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.
You may be looking for the Big Time Public Licence: http://bigtimelicense.com/
Thats pretty good! I havent found anything of the source code being available but I am in a hurry so I skimmed through it fast.
Even proprietary software can be “open source”, you just wouldn’t have any freedom to use that code without paying.
This is pretty cool. I’ve got a couple repos that Microsoft uses for VS Code. I switched one of them to GPLv3, but maybe I’ll switch the other to this license.
Does CC BY-NC-SA meet your intentions?
CC BY-NC-SA
Thanks for mentioning it. I read through it a couple of times already in my search. I want a more clear cut and specific license which says “you may sell it but if you make money, you donate to all foss you use”.
Creative commons licenses are not recommended for software.
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.
That’s the FSF definition. Most users and developers of open source do not care at all about that, and certainly do not care about protecting corporate right to use their software without giving back.
To many of them, open source is about transparency, community driven development, open contribution model, forkability, etc.
no, thats also the open source definition point 6: No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor.
A license that reatricts use would be a “source-availible” license aka corporate bs “work for me for free” licenses.
Also, with strong copyleft licenses, businesses must give back, namely when expanding the program. I think thats what many programmers like about open-source and free software. And yeah, a free software license is a precondition to bazaar style development.
no, thats also the open source definition
Correction: the definition of open source by a specific organization, the OSI.
I don’t remember voting or appointing the OSI as our legitimate representative. But you know who did? Corporations like Amazon, Google, Bloomberg, and many of them: https://opensource.org/sponsors
I do not subscribe to a definition from such an organization, just because it has open source in the name.
The people who coined the term “open source” are the same people who founded OSI. If you don’t like their term, don’t use it.
I have two arguments: first, it’s not true that the OSI coined the term. But more importantly, it isn’t even important if it was true. What matters is the context in which the open source movement emerged, and how people who use the term think of it.
The open source / free software movement was born in universities who primarily wanted to erase the barriers on collaboration between them, and wanted to follow an open model. They grew frustrated of the proprietary and opaque model of software written by major corporations. They could not use it. So they decided to write their own free software and combine their efforts to not rely on corporate or proprietary software.
Back then, corporations were uninterested in open source. In fact they were hostile to it and wanted it to die. The issue that we deal with today of corporations leeching on open source did not exist, so the fact that the movement did not specifically fight this does not mean they’re okay with it. The corporate hostility took a different form and that’s what they combatted.
On OSI coining the term, the OSI themselves claim it was coined by Christine Peterson. They do not claim that they founded the term, nor that the founder had an affiliation with them: https://opensource.org/history
with strong copyleft licenses, businesses must give back, namely when expanding the program
A user is required to make the source open only if they create a derivative work of the copyleft licensed work, and only if said work was distributed to users.
They do not have to do any profit sharing or donation. They are not even required to make the code open source if they merely use this program, or they interface with it. They are not required to do anything if they only use it internally.
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.
Thanks for clarifying. Im mean that is something, which I appreciate.
Still, I think making something like „FOSS tax“ which applies to companies who use software with this license would break both the software market wide open and tenfold the foss dev crowd because people actually get paid if their controbution is good. The quality of foss software would shoot through the roof.
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.
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”
From my experience, companies would rather just pay for a commercial license. Anything abnormal gets trashed and banned in my company.
I think it’s more easy to understand “pay exactly this amount to use commercially” than the legal and accounting teams trying to work out how much to pay when you say 1% of their revenue to FOSS software. You can always donate the profits anyway
Yeah, I get that. Its a tough topic, especially with many folks not trying to understand the point I was trying to make and trying to shut me down instead.
Dual license is probably the way to go then. Have a nice day and thanks for elaborating.
App stores and game engines are examples where you are paying a percentage of revenue. Not that it makes this scenario make any more sense, but there are models out there that operate this way. However, in both you are working in pretty locked down environments.
They would have to get in touch to figure out how to pay 1% either way, no?
No, because my idea was that they have to pay 1% to all foss projects (total, not individual) they use and if the projects want donations, they have to post it on their repos. if its not on the repo, no donation is required.
1% is an exorbitant amount of money, and more than most businesses would be able to donate via credit card, so they would still have to reach out to repository owners for banking info
Actually, we are currently working on something like a payment union for FOSS developers. That would make this significantly easier. And also, I dont care if google has to do it, I just dont want everyone to have to contact me for 1.50 $/€.
You are probably better off setting up a non-profit and running traditional license fees through it into your payment union then. I can’t emphasize how much of a non-starter 1% of revenues is for any business (it’s my company’s entire IT budget, including salary) - you are basically just saying “personal use only” with more words.
Actually, I‘m just excluding companies like yours because they are making way too much revenue on the basis of FOSS without giving back. We would have millions of FOSS developers if this were the case and we would solve dozens of current problems.
For example every employed sw dev with a specific skill set would then be able to go self employed immediately since they can provide insane foss code, stuff that we currently dont have and every company in the world can use it, just making sure they pay FOSS tax, so to speak.
It would completely break the locked down proprietary software model and break walled gardens wide open.
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.
It’s basically a “free for personal use” license.
Not sure I 100% agree on that.
If there was a license that i.e. required a certain percentage of all revenue that can be attributed to the usage of the software, a for-profit company could utilise it without paying a cent if they used it without generating revenue with it.
Man, lemmy will just let anyone moderate.
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?
“Forcing donations” is just a fancy way of saying “charging licensing fees”.
It’s clearly a license fee. I don’t see how a license fee stands in conflict with FOSS though. FOSS is Free as in freedom, not free as in gratis.
The godfather of all FLOSS licenses himself (GPL) contains explicit terms to allow license fees too.
The freedom in Foss is freedom to redistribute (under the same license).
Is the the distributor or the og developer getting the licensing fees? Neither makes any sense to me.
Nope. I want people to share their profit made from foss, thats it. Licensing fees are applicable to anyone and thats not what I‘m saying.
If you want a share of their profit, how much is enough? Would it be a pay-what-you-want model, without any restrictions or how’d you define the minimum amount to stop them from donating 1$? A rate based on profits would be pretty much the same as charging a license fee based on a companies worth.
I get why you want to force donations, but at the same time restrictions like that aren’t compatible with the FOSS freedoms. Like others said, dual-licensing or a source-available license is probably the closest you’ll get. It’s not a license I prefer, but it’s okay. For example I’d rather have a non-compete clause for two years than something being proprietary for eternity.
restrictions like that aren’t compatible with the FOSS freedoms
They are.
FOSS freedoms are about what you’re allowed to do with the code, not about providing those privieges for free (as in: gratis) to everyone.
It’s whether the freedoms are attainable at all; in proprietary software, the freedoms are not attainable, no matter how much you pay for it. Paying for the privilege of being granted those freedoms does not stand in direct conflict with FOSS IMV as long as it is reasonably possible to attain them.Where it gets complex is transitive freedoms. If I sell you my FOSS program and grant you all the freedoms that includes the freedom to grant those freedoms to others. Such “licensing proxies” are impossible to forbid without limiting essential freedoms of FOSS.
One possible method that sprung to my mind is to only allow granting the rights on modified copies (“modification” meaning original work atop of the licensed work) or even just the modifications themselves. This would technically restrict an essential freedom but I don’t consider those to be set in stone either.
It would be extremely difficult to implement this in a manner that actually makes the freedoms attainable and there are tons of complexities in this that I’ve glossed over but I don’t see a licensing model that requires monetary payment in exchange for the freedoms as fundamentally wrong or incompatible with the spirit of F(L)OSS.
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.
I still dont see how this breaks any of these. They get the source code and they get to sell it (or whatever), they can change it however they see fit. They still have to provide fair upstream financial kickback imo.
They still have to provide fair upstream financial kickback imo
Then it’s not FOSS. I don’t see how it’s very different from Unity (for example) licensing model. So maybe a license like that can have a place, but not in the FOSS space and it will be definitely not compatible with any gpl.
Unity is insane, asking for money per download, leading to completely lopsided situations where you get ruined if you have too many users for free.
And thanks for your opinion. My opinion is that this is what foss needs and its very much foss. The foss principles I read clearly state free as in freedom, not free beer. Putting in an elaborate payment scheme that benefits small companies and individuals and makes large companies pay their share to help counter the thankless grind of foss development is totally in line with the principles imo.
Your opinion is at odds with the rest of the FOSS community though, and always will be. You can license your software however you feel fit for your project, but don’t expect to get any traction from the Libre community when you do.
“Free as in Freedom” means a lot to people. Restrict that freedom and you’re out.
I see you quoting “Free as in Freedom” but you seem to imply that FOSS also means “Free as in gratis”. That is not true. FOSS does not grant you the freedom of receiving everything for free (gratis).
A fee for comercial use or corporate users sounds like “discrimination against fields of endeavor” to me.
I think it perfectly aligns with the freedom 2 “redistribute to help your neighbor”. It you dont make money with it, you dont have to pay anything, if you do, you should give back, simple as that.
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.
Dual licensing seems to be a good idea. Although I’d like something like “it’s agpl but making revenue means you pay 1%”
@haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com there are products out there that offer a dual license, one for companies with more than X employees and a free one otherwise.
How to enforce such licenses though seems to be the more difficult question
Thanks for explaining. I appreciate it.
Isn’t QT’s dual licence policy basically this?
Thanks for mentioning it. I searched for it but I cant find the clause you’re referring to. Feel free to provide a source.
That’s because “Dual License” means there are two licenses. Anyone can use it under the terms of the LGPL. If a company doesn’t want to abide by those terms, they can pay them not to by buying one of the commercial licenses
It doesn’t matter how hard you want to call it FOSS, but with this licensing terms you describe it is not FOSS, period. And to be honest, you calling out various people for not getting what FOSS is, while you fully ignore the agreed on definition by people who are actually doing FOSS is you discrediting yourself.
You haven’t found a license like this, because your model is flawed: A licensing like this will disqualify you from any kind of usage in an actual FOSS licensed environment. Personal users, which will not be providing revenue, will not be really affected by this, and are irrelevant for your point. Corporate users, which you will mostly target by this new license probably won’t be able to use your funky new license because they will need to check with legal, and your software will need to have a lot of USPs for someone to bother with that. A 1% corpo-richness-tax will not be approved by any kind of bigger company, because it’s a ridiculous amount from the perspective of your potential customers.
You’re taking yourself way to important. Open source software is not replaceable as a whole, but individual projects are. If you want to earn money with your project, that’s good on you, license it accordingly, but do not try to upsell it as FOSS.
And I fully get your point, and I’m currently working on the same problem in my in-development project, and I’m not sure yet whether to dual-license it, for similar reasons you stated, and live with the consequences of providing OSS, but non-FOSS software, or do FOSS and provide it for actually free.
Edit: Also, the xz backdoor has nothing to do with funding. Any long time maintainer (as in not just a random person contributing pull requests) going rogue can happen in funded scenarios as well.
it is not FOSS
If you take the OSI or FSF definition, sure. Not all of us take that definition.
For many people, the appeal of open source has nothing to do with how easy it is for corporations. It is about transparency, the ability to contribute, and the community driven product as a result. It is about the ability to pick up the project if the original developer stops using it, even decades later. It’s about the ease of interfacing with said software.
Again, you may quote the FSF, but there are too many users of open source, as well as developers, who got into it for the reasons I stated. I can assure you that they are not doing it so that corporations can profit off their software without giving back.
Again, you may quote the FSF, but there are too many users of open source, as well as developers, who got into it for the reasons I stated. I can assure you that they are not doing it so that corporations can profit off their software without giving back.
If you are developing open source, you are not necessarily developing FOSS. If you are developing FOSS, you are also developing open source.
FOSS is well defined by the FSF, and it has been for ages, and to be frank, therefore no one cares for anyone’s personal definition of it.
What I am against is having the cake and eating it, as it’s being proposed with this licensing. Either you do FOSS, or you don’t. Either you do open source, or you don’t. Either you do proprietary software, or you don’t. It’s really that simple, because depending on your project, you take the terms that you see fitting and live with the consequences. The whole goal of this proposal was to be taken more serious as open source developers and projects, and to ensure funding for further development. Cherry picking the best parts of every model, and making irrational demands does not achieve that.
As I said, I’m absolutely on board that open source licensing and open source development being taken for profit by corpos absolutely sucks, and the usual licensing models have not aged well with the much wider adoption and usage of open source, and there is a need for change - as it’s being done e.g. by elastic, redis and others with their dual licensing.
> It is about transparency, the ability to contribute, and the community driven product as a result. It is about the ability to pick up the project if the original developer stops using it, even decades later. It’s about the ease of interfacing with said software.
That’s… exactly what the FSF and OSI definitions are all about.
The FSF and OSI do not allow licenses that limit corporate leech or restrict profiting of software without giving back.
@cyclohexane Yes, but… For many people, the appeal of open source has nothing to do with how easy it is for corporations. So any license that limit “corporate leech” is NOT FOSS because FOSS is about having no such limits. At the same time FOSS doesn’t say you can’t charge money, because FOSS is NOT about restricting profit.
I am pretty sure that if you ask most open source developers if they are happy about corporations profitting off their software without giving back, they would say no.
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
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.
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.
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.
I get it. My point was that profitseeking and charity dont mix well imo.
Open Source software isn’t charity. It’s a group effort that anyone can use.
Now I get it. OP wants to turn FOSS into a Ponzie scheme: https://lemmy.giftedmc.com/comment/768869
Hi @haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com,
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/opensource@lemmy.ml 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):
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition
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 :)
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.
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.
Don’t confuse Lemmy upvotes with Reddit agreement or Facebook likes. As often as not, upvotes here just mean “You gotta see this!”
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.
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.
