you run the software (eg, if you put an AGPL notice in the UI, I am not allowed to remove it) the AGPL is more than just a copyright license: violations of the GPL and most FOSS licenses are strictly copyright violations and can be enforced as such, but violating the part of the AGPL where it differs from the GPL would not constitute copyright infringement because no copying is taking place. Unlike almost every other FOSS license, the AGPL is both a copyright license and a end-user license agreement.

For this reason, many people have misgivings about the AGPL. However, if you want to scare companies away from using your software at all (and/or require them to purchase a different license from you to use it under non-AGPL terms, which is only possible if you require all contributors to assign copyright or otherwise give you permission to dual-license their work) while still using a license which the FOSS community generally accepts as FOSS... AGPL is probably your best bet.

HTH.

p.s. I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, etc etc :)

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

As you can see from upvotes, the demand for fair treatment of developers by financial benefactors is there.

But since 90% of folks here dont get the issue and rather troll dan dogpile on someone instead of discussing possibilities, I will just stay with agpl to make it impossible for companies to use my stuff.

I wanted to go a different route but the scorched earth solution is okay too.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Don’t confuse Lemmy upvotes with Reddit agreement or Facebook likes. As often as not, upvotes here just mean “You gotta see this!”

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I definitely understand that paying OSS developers is a growing concern, and if not addressed, a lot of software will go back to being proprietary. The Redis/Terraform double dip is the solution they want, but it just means PlaceholderDB and OpenTofu have to pick up the pieces.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

That I can agree with. One reason why this will happen is because people are unwilling to see that solutions need openness. Being able to disagree without shitting on someone seems to be a rare skill in the IT community as a whole.

Look at the thousands of reports of people who wanted solutions for their problems and asked them online just to get dogpiled on and laughed out of the room.

I have a cynical joy in thinking that everything will go to shit because of these disgusting creatures.

All it takes is for people to say „I disagree“ without calling the other person an idiot for ten seconds.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Now I get it. OP wants to turn FOSS into a Ponzie scheme: https://lemmy.giftedmc.com/comment/768869

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That's not FOSS. All you'll do is guarantee that no one will contribute to your project and will just wait for someone else to make their own FOSS version, or encourage corporations to write their own version in-house.

I think we're far from solutions to ensuring money from FOSS goes to contributors, but moving to licenses that enforce it at the expense of the projects themselves is naïve at best

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

By now I get that FOSS mostly implies free work for corporations. I‘ll just go with agpl to ensure they get nothing from my work.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I use GQIS and OSM professionally. My company also contributes to both projects. You WANT companies to adopt free software because they'll put resources into improving it, which improves it for everyone.

Are they doing it to make money? Yep.

But it's good for the product and every user of the product. It allows hobbysts and individual users to benefit from corporate resources without ever giving the corporations money or data.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I get it. My point was that profitseeking and charity dont mix well imo.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Open Source software isn't charity. It's a group effort that anyone can use.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Sure. The point being though that companies will explicitly avoid projects that expect payment except for very specific circumstances.

And, as much as corporations get the work for "free", so do other free software projects who will also explicitly avoid anything that adds further costs to their own work.

If you're that afraid of someone getting your software for free then you might as well make your project proprietary because you're misunderstanding, fundamentally, how FOSS works.

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