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Do any of these copyleft (FOSS) licenses address royalties? I was wondering how FOSS teams could get their fare share of revenue from cloud providers. It just

Do any of these copyleft (FOSS) licenses address royalties? I was wondering how FOSS teams could get their fare share of revenue from cloud providers. It just seems reasonable that AWS would pay royalties to the elasticsearch, postgres, rabbitmq teams. For examples. Am noob, just started foraging for details. I didn't quickly find anything, so started reading about how the music industry handles royalties, because that's copyright. Stuff like sampling, covers, airplay. Next, I'll probably read about royalties for patents. Thoughts?

Kye 6y ago
None address it as far as I can tell. Their goal is usually to ensure people have the code to change how their software and hardware works and are able to actually make those changes. The original GPL tried to address the first concern. GPL 3 was an update made in light of companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google (and Tivo) making billions off open source software and not contributing much if anything back to the original project while not letting people touch the operating system--usually based substantially on open source code--on their hardware.
mr_tristan 6y ago
Is the MongoDB SSPL license an example of such a "royalty friendly" license? https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license I've heard of this in a couple of other places, I'm not aware of a common approach just yet. And I'm not sure how it's played out.
phkahler 6y ago
>> Do any of these copyleft (FOSS) licenses address royalties? No. The goal of copyleft is to ensure that the users of software are free to do what they want with it. Royalties would encumber that freedom. The only freedom not allowed is giving the software to someone else without granting them the same freedoms.
- specialist 6y ago
  How's that working out? As I said, I'm pondering fairness. Something practical, a la Hintjens (zeromq). Like maybe dual licensing. Edit: Hintjens has some advice about using trademarks to maintain control. I'll go back and check if his strategy talks about getting paid.
  - codeguro2 6y ago
    Seeing as how RedHat is a thing, and I'm typing this from Trisquel Linux, I'd say it's working very well.
    - specialist 6y ago
      How does elasticsearch, for instance, replicate redhat's success?
  - phkahler 6y ago
    >> How's that working out? IMHO it's working ok. It definitely could be better. I think GPLv3 or AGPLv3 with a dual license is currently the way to go. That offers the free software folks the freedom and increases awareness of the code, and the commercial license can be negotiated on a case by case basis. The challenge is to get projects to require CLA before they grow and lose the control needed for dual licensing.
    - specialist 6y ago
      Ok. As you'd expect, this is not a novel idea. I did reread some of the seminal documents, refresh my memory. Free vs open, libre vs gratis. I now lean towards dual and maybe three-fold licensing. Free for non commercial use. Open for others. Something something for cloud service providers. I can't yet guess what that something something will look like. My hunch is it'll be analogous to music royalties and publishers rights. Mostly, I want some boilerplate deals and heuristics, so that people can frame their arguments, instead of reinventing the wheel each round.
jabl 6y ago
Such restrictions would make it not open source (per the open source definition). Can't both have your cake and eat it too. There's e.g. the polyform project https://polyformproject.org/ https://polyformproject.org/ but that's explicitly source-available proprietary software, not open source.
SimonPStevens 6y ago
There are some that do address this type of issue. Timescale DB have a license [0] that is basically open source with the one added restriction that you can't use their open source to offer a hosted SAAS version of their product. Basically to allow them to open source the software for those that want to host it for their own use, but preventing the big cloud providers from taking all their business. It's not really 'copyleft' though because it takes away a users freedom (albeit a very small and limited one). The GNU Affero GPL [1], adds the requirement that using the open source software in a server environment you must also provide the ability for your users to download the source code. It doesn't address the problems through royalties because that's kind of against the GNU philosophy, but it does stop the cloud providers from just taking the software and modifying it and using for cloud infrastructure without providing the modifications back to the community. I'm sure there are other examples of this kind of this. [0] - https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-business-in-cloud-era-v2/ https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-busines... [1] - https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html

Kye 6y ago

None address it as far as I can tell. Their goal is usually to ensure people have the code to change how their software and hardware works and are able to actually make those changes. The original GPL tried to address the first concern. GPL 3 was an update made in light of companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google (and Tivo) making billions off open source software and not contributing much if anything back to the original project while not letting people touch the operating system--usually based substantially on open source code--on their hardware.

mr_tristan 6y ago

Is the MongoDB SSPL license an example of such a "royalty friendly" license? https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license I've heard of this in a couple of other places, I'm not aware of a common approach just yet. And I'm not sure how it's played out.

phkahler 6y ago

>> Do any of these copyleft (FOSS) licenses address royalties? No. The goal of copyleft is to ensure that the users of software are free to do what they want with it. Royalties would encumber that freedom. The only freedom not allowed is giving the software to someone else without granting them the same freedoms.

specialist 6y ago
How's that working out? As I said, I'm pondering fairness. Something practical, a la Hintjens (zeromq). Like maybe dual licensing. Edit: Hintjens has some advice about using trademarks to maintain control. I'll go back and check if his strategy talks about getting paid.
- codeguro2 6y ago
  Seeing as how RedHat is a thing, and I'm typing this from Trisquel Linux, I'd say it's working very well.
  - specialist 6y ago
    How does elasticsearch, for instance, replicate redhat's success?
- phkahler 6y ago
  >> How's that working out? IMHO it's working ok. It definitely could be better. I think GPLv3 or AGPLv3 with a dual license is currently the way to go. That offers the free software folks the freedom and increases awareness of the code, and the commercial license can be negotiated on a case by case basis. The challenge is to get projects to require CLA before they grow and lose the control needed for dual licensing.
  - specialist 6y ago
    Ok. As you'd expect, this is not a novel idea. I did reread some of the seminal documents, refresh my memory. Free vs open, libre vs gratis. I now lean towards dual and maybe three-fold licensing. Free for non commercial use. Open for others. Something something for cloud service providers. I can't yet guess what that something something will look like. My hunch is it'll be analogous to music royalties and publishers rights. Mostly, I want some boilerplate deals and heuristics, so that people can frame their arguments, instead of reinventing the wheel each round.

jabl 6y ago

Such restrictions would make it not open source (per the open source definition). Can't both have your cake and eat it too. There's e.g. the polyform project https://polyformproject.org/ https://polyformproject.org/ but that's explicitly source-available proprietary software, not open source.

SimonPStevens 6y ago

There are some that do address this type of issue. Timescale DB have a license [0] that is basically open source with the one added restriction that you can't use their open source to offer a hosted SAAS version of their product. Basically to allow them to open source the software for those that want to host it for their own use, but preventing the big cloud providers from taking all their business. It's not really 'copyleft' though because it takes away a users freedom (albeit a very small and limited one). The GNU Affero GPL [1], adds the requirement that using the open source software in a server environment you must also provide the ability for your users to download the source code. It doesn't address the problems through royalties because that's kind of against the GNU philosophy, but it does stop the cloud providers from just taking the software and modifying it and using for cloud infrastructure without providing the modifications back to the community. I'm sure there are other examples of this kind of this. [0] - https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-business-in-cloud-era-v2/ https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-busines... [1] - https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html