Who do you think a "regular dev" is?

If it's software for personal use, then the GPL is just fine. The GPL is explicitly designed to protect personal use.

If it's software for commercial use - I mean, that's exactly what the issue is here. Commercial users ought to need to pay for the software they use. Just because you offer a commercial license doesn't mean you need to charge a million bucks for it - if someone emails you and says that they work for a startup, you can always respond with a exclusive commercial license free of charge, if you like.

If you own the software you can charge whatever you like to different people.

> Who do you think a "regular dev" is?

Someone who's not employed by a fortune 500 company, probably the 99% of devs?

Why is it evil for a large company making a large profit to exploit your free work, but not a small company making a small profit? They're both benefitting from work you're doing without paying you. Personally I don't see an qualitative difference, just one of degree.

Like I said, go ahead and offer free commercial licenses to small companies, who in your estimation are 99% of developers.

Because a small company, by definition, doesn't earn millions and usually has very small margins (if none, if they're still in the startup phase). A large company can definitely afford to contribute more.

> Like I said, go ahead and offer free commercial licenses to small companies, who in your estimation are 99% of developers.

Offering commercial licenses adds a lot of work on top of the already difficult development of OSS projects. I don't understand why you think that the situation can be fixed using existing solutions, when the problem arised with these solutions already in place.

Perhaps we need something different??

Edit: I also completely reject the notion that everything should be commercialized. OSS is the antithesis of this. Down with commercial licenses, down with rich capitalists exploting people's voluntary work.

In a way the dual licensing could do exactly that, it's just a manual process, and not "automated" by the license.

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.

Wouldn't using AGPL solve this issue?