5 ms·

Situations like this make me wonder why no one has created an open source license with a clause excluding multi billion dollar companies. If your company makes

by bogwog 6y ago

Situations like this make me wonder why no one has created an open source license with a clause excluding multi billion dollar companies. If your company makes more than, say, $50 billion in revenue per year or something crazy like that, then you need to pay for a license. Everyone else can use the free license. Amazon in particular is well known to be aggressively anti-competitive, as we saw with the Diapers.com fiasco. So logically, if you allow them to use your open source project for free, you run the risk of supporting the company that is going to run you out of business if they ever decide to compete with you. Might as well grab a piece of the pie on your way out!

Muromec 6y ago
> with a clause excluding multi billion dollar companies. Every multi billion dollar company: runs subsidiary to not trigger legal threshold. They probably do it anyway for tax purposes.
- varispeed 6y ago
  You can exclude companies that have multi billion company in their tree.
  - pas 6y ago
    So someone launches a new company that provides services for everyone, including billion dollar companies. Basically unless you put a non-commercial license on it, any effort to limit its use will be easily circumvented.
    - bogwog 6y ago
      The middle man increases costs and inefficiency for the billion dollar companies, giving a competitive advantage to everyone else. It's foolproof I tell ya!
    - varispeed 6y ago
      You cannot circumvent that. If you want to do a service for a company that has a multi billion company in the chain then you would have to get full commercial license and when that happens you simply raise an invoice to the client that covers this cost. It is pretty simple and you cannot get around it.
CydeWeys 6y ago
Why so high? Why not, say, $10M? If you want to be paid for your work, why let most of even the Fortune 500 still use it for free?
- KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
  You'll have less users with such a license, in reality only a tiny percentage of even huge companies use your code in a way that is annoying or make you feel like you should get something back for it and it's hard to target such companies specifically rather than crater the popularity of your project entirely.
asim 6y ago
Polyform Shield is what you're looking for https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/
- GordonS 6y ago
  I've seen these Polyform licenses touted on HN a couple of times recently. I really do think we need a couple of new licenses along these lines to become popular enough to be generally accepted. Having said that, I struggle to really grok the language in these licenses; it could be that I'm just more familiar with MIT, BSD and the like, but with the Polyform licenses I'm always left with questions about what I can and can't do.
  - asim 6y ago
    I think its likely familiarity. Licensing is legal terminology so anything new requires time to reason about. In this case I am a strong advocate for these licenses as they're written in part by Heather Meeker who has authored some of the custom licenses for Redis Labs, MongoDB, etc to protect against this cloud provider hosting issue.
    - GordonS 6y ago
      Then I'd love for them to get some more attention, discussion and scrutiny in the community, because I think that's the only chance new licenses have at gaining wider adoption.
minerjoe 6y ago
Could we write a license so that if a big company uses my software they have to send me a pony? A real live pony?
- richardwhiuk 6y ago
  You could. No big company would use your software.
  - Zenbit_UX 6y ago
    Idk, a pony sounds cheaper than a single day of work for one dev at a FAANG company. I'd have to at least consider the pony option.
    - GordonS 6y ago
      True, but have you ever been involved in purchasing at a big company? Trying to procure and ship a pony would take longer than just writing the software yourself (I'm not even joking).
marcinzm 6y ago
That creates problems for anyone who ever wants to sell their business to or sell services to any larger company. Which covers a lot of smaller companies. The license would trigger all sorts of legal red flags during due diligence for either case. And not just with the companies it's supposed to cover but any large company (ie: what if they one day trigger the clause, how well defined is the clause, what if they are partially owned/invested in by a larger company, etc, etc, etc).
- tzs 6y ago
  > That creates problems for anyone who ever wants to sell their business to or sell services to any larger company We ran into that, sort of, although the only one it ultimately affected was the author of the free software that we wanted to use. We were a small company doing development for a major Japanese software distributor. He wanted a virtual CD product that would make images of your CD-ROMs and let you use those images. We were using zLib to compress the images, but he said it was too slow. zLib has settings to sacrifice some compression to gain speed, but they would not gain enough speed while maintaining the minimum amount of compression he wanted. I found a zLib compatible library that some grad student at a nearby major university had written in assembly for speed. It was very good, handily beating zLib, and he even used the same assembler we used (Watcom). The library was GPL, which was not acceptable to the distributor we were writing for, so I contacted him about a different license. We agreed on some reasonable price to use his library in that product, and some reasonable larger price for a license to use it in all our future products. But then he started worrying--our products were for Windows. What if we caught Microsoft's attention and they bought us, and his code ended up available for all of Microsoft to use. He wanted to negotiate a license that would cover all of the kind of thing to make sure his code could not end up at Microsoft or some other big company. Negotiating that would require our CEO's involvement, and probably bringing in outside lawyers. The CEO did not have the time for that nor any interest in it, and told me to figure something else out. I did. I went back to zLib, and I added a slider to our UI which went from 0 to 100, labeled something like "Faster ripping" on the 0 end and "Smaller Images" on the 100 end. If the slider was set to N when ripping an image, I used zLib at maximum compression setting on N out of every 100 sectors ripped and stored 100-N out of every 100 sectors ripped uncompressed. The distributor was delighted with this. (I have never been able to decide if I should be proud of this solution or deeply shamed by it). 25 years later, and nothing from then ended up at Microsoft or anywhere else, and that grad student lost out on several thousand easy dollars that I'm sure would have been very nice and useful for him to have.
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "Situations like this make me wonder why no one has created an open source license with a clause excluding multi billion dollar companies." People start looking at things differently when they're asked to pay for them and they start comparison shopping. Would people pay for LibreOffice over MS Office? Would people pay for GIMP over Photoshop? Some would, most wouldn't. It would kill corporate adoption of FOSS and, since most FOSS development is done by people employed by corporations, that would shrink the userbase and reduce the sustainability of FOSS.
fuball63 6y ago
There was a discussion a few weeks back about TimescaleDB doing a "Cloud Protection License", which seems to mean that they reserve the right to offer the product in a cloud offering. Seemed to me like a good compromise. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579628 https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-business-in-cloud-era-v2 https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-busines...

by bogwog 6y ago

Muromec 6y ago

> with a clause excluding multi billion dollar companies. Every multi billion dollar company: runs subsidiary to not trigger legal threshold. They probably do it anyway for tax purposes.

varispeed 6y ago
You can exclude companies that have multi billion company in their tree.
- pas 6y ago
  So someone launches a new company that provides services for everyone, including billion dollar companies. Basically unless you put a non-commercial license on it, any effort to limit its use will be easily circumvented.
  - bogwog 6y ago
    The middle man increases costs and inefficiency for the billion dollar companies, giving a competitive advantage to everyone else. It's foolproof I tell ya!
  - varispeed 6y ago
    You cannot circumvent that. If you want to do a service for a company that has a multi billion company in the chain then you would have to get full commercial license and when that happens you simply raise an invoice to the client that covers this cost. It is pretty simple and you cannot get around it.

CydeWeys 6y ago

Why so high? Why not, say, $10M? If you want to be paid for your work, why let most of even the Fortune 500 still use it for free?

KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
You'll have less users with such a license, in reality only a tiny percentage of even huge companies use your code in a way that is annoying or make you feel like you should get something back for it and it's hard to target such companies specifically rather than crater the popularity of your project entirely.

asim 6y ago

Polyform Shield is what you're looking for https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/

GordonS 6y ago
I've seen these Polyform licenses touted on HN a couple of times recently. I really do think we need a couple of new licenses along these lines to become popular enough to be generally accepted. Having said that, I struggle to really grok the language in these licenses; it could be that I'm just more familiar with MIT, BSD and the like, but with the Polyform licenses I'm always left with questions about what I can and can't do.
- asim 6y ago
  I think its likely familiarity. Licensing is legal terminology so anything new requires time to reason about. In this case I am a strong advocate for these licenses as they're written in part by Heather Meeker who has authored some of the custom licenses for Redis Labs, MongoDB, etc to protect against this cloud provider hosting issue.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    Then I'd love for them to get some more attention, discussion and scrutiny in the community, because I think that's the only chance new licenses have at gaining wider adoption.

minerjoe 6y ago

Could we write a license so that if a big company uses my software they have to send me a pony? A real live pony?

richardwhiuk 6y ago
You could. No big company would use your software.
- Zenbit_UX 6y ago
  Idk, a pony sounds cheaper than a single day of work for one dev at a FAANG company. I'd have to at least consider the pony option.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    True, but have you ever been involved in purchasing at a big company? Trying to procure and ship a pony would take longer than just writing the software yourself (I'm not even joking).

marcinzm 6y ago

That creates problems for anyone who ever wants to sell their business to or sell services to any larger company. Which covers a lot of smaller companies. The license would trigger all sorts of legal red flags during due diligence for either case. And not just with the companies it's supposed to cover but any large company (ie: what if they one day trigger the clause, how well defined is the clause, what if they are partially owned/invested in by a larger company, etc, etc, etc).

tzs 6y ago
> That creates problems for anyone who ever wants to sell their business to or sell services to any larger company We ran into that, sort of, although the only one it ultimately affected was the author of the free software that we wanted to use. We were a small company doing development for a major Japanese software distributor. He wanted a virtual CD product that would make images of your CD-ROMs and let you use those images. We were using zLib to compress the images, but he said it was too slow. zLib has settings to sacrifice some compression to gain speed, but they would not gain enough speed while maintaining the minimum amount of compression he wanted. I found a zLib compatible library that some grad student at a nearby major university had written in assembly for speed. It was very good, handily beating zLib, and he even used the same assembler we used (Watcom). The library was GPL, which was not acceptable to the distributor we were writing for, so I contacted him about a different license. We agreed on some reasonable price to use his library in that product, and some reasonable larger price for a license to use it in all our future products. But then he started worrying--our products were for Windows. What if we caught Microsoft's attention and they bought us, and his code ended up available for all of Microsoft to use. He wanted to negotiate a license that would cover all of the kind of thing to make sure his code could not end up at Microsoft or some other big company. Negotiating that would require our CEO's involvement, and probably bringing in outside lawyers. The CEO did not have the time for that nor any interest in it, and told me to figure something else out. I did. I went back to zLib, and I added a slider to our UI which went from 0 to 100, labeled something like "Faster ripping" on the 0 end and "Smaller Images" on the 100 end. If the slider was set to N when ripping an image, I used zLib at maximum compression setting on N out of every 100 sectors ripped and stored 100-N out of every 100 sectors ripped uncompressed. The distributor was delighted with this. (I have never been able to decide if I should be proud of this solution or deeply shamed by it). 25 years later, and nothing from then ended up at Microsoft or anywhere else, and that grad student lost out on several thousand easy dollars that I'm sure would have been very nice and useful for him to have.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago

> "Situations like this make me wonder why no one has created an open source license with a clause excluding multi billion dollar companies." People start looking at things differently when they're asked to pay for them and they start comparison shopping. Would people pay for LibreOffice over MS Office? Would people pay for GIMP over Photoshop? Some would, most wouldn't. It would kill corporate adoption of FOSS and, since most FOSS development is done by people employed by corporations, that would shrink the userbase and reduce the sustainability of FOSS.

fuball63 6y ago

There was a discussion a few weeks back about TimescaleDB doing a "Cloud Protection License", which seems to mean that they reserve the right to offer the product in a cloud offering. Seemed to me like a good compromise. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579628 https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-business-in-cloud-era-v2 https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-busines...