4 ms·

I'm just saying that as a consumer of software, I am wary of subjective terms like "fair" that I can't afford to litigate. Yeah, pricing software is hard and of

I'm just saying that as a consumer of software, I am wary of subjective terms like "fair" that I can't afford to litigate. Yeah, pricing software is hard and of course the seller wants to tailor each deal to the customer... but if the customer is already dependent on the software, the power relationship is lopsided. As a customer, if your software is something that I can fairly easily replace, then sure this license is not scary. If it's critical to my business, this license is the same as a "trial period" and I need to have some idea what happens at the end of the trial period so I can compare it against the alternatives (competitors, build in-house, etc). Examples: Some random image processing library - sure, I can probably find or make alternatives. Some exotic database - probably not, too much lock-in.

kemitchell 5y ago
"Fair" can express an intuition, in addition to objective standards. Which is why Big Time adds both context and definitions to flesh it out. A bitter dispute about those terms could result in litigation. But the overwhelming majority of contract disputes don't go to court. Sides figure things out based on estimates of their odds in court. The defined term "fair commercial license" only matters if you fall outside the definition of "Small Business", reach out for a paid license proposal, and don't see receive proposal you think meets the definition within 32 days. In other words, if negotiations for the license totally fail. At that point, if the developer is dead convinced they've made proposals meeting the requirements of Big Time, and your company continues to use the software, they can sue you for infringement. Which, in all likelihood, will just result in another round of license agreement negotiations, this time with lawyers. If you get to the point where a piece of Big Time software is worth that much to your business, even if it still counts as a "Small Business" under the terms, there's nothing to stop you reaching out to negotiate paid terms ahead of time. In sum, both the value of the software to your business and the extent to which you're even worth pursuing in the first place will affect the way things play out in practice. FRAND-like commitment aside, compared to the traditional, closed-and-proprietary approach, the difference with Big Time is that noncommercial and small-business users can have the software for free, and everyone can see the source code.
onphonenow 5y ago
Agreed. Ideally it would be up to 2% of related product revenue up to $500K per year or whatever so there was some kind of fallback cap or similar.

kemitchell 5y ago

"Fair" can express an intuition, in addition to objective standards. Which is why Big Time adds both context and definitions to flesh it out. A bitter dispute about those terms could result in litigation. But the overwhelming majority of contract disputes don't go to court. Sides figure things out based on estimates of their odds in court. The defined term "fair commercial license" only matters if you fall outside the definition of "Small Business", reach out for a paid license proposal, and don't see receive proposal you think meets the definition within 32 days. In other words, if negotiations for the license totally fail. At that point, if the developer is dead convinced they've made proposals meeting the requirements of Big Time, and your company continues to use the software, they can sue you for infringement. Which, in all likelihood, will just result in another round of license agreement negotiations, this time with lawyers. If you get to the point where a piece of Big Time software is worth that much to your business, even if it still counts as a "Small Business" under the terms, there's nothing to stop you reaching out to negotiate paid terms ahead of time. In sum, both the value of the software to your business and the extent to which you're even worth pursuing in the first place will affect the way things play out in practice. FRAND-like commitment aside, compared to the traditional, closed-and-proprietary approach, the difference with Big Time is that noncommercial and small-business users can have the software for free, and everyone can see the source code.

onphonenow 5y ago

Agreed. Ideally it would be up to 2% of related product revenue up to $500K per year or whatever so there was some kind of fallback cap or similar.