Interesting idea for a license.
Everyone can use and modify it, but if a large company with a market cap above $100m or a company wholly funded or owned by such company decides to utilize this project as a for-profit service, then said large company must hire me at for no less than $175,000 in 2020 value.
No, I think I'll respond to that. It's not that I don't _care_, but it's naive at best to expect anything else. Besides, if your license allows it, they're not really taking advantage are they? Change your license.
>Everyone can use and modify it, but if a large company with a market cap above $100m or a company wholly funded or owned by such company decides to utilize this project as a for-profit service, then said large company must hire me at for no less than $175,000 in 2020 value.
Seems incredibly difficult to implement logistically, and most companies will probably just say "screw it" as they all hope to be valued at > 100M some day. Just enforce a per-basis license negotiation for commercial use or disallow it entirely. What happens if a company goes from a cap of 99M -> 101M -> 98M (etc etc). Just seems wrought with obvious problems.
^^ Written as if you've been burnt before...
https://creativecommons.org/faq/#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Common...
As stated on the Creative Commons website (licensed under CC-BY):
Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software? We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses listed as free by the Free Software Foundation and listed as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative.
Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works. Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed work with other free software. Existing software licenses were designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of rights to the Creative Commons licenses.
Version 4.0 of CC’s Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) license is one-way compatible with the GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3). This compatibility mechanism is designed for situations in which content is integrated into software code in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish the two. There are special considerations required before using this compatibility mechanism. Read more about it here.
>Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available
But as far as I am aware, there are no comparable software licenses that prohibit commercial use. So, the CC NC licenses seem to be the only option here, even if supposedly imperfect.
Do you have an example of an ambiguity with regard to non-commercial use?
You might consider whether it serves your intended goals.
In effect, if you sell redis as a service (which, and IANAL, as I understand doesn't mean you sell a service supported by using redis) you must pay them in some way.
FYPML.
Figuring out the right terms would be difficult, but not impossible.
In my view, no license can enforce being a good citizen of the open source community. In the embedded space, I've seen vendors bound by the GPL follow it in letter but not in spirit (ie, delivering unusable code with a ridiculous toolchain), or just straight up ignore it (what are we going to do, sue?). On the flipside, good citizen vendors frequently contribute upstream even when they don't have to.
It specifically does not require you to pay homage to the original author. The point is to ensure that the code remains free, the original author has no say over what happens to it.
Whether the GPL is good enough for that depends on whether end users are recipients of binaries and therefore would be entitled to the source under GPL.
I once discussed that with my employer and they agreed: it's almost never a good idea to fork a product in order to fix bugs, since you will have to continouiusly maintain the fork. If you get the fix upstream, you'll get the maintenance for free. So this often is not out of generosity, but rather in their own interests.
Licenses are contracts. You can add to the contract that people who fork must do star-jumps every morning, if you feel like; but you have to state it upfront.
It baffles me how many people fail to understand this.
Both are about freedom that is only directly meaningful for developers or people that can employ developers on their behalf; permissive license are about simply providing that freedom rather directly, with limitations that tend to be focussed mainly on avoiding unexpected costs to the original provider of the software (liability, reputational, or otherwise). Copyleft licenses compromise direct provision of freedom to acheive broader but less direct social goals which relate to that freedom.
If you both agree with the goal and agree with the pragmatic judgement involved in the design of the detailed mechanics in a particular license about how to acheived that goal, its quite possible that a copyleft license is better for your interest.
Personally, whether the goal is (and these are two very different goals I've seen cited by GPL proponents) promoting development of free software or inhibiting development of nonfree software, I'm not sure the GPL family (or any other copyleft license) does that better, in practice, than permissive licenses.
The GPL is better at inhibiting nonfree direct descendants of a particular code base, but I don't generally see that as a valuable goal.
GPL is the better license for net freedom. - it's not, because of it's virality, it pollutes other code and then demands everything fall into it's license, which is ethically wrong.
Nobody has a gun held to their head and are forced to use GPL code in their code.
These are, honestly, expensive questions to answer as the tech gets more complicated - at what point is linux part of the binary you're distributing vs. an external dependency and, if you get the answers wrong, you'll potentially create an outage that will wreck havoc on the economy by grinding the cloud to a halt and cost Amazon tens of billions in revenue.
This is a very, very, complicated situation.
Sure the author can't require payment after the fact, but there are no open source licenses that prevent the author from soliciting payment from a downstream user. This is all fair game.
>You seem to want all of the good of open source, with none of the downsides.
If you do it right there aren't downsides. As far as business is concerned, the point with choosing any license is to create a win-win situation for all parties involved.
That's not how GPLv3 works. Both in terms of selling [1] and in terms of additional permissions under section 7.
GPLv3 without a CLA essentially requires you make the modified code available, but not when it's behind a cloud/webservice. For that you need AGPLv3.
This does go against some philosophical decisions underlying the GPL license but IMO GPL itself is less free than BSD/MIT licensing and to each their own.
Then use a different license. Hoping that a company like Amazon finds it in their hearts to always do what _you_ consider "the right thing" is just a loser of a strategy. You seem to want all of the good of open source, with none of the downsides. Good luck with that.