Re:No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
by warent on Monday November 09, 2020 @03:23AM
(#25032534)
When I worked at Google I heard AGPL called the "fuck google license" for this reason. There do exist licenses which restrict certain business models, but I agree there could probably be even more work around improving it
Re:No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
by ghayes on Monday November 09, 2020 @03:30AM
(#25032581)
There are a ton of real world problems here though: if a small
company gets acquired, do they have to stop using the license? Negotiate with you to pay for it? FOSS licenses are meant to be free to anyone, including big orgs, so long as they play by the rules. AGPL might be your target.
Re:No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
by cercatrova on Monday November 09, 2020 @03:38AM
(#25032644)
I was just mentioning to the OP about their wants, that it's possible for them to write their own license with their own terms, it is their source code after all, but I'm not necessarily advocating for such a proprietary license. I am in full support of the AGPL over 'permissive' MIT style licenses, although of course I'll still use MIT open source code if it exists.
Re:No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
by BlueTemplar on Monday November 09, 2020 @05:49AM
(#25033430)
The traditional ways to make money from free (libre) software and open source were :
1.) selling physical copies
2.) charging for support
The first one is probably not viable most of the time these days, but I can see how the second one could work : for instance one could modify one's code forge so that you would need to pay to open a ticket, and/or put up an asked sum of money to start working on a ticket (that several people could contribute to).
Re:No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
by Qwertious on Monday November 09, 2020 @09:37AM
(#25035226)
We could still sell software if distros decided to add support for selling freedom-respecting software through the package manager. Some people still do it (see RCU on http://davisr.me , it's a $15 FOSS third-party program for stuff related to the ReMarkable e-ink stylus tablet)
Re:No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
by cercatrova on Monday November 09, 2020 @11:48AM
(#25036682)
Neither option stops Amazon from packaging your code up and selling it as a cloud service.
Re:No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
by boomlinde on Monday November 09, 2020 @04:12AM
(#25032874)
> 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
It would be nice with a license template for this purpose, vetted by a lawyer to be reasonably airtight. Encoding that intent in a way that's not easily avoidable is probably harder than most people think.
Re:No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
by cercatrova on Monday November 09, 2020 @04:17AM
(#25032904)
Probably true, someone else mentioned that Apple could simply make a shell company that is technically only worth a small amount of money in order to fit into the "under 1 billion dollar valuation" stipulation. I'm not a lawyer so you'd have to take up the specifics with them.
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.