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I don't want GPL. I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That's it. That's all I want.

I don't want GPL. I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That's it. That's all I want. MIT-Billionaires. Want to take funding from A16Z? That's a million a year for the license or something that maybe scales with a market cap just to level the playing field between a funded startup and Apple Computers. Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don't love this hyper-centralization of wealth and it would be better for the world if we defanged the power that billionaires have.

rusk 6y ago
What is wrong with saying “all rights reserved. You are free to use this software for educational and nonprofit purposes but once you start to make money off it you must request permission in writing” - I’ve seen a few licences like this. I guess the down sides are it might send some people elsewhere and you might be on your own trying to enforce it in court.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up. Besides, it would have to be a lot more formal; another commenter mentioned the Unreal Engine, which states something to the tune of "free to use until you earn over X, then you pay us Y% of your revenue". Cynically, open source libraries need to use the err, hook-and-sinker approach? Be really good at bootstrapping a company or part thereof, then when they have buy-in, start charging. It's what Unreal and (I think?) Unity do, it's what Slack did (really successfully, in a lot of places where it was introduced it was snuck in the back door by employees, used for a couple of months until the restrictions became too much, then the company started to pay for it; I've never seen 'grassroots' software deployment like that before and I'm impressed). But it'll be difficult to pull off fully without the software being as-a-service or DRM things. I wonder if the package manager systems could play a role in that. Require you to register your application at e.g. NPM, then every time an `npm install` is done, keep track of it. If usage does not decrease, start charging for things. One could also consider an alternative, compatible package manager; an open source publisher could opt to only push to and promote that one. The package manager charges for use, and pays package maintainers relative to usage.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up. It is very much the Silicon Valley mentality that all value is added by that company and that no suppliers should make any profit. Cynically, open source libraries need to use the err, hook-and-sinker approach? The common terminology is “bait and switch”. Also very much Silicon Valley. Apple for example likes to become a critical customer for any supplier, then use their leverage to squeeze them.
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    > I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want usage, you can make it MIT and then suffer while they capitalize your code (as they are with in their rights to do), or if you want protection but low usage, make it AGPL or proprietary even. I don't really see a scenario where you have high usage, high protection and also high profit from you selling your product, unless you are good at marketing and selling your product.
    - tingol 6y ago
      What's the point you're making? There's a lot of proprietary software that's - high usage - high protection - high profit What's the argument that OSS software (which you could use for free indefinitely until you gain profitability) is somehow not capable of the same?
      - eru 6y ago
        There's even more software that's not used much at all. Going open source is one of the ways to increase your chances of increased usage.
      - webmaven 6y ago
        > What's the point you're making? There's a lot of proprietary software that's > - high usage - high protection - high profit > What's the argument that OSS software (which you could use for free indefinitely until you gain profitability) is somehow not capable of the same? Software that meets those criteria also has an organization that spends quite a lot on sales and marketing. Stimulation of usage and extraction of revenue doesn't happen on its own. More explicitly, if an already-profitable organization can't use the software without paying on day zero, quite a lot of effort has to be expended to get them to make the leap, hence the long enterprise sales cycle. You can do it with just marketing if you keep the purchase price low (ie. below what a department manager is allowed to spend using a corporate credit card). Open source can circumvent this to an extent, but to do so it has to allow businesses to use the software for free, and convert a percentage of those users to paying voluntarily. Whether the mechanism of conversion is consulting and customization services, hosting services, support services, dual licensing, an 'enterprise' version with specific features, or something else is immaterial, they are never just paying for exactly what they were getting for free. The closest a business will come to that is employing developers to work on the open-source software, or at least allowing employees to work on the software during work hours. The specific licensing-only approach you're outlining will only work in a very narrow case: A new unprofitable company starts using the software for free, and starts paying once they cross over to profitability (at which point they might decide to switch to using something else, instead). Note that there are some very large VC-fueled companies that have yet to be profitable. Convincing an already profitable business to pay at the outset just can't be done without the aforementioned marketing and sales.
- majewsky 6y ago
  > educational and nonprofit purposes > once you start to make money So if a nonprofit uses that software to sell services (they gotta fund their expenses after all), does that count? Seriously. With vague phrasing like this, you're gonna have a bad time. Contracts are that verbose for a reason.
  - rusk 6y ago
    That’s why it’s all rights reserved. If you want to use it to make money you have to ask me. In the scenario you describe is probably say that’s okay, but like I say it’s up to me and only me, at the end of the day. This of course means it’s not open to the kind of free-form open collaboration that typifies Open Source but if anything this just goes to show how more restrictive licences such as GPL actually promote innovation.
    - eru 6y ago
      The GPL is perhaps restrictive than the license you suggested. It's definitely more predictable.
      - rusk 6y ago
        Yes but you are still free to make money off the software, and this is the topic under discussion.
        eru 6y ago
        Sorry, I missed a word. I was going to say, the GPL is perhaps less restrictive.
- dvdkon 6y ago
  I for one wouldn't use a library licensed like this. There are ideological reasons, but more practically, let's say I run a server that provides a public service. At some point, it gets a lot of traffic and I want to accept donations or use ads to fund the hosting. Under such a licence, I'd be completely at the mercy of the author, who could effectively shut down the server.
  - rusk 6y ago
    Yep. That's the point. You have the option to use something with a more liberal license, develop something yourself, or pay for it. Yes, maybe at the end of the day I lose out to potential suitors, customers, collaborators etc. but that's my choice.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      I don’t think anyone is suggesting that it isn’t your choice. Most people are likely assuming that the typical author intent behind the decision to open source is to increase usage and contributors over the default closed source/proprietary licensing.
  - michaelt 6y ago
    Is the problem that you have to pay at all - or is the problem merely that in the absence of a listed price, there's no guarantee the price will be fair? Would you also reject a library with this license if you knew the commercial use license was pocket change?
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      If the commercial license was literally pocket change, I’d be inclined to use it under that commercial license right out of the gate to increase my certainty going forward.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Or you could pay the author for his/her work from your income. I could be wrong but it seems obvious to me that semi-commercial licenses would explode the amount of open code available, because instead of devs working for corporations, corporations would end up working for them. Commercial licensing - open code, free for non-profits, per-seat or per-user pricing for for profits with an official license, forks are considered a derivative work, clean room clones aren't. There would be details, but there are always details, and they don't stop two hundred page EULAs from existing and being (mostly) binding. But we don't have this because Stallman is a zealot and he wanted to Make A Point about purity. So instead of creating a market where devs could actually get paid for original work and corporations would be the ones paying, corporations get millions of hours of development effort for free - because he thought he could somehow magically strong-arm them into playing to his rules.
- orlandohill 6y ago
  There are source-available licenses for this: Polyform Non-Commercial License https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 Prosperity Public License https://prosperitylicense.com/ https://prosperitylicense.com/
ntucker 6y ago
So write the license this way. I think it's a fabulous idea.
- 3pt14159 6y ago
  I actually did write a license at one point, but I realized that the core issue here was buy-in from the rest of the hacker community. It's like trying to end slavery. Until there are enough of us willing to work an underground railroad the best strategy is evangelizing the issue and collectively coming up with something that works for all of us. I also think that there are good billionaires out there, like Bill Gates and Paul Graham, I don't want a war. I want something that the existing billionaires that are pro-social will sign onto and we need their input and ideas too.
fabianhjr 6y ago
May I suggest something along the lines of Dmytri Kleiner's Peer Production License? As discussed more generally on P2P Foundation: http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Copyfarleft http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Copyfarleft
- xDmytri 6y ago
  Hey, original author of the Peer Production license here. AMA
  - fabianhjr 6y ago
    Hi Dmytri, in your work you mentioned that PPL isn't intended for software. (As it is based on CC-BY-NC-SA which is also not intended for software) Do you have licensing recommendations for software along the lines of copyfair/copyfarleft?
    - xDmytri 6y ago
      For the most part the PPL is intended for consumer information commodities, this could be software, but not captial information comodities like server software or programming languages, but rather books, movies, video games, end-user consumer desktop top software, etc. For capital information goods I recommend the GPL, or even BSD style licenses depending on what it is and who is making it and what their plan is.
krasin 6y ago
Unreal Engine license is along these lines: it's free if you are small / no significant revenue, and it's 5% of your revenue otherwise. That said, not every shared-sources project would be used, if its license requires to pay royalty.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Unreal isn't open source
  - wodenokoto 6y ago
    What the parent is asking for is inherently not open source.
    - roenxi 6y ago
      For a moment I disagreed with this, so I'll add a link to the OSD [0] for anyone else who wants to quibble. Also a choice quote about Stallman [1]: "Richard Stallman argues the obvious meaning of term "open source" is that the source code is public/accessible for inspection, without necessarily any other rights granted" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
      - yesenadam 6y ago
        Thanks, that led me to this intriguing origin story from Christine Peterson, involving some advanced people skills: (my italics) "Between meetings that week, I was still focused on the need for a better name and came up with the term "open source software." While not ideal, it struck me as good enough. I ran it by at least four others: Eric Drexler, Mark Miller, and Todd Anderson liked it, while a friend in marketing and public relations felt the term "open" had been overused and abused and believed we could do better. He was right in theory; however, I didn't have a better idea... Later that week, on February 5, 1998, a group was assembled at VA Research to brainstorm on strategy. Attending – in addition to Eric Raymond, Todd, and me – were Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman, and attending by phone, Jon "maddog" Hall... Todd was on the ball. Instead of making an assertion that the community should use this specific new term, he did something less directive – a smart thing to do with this community of strong-willed individuals. He simply used the term in a sentence on another topic – just dropped it into the conversation to see what happened.... A few minutes later, one of the others used the term, evidently without noticing, still discussing a topic other than terminology. Todd and I looked at each other out of the corners of our eyes to check: yes, we had both noticed what happened... " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Peterson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Peterson
berdario 6y ago
Have you seen the Anti-capitalist Software License? https://anticapitalist.software/ https://anticapitalist.software/ By default it disallows use by entities like Apple, but you could dual-license it, to provide the million-a-year alternative
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Potential*; it won't do much good if it's trivial software easily reimplemented by Apple's great army of engineers, or if there's competitive software that does the same thing.
robin_reala 6y ago
This is the traditional point that Open Source™ people turn up and say that you’re not allowed to discriminate between different groups of users with an Open Source™ licence. Personally, I’d be in favour of a non-military licence, but that’s historically been blocked by the OSI for the same reasons (not that it stopped Crockford).
cercatrova 6y ago
That's just a proprietary license, just write the license like that if you want as I don't see how anything is stopping you from creating or using such a license. Just don't make the assumption that it's open source, it's just another form of a proprietary license like much of the paid software currently present. However, don't complain later on that you can't modify software or run it on your own device like you can with GPL. You can't have your cake and eat it too, pick one. I wrote more about this in another comment but I'll paste here for convenience. --- Why do people create something and explicitly license it under an open source license and are then surprised when it's used as the license permits? I can see a few possible reasons: 1. Culture: GitHub seems to have the culture of people using and putting out their code as open source just because everyone else is doing it, or they just don't know or care to do enough research about software licenses. 2. Promotion: open source seems to be used as a way to promote your product and you simply hope that no one will "screw you over" by using the license as it permits, even by big companies. They'll use open source to build their product but will cry foul when corporations do the same exact thing the open source creators were doing in the first place! These two factors seem to account for a the reasons behind switching licenses or other licensing issues for a significant portion of the open source license based posts on Hacker News in the past several years. Companies could have just started with a proprietary or copyleft license initially but inevitably in most of the posts I've seen, it's always a company with a permissive MIT style license that then bemoans cloud vendors rightfully taking advantage of their code. What will happen in the future? It seems that people will create more proprietary software in the form of ostensibly "open source" licenses such as the SSPL by MongoDB or others. People will say that they're not truly open source, just another variation on proprietary source available licenses, which is true but the problem isn't a moral one, it's a practical one. GPL was started because the end user freedoms were eroded, and these licenses also fall into that, where people will soon discover that a proprietary license isn't great when they want to expand the original software but are encumbered by the license, such as if they work for a large company or other such restriction. Having no restrictions is always better than having even small ones. But how will open source creators make money, one may ask. The simple answer is, they don't, and they shouldn't expect to. The more complex answer is, open source is not a business model, it is merely a licensing and distribution model. You must compete not on the code but the problems your code solves. Your product must also include marketing, sales, branding, and other business skills. Treat your product as a startup. Amazon could open source all of its code and infrastructure and it would still be the dominant player in cloud computing as well as buying stuff online. Why? They are not in the business of selling code, they are in the business of selling convenience (as every business is actually, you don't hunt your own meat, a grocery store sells you the convenience of buying food, with money rather than time and effort; business is just commoditized convenience). Moreover, people know and trust Amazon, they don't know your other site, even if you took their source code and made your own website. At the end of the day, people need to understand that a product is not a business. If you want to make money, you probably shouldn't make a free product. There are ways to leverage a free product into a business, as seen with TailwindCSS (free, open source) to Tailwind UI (paid, proprietary) or Laravel to Laravel Spark and Forge (they're what's known as lead magnets in marketing terms, a free product to entice the customer to buy the paid version), but don't expect people to spontaneously pay you when they could use your product for free, unless, again, you have the business skills to make your product stand out via marketing and having product-market fit.
kd5bjo 6y ago
That sounds like an aggressive copyleft license plus a paid commercial license to avoid the copyleft terms. If someone wants to charge for a software library, is there a good royalty-free, one-time payment license template out there somewhere?
- icebraining 6y ago
  The problem with dual-licensing is that it impedes collaboration. If one contributes a big feature, shouldn't they also get some cash from those sales? If so, who decides how much?
  - kd5bjo 6y ago
    That would be a negotiation between the library maintainer, who is running a business selling commercial licenses, and the potential contributor, who wants to be a paid supplier to said business. If the negotiations fail, the contributor’s code is neither merged into upstream nor sold as part of the commercial offering.
roenxi 6y ago
> I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That is an arbitrary criteria, and you'll end up with software being written by Apple Development LLC, the loss-making shell company that Apple uses to do all it's development. If you want something other than the GPL you can use it but don't be surprised when people commercialise your software at scale, don't pay for it and don't release changes back to the community.
- 3pt14159 6y ago
  Nope. Because the loss-making shell company has a stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. The core issue here is all these lawyerly lawyers try to parse words and contracts and it's all bullshit. The core point about OSS isn't to hyper-centralize wealth. The core point about OSS is to enable people to create a common good. A common wealth for the people. I'm not against the core function of capitalism—the feedback loop that allocates resources to those that produce things that others want—I'm against some of its outcomes. Namely, a class of hyper-wealthy people that make out like bandits and incorporate in places like Cyprus to pay as little back as possible to the very communities that enriched them in the first place. It isn't just. And quite frankly, I consider it to be a disease that hurts the billionaire class as much as it hurts the rest of us. This never ending dick measuring contest while the world burns. Ferraris driving past over-packed women's shelters. People ashamed that they "only" drive an Audi. Like, in bayesian free energy terms it's the equivalent to holding onto ninety tons of fat and still trying to eat more. Of course Bezos went ballistic when his phone got hacked. Security concerns sky-rocket when you're holding onto this much energy and power.
  - eru 6y ago
    Almost all public company has stakeholders worth billions: Vanguard for example.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  I mean, this is a fairly trivial loophole to close if you have a lawyer who knows what they're doing. In fact, you don't even need to close the loophole. You just need to make FAANG employees pause long enough to worry that they might not comply, deterring them from using said library.
pampa 6y ago
> Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don't love this hyper-centralization of wealth and it would be better for the world if we defanged the power that billionaires have. We tried it here in russia back in 1917. But then oops! something went wrong.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  In all fairness, there is an extremely large middle ground between Communist insurrection and loophole-diseased corporatism. Just using anti-trust laws to their full effect would be enough.
  - eru 6y ago
    Well, in practice anti-trust law has proven a better tool for the people who can afford expensive lawyers than it's supposed intended purpose. Funny enough, even the original paradigmatic case of breaking up Standard Oil was a farce.
solatic 6y ago
As the person who wrote the software and owns the copyright, nothing prevents you from dual-licensing your software. You can release your software as GPL on GitHub, with a notice that you're willing to also license your code under a paid proprietary license; interested parties may send an email to sales@example.com at their leisure. Do note that this effectively prevents other people from collaborating with you, since their contributions would be GPL-protected and you may not sell them. So it's not a good model for larger open-source projects. But if you're an independent open-source developer who works as a sole contributor and feels exploited, then it's probably a better model.
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  It's not what OP meant at all. He's asking for a license that lets regular devs use your project freely, but require fortune 500 like companies to pay.
  - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
    In a way the dual licensing could do exactly that, it's just a manual process, and not "automated" by the license.
    - michaelt 6y ago
      It depends on the project. If your GPL project will be so tightly coupled with the company's project that their entire project will become GPL - then yes. Big libraries like Qt, for example. On the other hand, if the coupling to the user's project is loose and doesn't make their entire project GPL, they have no reason to pay for a license. For example, compiling with gcc or hosting with nginx, or calling ffmpeg doesn't make your entire product GPL.
      - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
        Wouldn't using AGPL solve this issue?
  - 6y ago
rglullis 6y ago
Apple doesn't love you back. Amazon doesn't love you back. Any company that seems oh-so-awesome, but makes their software proprietary, does not love you back. You are never going to fix the problem of centralization of wealth if you keep thinking that is a matter of "unfairness". (Much like Socialism and central planning), as long as people give in their freedoms to big central entities for the immediate benefit they offer (shiny hardware, low TCO, whatever) economies of scale lock-in and then it becomes almost impossible to get these entities back under control. As long as there are people that think that it is okay for us to spend our resources creating private software we will get companies exploiting trying to extract value from software developers, and especially so from those that work on FOSS
- eru 6y ago
  I thought free software was all about allowing people to create value from it?
  - rglullis 6y ago
    Even though I believe it is more about the principles than the economics, where am I saying otherwise? The problem I am talking about is the asymmetry: Apple (Amazon, Google, MS, etc) can create value from the work from FOSS developers, but FOSS developers can not create value from the work of Apple (Amazon, Google, MS, etc).
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      I would say that developers have been able to create a lot of value building on top of Android (Google), Flutter (Google), and .Net Core (Microsoft). I could probably dig up specifically an Amazon open source example, but I think you can convincingly argue that devs have created a ton of value building on top of the work on AWS.
      - rglullis 6y ago
        First, creating value on top of the platform is not the same of extracting value from it. Second, the examples you give are not part of the core value of the companies. They are commoditizing their complements. [0] When Google releases a self-hosted version of their search and adwords programs, when Amazon makes AWS products compatible with OpenStack or when people can run iOS on any hardware and have access to the source, then I will start believing they are willing to give back proportionally to the amount of value they extract. [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
GoblinSlayer 6y ago
Apple already evades use of GPL3 software, so GPL currently does solve the problem. You can also dual license, like mysql, if you want to provide non-GPL use.
- icebraining 6y ago
  Apple writes software mostly for distribution, so the license affects them heavily. It might not be enough for companies that run the software on their servers and just offer it as a service.
emersion 6y ago
This means you're no longer producing open-source software. You're now producing proprietary software.
orlandohill 6y ago
Check out the Polyform Project's Small Business License. It has a threshold of 100 employees and contractors, and 1,000,000 USD in annual revenue. Of course, the OSI's Open Source Definition precludes these kinds of restrictions, so it isn't "open source" by that definition. https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0/
pedro596 6y ago
I am not a lawyer, and please correct me if needed, but you can publish with GPL in all your projects that you own the copyright and simply include "if GPL doesn't suit your needs ping me" in a README and you can do agreements on case by case basis where you can grant a different license to a specific third party. With this FAANG will need to negotiate to use your code in close source but any average Joe can just write a nice email and use it.
- RegnisGnaw 6y ago
  If the GPL is fine for them, why would FAANG need to use a different license?
  - pedro596 6y ago
    I am referring to the case where FAANG would make money out of your work in closed sources:"With this FAANG will need to negotiate to use your code in closed sources(...)" Still I get your point, and they indeed don't need to negotiate to use GPL but, with GPL most of the times the actual developer receives the merit of the work (whatever it means) and more important, the community can use any improvements/features/functionalities that FAANG may develop on top of original work.
ghaff 6y ago
Then write one. You can write a license with any terms you want. It won't be open source (per FSF, Debian, and OSI definitions) but it can impose absolutely any terms that are important to you. Don't be surprised if not many use it, but you'll have achieved what seems to be your primary objective.
- Guthur 6y ago
  This. Using a free use license and then complaining that companies and people freely use is just completely moronic. And it's not stealing so stop with the hyperbolic nonsense.
MaxGabriel 6y ago
Andreesen Horowitz primarily focuses on early stage startups. A company with 5mm in investment isn’t able to spend 1mm on a single open source license.
globular-toast 6y ago
> I don't want GPL. Any reason for that? Most of the opposition is on religious/fashion/popularity grounds as far as I can tell.
microtherion 6y ago
> I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. What's that supposed to mean? Surely the value of e.g. Linux to its stakeholders surpasses 1B.

rusk 6y ago

What is wrong with saying “all rights reserved. You are free to use this software for educational and nonprofit purposes but once you start to make money off it you must request permission in writing” - I’ve seen a few licences like this. I guess the down sides are it might send some people elsewhere and you might be on your own trying to enforce it in court.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up. Besides, it would have to be a lot more formal; another commenter mentioned the Unreal Engine, which states something to the tune of "free to use until you earn over X, then you pay us Y% of your revenue". Cynically, open source libraries need to use the err, hook-and-sinker approach? Be really good at bootstrapping a company or part thereof, then when they have buy-in, start charging. It's what Unreal and (I think?) Unity do, it's what Slack did (really successfully, in a lot of places where it was introduced it was snuck in the back door by employees, used for a couple of months until the restrictions became too much, then the company started to pay for it; I've never seen 'grassroots' software deployment like that before and I'm impressed). But it'll be difficult to pull off fully without the software being as-a-service or DRM things. I wonder if the package manager systems could play a role in that. Require you to register your application at e.g. NPM, then every time an `npm install` is done, keep track of it. If usage does not decrease, start charging for things. One could also consider an alternative, compatible package manager; an open source publisher could opt to only push to and promote that one. The package manager charges for use, and pays package maintainers relative to usage.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up. It is very much the Silicon Valley mentality that all value is added by that company and that no suppliers should make any profit. Cynically, open source libraries need to use the err, hook-and-sinker approach? The common terminology is “bait and switch”. Also very much Silicon Valley. Apple for example likes to become a critical customer for any supplier, then use their leverage to squeeze them.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  > I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want usage, you can make it MIT and then suffer while they capitalize your code (as they are with in their rights to do), or if you want protection but low usage, make it AGPL or proprietary even. I don't really see a scenario where you have high usage, high protection and also high profit from you selling your product, unless you are good at marketing and selling your product.
  - tingol 6y ago
    What's the point you're making? There's a lot of proprietary software that's - high usage - high protection - high profit What's the argument that OSS software (which you could use for free indefinitely until you gain profitability) is somehow not capable of the same?
    - eru 6y ago
      There's even more software that's not used much at all. Going open source is one of the ways to increase your chances of increased usage.
    - webmaven 6y ago
      > What's the point you're making? There's a lot of proprietary software that's > - high usage - high protection - high profit > What's the argument that OSS software (which you could use for free indefinitely until you gain profitability) is somehow not capable of the same? Software that meets those criteria also has an organization that spends quite a lot on sales and marketing. Stimulation of usage and extraction of revenue doesn't happen on its own. More explicitly, if an already-profitable organization can't use the software without paying on day zero, quite a lot of effort has to be expended to get them to make the leap, hence the long enterprise sales cycle. You can do it with just marketing if you keep the purchase price low (ie. below what a department manager is allowed to spend using a corporate credit card). Open source can circumvent this to an extent, but to do so it has to allow businesses to use the software for free, and convert a percentage of those users to paying voluntarily. Whether the mechanism of conversion is consulting and customization services, hosting services, support services, dual licensing, an 'enterprise' version with specific features, or something else is immaterial, they are never just paying for exactly what they were getting for free. The closest a business will come to that is employing developers to work on the open-source software, or at least allowing employees to work on the software during work hours. The specific licensing-only approach you're outlining will only work in a very narrow case: A new unprofitable company starts using the software for free, and starts paying once they cross over to profitability (at which point they might decide to switch to using something else, instead). Note that there are some very large VC-fueled companies that have yet to be profitable. Convincing an already profitable business to pay at the outset just can't be done without the aforementioned marketing and sales.
majewsky 6y ago
> educational and nonprofit purposes > once you start to make money So if a nonprofit uses that software to sell services (they gotta fund their expenses after all), does that count? Seriously. With vague phrasing like this, you're gonna have a bad time. Contracts are that verbose for a reason.
- rusk 6y ago
  That’s why it’s all rights reserved. If you want to use it to make money you have to ask me. In the scenario you describe is probably say that’s okay, but like I say it’s up to me and only me, at the end of the day. This of course means it’s not open to the kind of free-form open collaboration that typifies Open Source but if anything this just goes to show how more restrictive licences such as GPL actually promote innovation.
  - eru 6y ago
    The GPL is perhaps restrictive than the license you suggested. It's definitely more predictable.
    - rusk 6y ago
      Yes but you are still free to make money off the software, and this is the topic under discussion.
      - eru 6y ago
        Sorry, I missed a word. I was going to say, the GPL is perhaps less restrictive.
dvdkon 6y ago
I for one wouldn't use a library licensed like this. There are ideological reasons, but more practically, let's say I run a server that provides a public service. At some point, it gets a lot of traffic and I want to accept donations or use ads to fund the hosting. Under such a licence, I'd be completely at the mercy of the author, who could effectively shut down the server.
- rusk 6y ago
  Yep. That's the point. You have the option to use something with a more liberal license, develop something yourself, or pay for it. Yes, maybe at the end of the day I lose out to potential suitors, customers, collaborators etc. but that's my choice.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    I don’t think anyone is suggesting that it isn’t your choice. Most people are likely assuming that the typical author intent behind the decision to open source is to increase usage and contributors over the default closed source/proprietary licensing.
- michaelt 6y ago
  Is the problem that you have to pay at all - or is the problem merely that in the absence of a listed price, there's no guarantee the price will be fair? Would you also reject a library with this license if you knew the commercial use license was pocket change?
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    If the commercial license was literally pocket change, I’d be inclined to use it under that commercial license right out of the gate to increase my certainty going forward.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Or you could pay the author for his/her work from your income. I could be wrong but it seems obvious to me that semi-commercial licenses would explode the amount of open code available, because instead of devs working for corporations, corporations would end up working for them. Commercial licensing - open code, free for non-profits, per-seat or per-user pricing for for profits with an official license, forks are considered a derivative work, clean room clones aren't. There would be details, but there are always details, and they don't stop two hundred page EULAs from existing and being (mostly) binding. But we don't have this because Stallman is a zealot and he wanted to Make A Point about purity. So instead of creating a market where devs could actually get paid for original work and corporations would be the ones paying, corporations get millions of hours of development effort for free - because he thought he could somehow magically strong-arm them into playing to his rules.
orlandohill 6y ago
There are source-available licenses for this: Polyform Non-Commercial License https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 Prosperity Public License https://prosperitylicense.com/ https://prosperitylicense.com/

ntucker 6y ago

So write the license this way. I think it's a fabulous idea.

3pt14159 6y ago
I actually did write a license at one point, but I realized that the core issue here was buy-in from the rest of the hacker community. It's like trying to end slavery. Until there are enough of us willing to work an underground railroad the best strategy is evangelizing the issue and collectively coming up with something that works for all of us. I also think that there are good billionaires out there, like Bill Gates and Paul Graham, I don't want a war. I want something that the existing billionaires that are pro-social will sign onto and we need their input and ideas too.

fabianhjr 6y ago

May I suggest something along the lines of Dmytri Kleiner's Peer Production License? As discussed more generally on P2P Foundation: http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Copyfarleft http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Copyfarleft

xDmytri 6y ago
Hey, original author of the Peer Production license here. AMA
- fabianhjr 6y ago
  Hi Dmytri, in your work you mentioned that PPL isn't intended for software. (As it is based on CC-BY-NC-SA which is also not intended for software) Do you have licensing recommendations for software along the lines of copyfair/copyfarleft?
  - xDmytri 6y ago
    For the most part the PPL is intended for consumer information commodities, this could be software, but not captial information comodities like server software or programming languages, but rather books, movies, video games, end-user consumer desktop top software, etc. For capital information goods I recommend the GPL, or even BSD style licenses depending on what it is and who is making it and what their plan is.

krasin 6y ago

Unreal Engine license is along these lines: it's free if you are small / no significant revenue, and it's 5% of your revenue otherwise. That said, not every shared-sources project would be used, if its license requires to pay royalty.

mhh__ 6y ago
Unreal isn't open source
- wodenokoto 6y ago
  What the parent is asking for is inherently not open source.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    For a moment I disagreed with this, so I'll add a link to the OSD [0] for anyone else who wants to quibble. Also a choice quote about Stallman [1]: "Richard Stallman argues the obvious meaning of term "open source" is that the source code is public/accessible for inspection, without necessarily any other rights granted" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
    - yesenadam 6y ago
      Thanks, that led me to this intriguing origin story from Christine Peterson, involving some advanced people skills: (my italics) "Between meetings that week, I was still focused on the need for a better name and came up with the term "open source software." While not ideal, it struck me as good enough. I ran it by at least four others: Eric Drexler, Mark Miller, and Todd Anderson liked it, while a friend in marketing and public relations felt the term "open" had been overused and abused and believed we could do better. He was right in theory; however, I didn't have a better idea... Later that week, on February 5, 1998, a group was assembled at VA Research to brainstorm on strategy. Attending – in addition to Eric Raymond, Todd, and me – were Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman, and attending by phone, Jon "maddog" Hall... Todd was on the ball. Instead of making an assertion that the community should use this specific new term, he did something less directive – a smart thing to do with this community of strong-willed individuals. He simply used the term in a sentence on another topic – just dropped it into the conversation to see what happened.... A few minutes later, one of the others used the term, evidently without noticing, still discussing a topic other than terminology. Todd and I looked at each other out of the corners of our eyes to check: yes, we had both noticed what happened... " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Peterson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Peterson

berdario 6y ago

Have you seen the Anti-capitalist Software License? https://anticapitalist.software/ https://anticapitalist.software/ By default it disallows use by entities like Apple, but you could dual-license it, to provide the million-a-year alternative

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Potential*; it won't do much good if it's trivial software easily reimplemented by Apple's great army of engineers, or if there's competitive software that does the same thing.

robin_reala 6y ago

This is the traditional point that Open Source™ people turn up and say that you’re not allowed to discriminate between different groups of users with an Open Source™ licence. Personally, I’d be in favour of a non-military licence, but that’s historically been blocked by the OSI for the same reasons (not that it stopped Crockford).

cercatrova 6y ago

That's just a proprietary license, just write the license like that if you want as I don't see how anything is stopping you from creating or using such a license. Just don't make the assumption that it's open source, it's just another form of a proprietary license like much of the paid software currently present. However, don't complain later on that you can't modify software or run it on your own device like you can with GPL. You can't have your cake and eat it too, pick one. I wrote more about this in another comment but I'll paste here for convenience. --- Why do people create something and explicitly license it under an open source license and are then surprised when it's used as the license permits? I can see a few possible reasons: 1. Culture: GitHub seems to have the culture of people using and putting out their code as open source just because everyone else is doing it, or they just don't know or care to do enough research about software licenses. 2. Promotion: open source seems to be used as a way to promote your product and you simply hope that no one will "screw you over" by using the license as it permits, even by big companies. They'll use open source to build their product but will cry foul when corporations do the same exact thing the open source creators were doing in the first place! These two factors seem to account for a the reasons behind switching licenses or other licensing issues for a significant portion of the open source license based posts on Hacker News in the past several years. Companies could have just started with a proprietary or copyleft license initially but inevitably in most of the posts I've seen, it's always a company with a permissive MIT style license that then bemoans cloud vendors rightfully taking advantage of their code. What will happen in the future? It seems that people will create more proprietary software in the form of ostensibly "open source" licenses such as the SSPL by MongoDB or others. People will say that they're not truly open source, just another variation on proprietary source available licenses, which is true but the problem isn't a moral one, it's a practical one. GPL was started because the end user freedoms were eroded, and these licenses also fall into that, where people will soon discover that a proprietary license isn't great when they want to expand the original software but are encumbered by the license, such as if they work for a large company or other such restriction. Having no restrictions is always better than having even small ones. But how will open source creators make money, one may ask. The simple answer is, they don't, and they shouldn't expect to. The more complex answer is, open source is not a business model, it is merely a licensing and distribution model. You must compete not on the code but the problems your code solves. Your product must also include marketing, sales, branding, and other business skills. Treat your product as a startup. Amazon could open source all of its code and infrastructure and it would still be the dominant player in cloud computing as well as buying stuff online. Why? They are not in the business of selling code, they are in the business of selling convenience (as every business is actually, you don't hunt your own meat, a grocery store sells you the convenience of buying food, with money rather than time and effort; business is just commoditized convenience). Moreover, people know and trust Amazon, they don't know your other site, even if you took their source code and made your own website. At the end of the day, people need to understand that a product is not a business. If you want to make money, you probably shouldn't make a free product. There are ways to leverage a free product into a business, as seen with TailwindCSS (free, open source) to Tailwind UI (paid, proprietary) or Laravel to Laravel Spark and Forge (they're what's known as lead magnets in marketing terms, a free product to entice the customer to buy the paid version), but don't expect people to spontaneously pay you when they could use your product for free, unless, again, you have the business skills to make your product stand out via marketing and having product-market fit.

kd5bjo 6y ago

That sounds like an aggressive copyleft license plus a paid commercial license to avoid the copyleft terms. If someone wants to charge for a software library, is there a good royalty-free, one-time payment license template out there somewhere?

icebraining 6y ago
The problem with dual-licensing is that it impedes collaboration. If one contributes a big feature, shouldn't they also get some cash from those sales? If so, who decides how much?
- kd5bjo 6y ago
  That would be a negotiation between the library maintainer, who is running a business selling commercial licenses, and the potential contributor, who wants to be a paid supplier to said business. If the negotiations fail, the contributor’s code is neither merged into upstream nor sold as part of the commercial offering.

roenxi 6y ago

> I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That is an arbitrary criteria, and you'll end up with software being written by Apple Development LLC, the loss-making shell company that Apple uses to do all it's development. If you want something other than the GPL you can use it but don't be surprised when people commercialise your software at scale, don't pay for it and don't release changes back to the community.

3pt14159 6y ago
Nope. Because the loss-making shell company has a stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. The core issue here is all these lawyerly lawyers try to parse words and contracts and it's all bullshit. The core point about OSS isn't to hyper-centralize wealth. The core point about OSS is to enable people to create a common good. A common wealth for the people. I'm not against the core function of capitalism—the feedback loop that allocates resources to those that produce things that others want—I'm against some of its outcomes. Namely, a class of hyper-wealthy people that make out like bandits and incorporate in places like Cyprus to pay as little back as possible to the very communities that enriched them in the first place. It isn't just. And quite frankly, I consider it to be a disease that hurts the billionaire class as much as it hurts the rest of us. This never ending dick measuring contest while the world burns. Ferraris driving past over-packed women's shelters. People ashamed that they "only" drive an Audi. Like, in bayesian free energy terms it's the equivalent to holding onto ninety tons of fat and still trying to eat more. Of course Bezos went ballistic when his phone got hacked. Security concerns sky-rocket when you're holding onto this much energy and power.
- eru 6y ago
  Almost all public company has stakeholders worth billions: Vanguard for example.
nmfisher 6y ago
I mean, this is a fairly trivial loophole to close if you have a lawyer who knows what they're doing. In fact, you don't even need to close the loophole. You just need to make FAANG employees pause long enough to worry that they might not comply, deterring them from using said library.

pampa 6y ago

> Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don't love this hyper-centralization of wealth and it would be better for the world if we defanged the power that billionaires have. We tried it here in russia back in 1917. But then oops! something went wrong.

sebmellen 6y ago
In all fairness, there is an extremely large middle ground between Communist insurrection and loophole-diseased corporatism. Just using anti-trust laws to their full effect would be enough.
- eru 6y ago
  Well, in practice anti-trust law has proven a better tool for the people who can afford expensive lawyers than it's supposed intended purpose. Funny enough, even the original paradigmatic case of breaking up Standard Oil was a farce.

solatic 6y ago

As the person who wrote the software and owns the copyright, nothing prevents you from dual-licensing your software. You can release your software as GPL on GitHub, with a notice that you're willing to also license your code under a paid proprietary license; interested parties may send an email to sales@example.com at their leisure. Do note that this effectively prevents other people from collaborating with you, since their contributions would be GPL-protected and you may not sell them. So it's not a good model for larger open-source projects. But if you're an independent open-source developer who works as a sole contributor and feels exploited, then it's probably a better model.

pietrovismara 6y ago
It's not what OP meant at all. He's asking for a license that lets regular devs use your project freely, but require fortune 500 like companies to pay.
- faeyanpiraat 6y ago
  In a way the dual licensing could do exactly that, it's just a manual process, and not "automated" by the license.
  - michaelt 6y ago
    It depends on the project. If your GPL project will be so tightly coupled with the company's project that their entire project will become GPL - then yes. Big libraries like Qt, for example. On the other hand, if the coupling to the user's project is loose and doesn't make their entire project GPL, they have no reason to pay for a license. For example, compiling with gcc or hosting with nginx, or calling ffmpeg doesn't make your entire product GPL.
    - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
      Wouldn't using AGPL solve this issue?
- 6y ago

rglullis 6y ago

Apple doesn't love you back. Amazon doesn't love you back. Any company that seems oh-so-awesome, but makes their software proprietary, does not love you back. You are never going to fix the problem of centralization of wealth if you keep thinking that is a matter of "unfairness". (Much like Socialism and central planning), as long as people give in their freedoms to big central entities for the immediate benefit they offer (shiny hardware, low TCO, whatever) economies of scale lock-in and then it becomes almost impossible to get these entities back under control. As long as there are people that think that it is okay for us to spend our resources creating private software we will get companies exploiting trying to extract value from software developers, and especially so from those that work on FOSS

eru 6y ago
I thought free software was all about allowing people to create value from it?
- rglullis 6y ago
  Even though I believe it is more about the principles than the economics, where am I saying otherwise? The problem I am talking about is the asymmetry: Apple (Amazon, Google, MS, etc) can create value from the work from FOSS developers, but FOSS developers can not create value from the work of Apple (Amazon, Google, MS, etc).
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    I would say that developers have been able to create a lot of value building on top of Android (Google), Flutter (Google), and .Net Core (Microsoft). I could probably dig up specifically an Amazon open source example, but I think you can convincingly argue that devs have created a ton of value building on top of the work on AWS.
    - rglullis 6y ago
      First, creating value on top of the platform is not the same of extracting value from it. Second, the examples you give are not part of the core value of the companies. They are commoditizing their complements. [0] When Google releases a self-hosted version of their search and adwords programs, when Amazon makes AWS products compatible with OpenStack or when people can run iOS on any hardware and have access to the source, then I will start believing they are willing to give back proportionally to the amount of value they extract. [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

GoblinSlayer 6y ago

Apple already evades use of GPL3 software, so GPL currently does solve the problem. You can also dual license, like mysql, if you want to provide non-GPL use.

icebraining 6y ago
Apple writes software mostly for distribution, so the license affects them heavily. It might not be enough for companies that run the software on their servers and just offer it as a service.

emersion 6y ago

This means you're no longer producing open-source software. You're now producing proprietary software.

orlandohill 6y ago

Check out the Polyform Project's Small Business License. It has a threshold of 100 employees and contractors, and 1,000,000 USD in annual revenue. Of course, the OSI's Open Source Definition precludes these kinds of restrictions, so it isn't "open source" by that definition. https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0/

pedro596 6y ago

I am not a lawyer, and please correct me if needed, but you can publish with GPL in all your projects that you own the copyright and simply include "if GPL doesn't suit your needs ping me" in a README and you can do agreements on case by case basis where you can grant a different license to a specific third party. With this FAANG will need to negotiate to use your code in close source but any average Joe can just write a nice email and use it.

RegnisGnaw 6y ago
If the GPL is fine for them, why would FAANG need to use a different license?
- pedro596 6y ago
  I am referring to the case where FAANG would make money out of your work in closed sources:"With this FAANG will need to negotiate to use your code in closed sources(...)" Still I get your point, and they indeed don't need to negotiate to use GPL but, with GPL most of the times the actual developer receives the merit of the work (whatever it means) and more important, the community can use any improvements/features/functionalities that FAANG may develop on top of original work.

ghaff 6y ago

Then write one. You can write a license with any terms you want. It won't be open source (per FSF, Debian, and OSI definitions) but it can impose absolutely any terms that are important to you. Don't be surprised if not many use it, but you'll have achieved what seems to be your primary objective.

Guthur 6y ago
This. Using a free use license and then complaining that companies and people freely use is just completely moronic. And it's not stealing so stop with the hyperbolic nonsense.

MaxGabriel 6y ago

Andreesen Horowitz primarily focuses on early stage startups. A company with 5mm in investment isn’t able to spend 1mm on a single open source license.

globular-toast 6y ago

> I don't want GPL. Any reason for that? Most of the opposition is on religious/fashion/popularity grounds as far as I can tell.

microtherion 6y ago

> I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. What's that supposed to mean? Surely the value of e.g. Linux to its stakeholders surpasses 1B.