I tried a couple license finders and I even looked into the OSI database but I could not find a license that works pretty much like agpl but requiring payment (combined 1% of revenue per month, spread evenly over all FOSS software, if applicable) if one of these is true:
- the downstream user makes revenue (as in “is a company” or gets donations)
- the downstream distributor is connected to a commercial user (e.g. to exclude google from making a non profit to circumvent this license)
I ask this because of the backdoor in xz and the obviously rotten situation in billion dollar companies not kicking their fair share back to the people providing this stuff.
So, if something similar exists, feel free to let me know.
Thanks for reading and have a good one.
Fauxpen source licenses such as this are the answer to the wrong question.
“Other people making money with my stuff” was never a problem in the software-freedom community. Whether this means “selling my stuff” or “using my stuff in a commercial setting” (“commercial use” restrictions are confusing in this way). In the free-software world we just accept that our work belongs to the community and the community can use it in ways we don’t approve of.
(Edit: Likewise, it has never been an issue to sell copies of free software, although I should point out the very nature of software freedom makes it more difficult to guarantee a revenue stream in this way)
Rather, this is a symptom of the proprietary software world’s reaction to free software and co-option of it (in the form of the open source movement). Tom Preston-Werner, founder of GitHub, opined that proprietary software companies should open source almost everything - “almost everything” being anything that does not “represent business value.” In other words, open source cost centers but keep profit centers proprietary. Ideally, these companies would cooperate on widely used components (and some do!), but practically they spend as little as possible because capitalism. This is also why we see so many projects turning fauxpen source lately; these companies imagined they were developing cost centers and then realized they could be profit centers instead.
What was (and still is) a problem is people making proprietary derivatives of free software, and copyleft is the solution to that. If you want to extract license fees from proprietary software developers you can dual-license under a strong copyleft like (A)GPL for the free software community and sell proprietary licenses. Believe it or not, Stallman explicitly does not object to this - mainly because, if selling GPL exceptions to enable proprietary development is wrong, then releasing under a permissive license must also be wrong because that also enables proprietary development.
I think this has been the best explanation together with the least condescending attitude in this whole thread. Thank you very much for making this easily understandable. I feel understood and can now grasp this a lot better.
If more people were like you, this world would be a much better place. You have my deepest respect.
Have a nice day.
Hi @haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com,
fyi icymi due to this thread someone posted this other thread asking “Is it appropriate for someone to be a mod here when they don’t understand open source, and insult users in the community?”.
I don’t have time to read all ~200 comments in these two threads, but I do think that being a moderator of /c/opensource@lemmy.ml requires knowing what FOSS is to be able to remove posts promoting things which are not.
Hopefully the replies here (again, I have not read even half of this thread…) have made you better informed?
In case you haven’t yet, I would highly recommend that you read these two documents (you can start with their wikipedia articles and follow links from there to the actual documents):
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition
In short, the answer to your question (“Is there a License that requires the user to donate if they make revenue?”) is yes, there are many such licenses, but they are definitively not FOSS licenses (despite what some people who haven’t read the above definitions might try to tell you).
I won’t enumerate any of the non-FOSS licenses which attempt such a thing, because I recommend against the use of such licenses or software licensed under them.
BTW, I saw you wrote in another comment:
By now I get that FOSS mostly implies free work for corporations. I‘ll just go with agpl to ensure they get nothing from my work.
While corporations benefiting from FOSS while failing to financially support it at all is extremely commonplace, I vehemently disagree that that is what FOSS “mostly implies”. In fact, the opposite is more common: the vast majority of free software users are not paying anything to the companies who have paid for an enormous amount of the development of it. A few hundred companies pay tens of thousands of individual developers to develop and maintain the Linux kernel, for instance.
Regarding the second sentence of yours that I quoted above, in case you haven’t understood this yet: the AGPL does not prevent commercial use of your work. If you write a web app and license it AGPL, you are giving me permission to run it, modify it, redistribute my modified version, and to charge money for it without giving you anything.
What the AGPL does, and why many companies avoid it, is impose the requirement that I (the recipient of your software) offer the source code to your software (and any modifications I made to it) under that same license not only to anyone I distribute it to but also to anyone using the software over a network on my server.
If the software were licensed GPL instead of AGPL, I would only be required to offer GPL-licensed source code to people when I distribute the software to them. Eg, I could improve a GPL web app and it is legal to not share my improvements (to the server-side code) with anyone at all because the software is not being distributed - it is just running on my server.
By imposing requirements about how you run the software (eg, if you put an AGPL notice in the UI, I am not allowed to remove it) the AGPL is more than just a copyright license: violations of the GPL and most FOSS licenses are strictly copyright violations and can be enforced as such, but violating the part of the AGPL where it differs from the GPL would not constitute copyright infringement because no copying is taking place. Unlike almost every other FOSS license, the AGPL is both a copyright license and a end-user license agreement.
For this reason, many people have misgivings about the AGPL. However, if you want to scare companies away from using your software at all (and/or require them to purchase a different license from you to use it under non-AGPL terms, which is only possible if you require all contributors to assign copyright or otherwise give you permission to dual-license their work) while still using a license which the FOSS community generally accepts as FOSS… AGPL is probably your best bet.
HTH.
p.s. I’m not a lawyer, this isn’t legal advice, etc etc :)
You can put up a non commercial license and write that if this is for a commercial application they can get in touch with you and you can discuss together a new license for their use case.
Yeah, I’m thinking of a more easy to understand thing. “Get in touch” is too much of a barrier imo. “Agpl but you need to pay 1% of your revenue to FOSS software”
They would have to get in touch to figure out how to pay 1% either way, no?
No, because my idea was that they have to pay 1% to all foss projects (total, not individual) they use and if the projects want donations, they have to post it on their repos. if its not on the repo, no donation is required.
1% is an exorbitant amount of money, and more than most businesses would be able to donate via credit card, so they would still have to reach out to repository owners for banking info
Actually, we are currently working on something like a payment union for FOSS developers. That would make this significantly easier. And also, I dont care if google has to do it, I just dont want everyone to have to contact me for 1.50 $/€.
You are probably better off setting up a non-profit and running traditional license fees through it into your payment union then. I can’t emphasize how much of a non-starter 1% of revenues is for any business (it’s my company’s entire IT budget, including salary) - you are basically just saying “personal use only” with more words.
Actually, I‘m just excluding companies like yours because they are making way too much revenue on the basis of FOSS without giving back. We would have millions of FOSS developers if this were the case and we would solve dozens of current problems.
For example every employed sw dev with a specific skill set would then be able to go self employed immediately since they can provide insane foss code, stuff that we currently dont have and every company in the world can use it, just making sure they pay FOSS tax, so to speak.
It would completely break the locked down proprietary software model and break walled gardens wide open.
Generally, a free software license has to grant the 4 freedoms to be compatible to the gpl and co.
Freedom 0 is running the program however you wish, for any purpose. Imagine if that wasnt standard for free software, and having to read every license of every program you are using to find out if you are allowed to run it!
So your funny license would sadly be incompatible with other free software. Consider dual licensing it instead, with agpl + a propriatary license for businesses that hate free software, and make them pay through the nose for it.
I dont know why my license idea would be funny but thanks for elaborating. I‘ll read up on dual licensing.
They meant funny “different”, not funny “haha”.
That’s the FSF definition. Most users and developers of open source do not care at all about that, and certainly do not care about protecting corporate right to use their software without giving back.
To many of them, open source is about transparency, community driven development, open contribution model, forkability, etc.
no, thats also the open source definition point 6: No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor.
A license that reatricts use would be a “source-availible” license aka corporate bs “work for me for free” licenses.
Also, with strong copyleft licenses, businesses must give back, namely when expanding the program. I think thats what many programmers like about open-source and free software. And yeah, a free software license is a precondition to bazaar style development.
with strong copyleft licenses, businesses must give back, namely when expanding the program
A user is required to make the source open only if they create a derivative work of the copyleft licensed work, and only if said work was distributed to users. And if I remember correctly, it is only required to open the source to the users it was distributed to.
They do not have to do any profit sharing or donation. They are not even required to make the code open source if they merely use this program, or they interface with it. They are not required to do anything if they only use it internally.
no, thats also the open source definition
Correction: the definition of open source by a specific organization, the OSI.
I don’t remember voting or appointing the OSI as our legitimate representative. But you know who did? Corporations like Amazon, Google, Bloomberg, and many of them: https://opensource.org/sponsors
I do not subscribe to a definition from such an organization, just because it has open source in the name.
The people who coined the term “open source” are the same people who founded OSI. If you don’t like their term, don’t use it.
If you want to sell proprietary software, why not just write and sell it? Or as others have suggested, dual license it? Hell, even the old shareware model could work for what you’ve described.
Unless you’re paying enforcers, how would you know if a corporation paid the right amount to use the code? How would your union determine distribution amounts to projects? How far upstream would payments go? How will disputes among developers be resolved?
Lots of foss use dual license: free for individual or non-profit use, but pay for commercial use, or even commercial use above a specific threshold. As part of my job, I’ve had to remove several of these, where the developer thinks it’s free but the corp can’t comply with the free licensing. It works.
Here’s an extremely well known example
I still haven’t decided what kind of company mine is with respect to foss. Its a good thing that they put effort into complying with licensing terms, they do support developers making contributions back, and historically they’ve “bought” a few foss projects (hire the developer, include that in his job responsibilities)! However I haven’t yet seen them make a corporate contribution and the first response with being out of compliance is to remove the dependency.
So it’s good that we take it seriously, and good that we historically contributed, however we don’t seem to co tribute much anymore and clearly get more benefit from foss than we give back
I thought Docker is FOSS but Desktop is not.
Branding confusion aside they are distinct, but complimentary, products with distinct licensing.
You are correct, my example is not a perfect fit.
I dont want to write proprietary software. I write foss software. But i dont want you to make money off of my invention without giving back, easy as pie.
The rest would obviously have to be determined. A union is a separate entity, same as the linux foundation seems to distribute donations (from another comment) it would have to be discussed and agreed upon.
Still, those who use foss, make money and dont donate upstream are scum imo.
This is not FOSS then. FOSS puts no restrictions on downstream use of your software other than that you acknowledge and credit the original authors… This is “Open Source” with strings attached. It’s no different than being forced to sign an NDA to see your code.
You either make it free for everybody, or then it isn’t free software.
Wrong. Free in FOSS means freely distributable, not free of cost. My idea of cost is just different than “pay for download”.
It does mean free of cost if the person downstream from you decides to not charge for it after getting it from you and forking it. That’s why you’re not finding a FOSS license that allows this. Because again, that’s not FOSS.
Here’s Stallman’s/FSF’s view on requiring
loyalties (lol)royalties (read the whole section, it’s explicitly stated at the end), and here’s similar requirement in OSI’s Open source definition.You are free to use whatever license you wish, but don’t call it FOSS/Open source if you don’t agree with their definitions.
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
So, if I understand this correctly, open source means free beer, just not if you sell the end product.
its all a scam for free work for corpos then. Very disappointing.
So, if I understand this correctly, open source means free beer, just not if you sell the end product.
Yes, once you give the beer to someone, you can’t require any further payments no matter what they do with it. Free software philosophy says users are free to use the software however they wish and for whatever purpose they wish without any barriers (like having to pay for commercial use).
its all a scam for free work for corpos then. Very disappointing.
I’m sorry you feel that way, and it’s becoming a not-so-rare sentiment lately (or at least I’ve started noticing it more), but I don’t agree. Look at (A)GPL and how many companies are doing their best to avoid such code - like when Google made their own C library for Android and even stated that its main goal was to avoid copyleft licenses. I’ve also seen plenty of people say that GPL code is pretty much useless for their work due to their company’s policies forbidding its use.
I also think that revenue-based loyalties screw over small companies the most - sure, you get the donations from the massive companies that can work with 1% of their revenue gone while also keeping it free for non-commercial users, but in my view you also help those same massive corporations by making the software less viable for their smaller competitors who don’t have the economies of scale on their side, and for whom that 1% might legitimately break the bank.
And to be clear, I don’t mean any of my arguments as some kind of “gotcha! Look, I’m right and you’re wrong”, I just thought I might share my reasoning for why I don’t think your statement is fair.
Thats a very reasonable answer, in brutal contrast to all the childish trolls in this community that flooded my inbox and are blocked now.
I‘ll probably just leave it at that. Its probably agpl forever for me since I‘m not giving my work to anyone who thinks they can just fuck over the little man. If we cant work out a foss version that is fair to devs then it is copyleft.
Still very disappointing. Thank you for providing the explanation though. I appreciate it.
Yeah, that’s cool and all, but your software isn’t FOSS if ppl have to pay to use it… Just license it under the AGPL and call it a day
You dont understand what FOSS means then. Free in FOSS means freedom, not free beer. You can absolutely charge someone to use it, which I’m not suggesting. I’m saying if a corpo uses software under my idea of a license, they have to pay fairly, thats it.
I know what FOSS means, but it seems like you think a license only needs to comply with one of the rules set up by OSI to be a FOSS license. If you charge your users (corps are also users) licensing fees, then you’re discriminating against specific fields of endeavor (users making money using your software). I’d argue you’re also interfering with other software projects, as some projects are strictly refusing donations (uBlock Origin as a popular example). As a last point: how would a business know which software it’s using and how do you define what project should get how much of their 1% of revenue? If a business is using proprietary ERP-Software, and that is using any random FOSS-Library, then how would that business know that the library is being used and, assuming they found out, how would they determine how much to donate?
i dont want you to make money off of my invention without giving back
Why do you think that you’re interested in writing FOSS software? Nothing you’ve posted here supports that claim. You do, however, speak like a textbook entrepreneur who wants to be paid for their innovation.
Their concern is obviously solving the dire problem of FOSS maintainers not getting compensated for their work, not getting rich themselves.
Obviously. With this much “I/me/my” in their rhetoric, it’s clear that they’re thinking about everyone else.
I have built stuff to help people all my life and have gotten fuck all for it. Its very easy to understand why I sound like this. Because I dont like people freeloading on others. Its selfish and disgusting.
If you don’t like people accepting what you freely offer, then don’t offer it. If you want to be paid, sell your work. It’s extraordinarily simple.
I dont like your condescending tone mate. I can have my opinion without having this and that ascribed to my personality every step of the way. Stop projecting.
I‘m ending this now. Good bye.
Im an outsider to this community but I am confused by this. I actually do understand wanting to earn from your work but I wouldn’t then offer free stuff expecting money in return.
I am not in IT but with my skillset I get paid from work and then I do charity work separately, I dont think it would make sense for me to find issue with the lack of return on my charitable time.
If you don’t want to give it away for free, then just don’t make it FOSS. It’s that simple. People use free-libre licenses because they want to use that license model. If you don’t want to, then don’t.
I‘m gonna say it again. Condescend and dogpile on someone else. I‘m trying to discuss something here. Good bye
That’s not FOSS. All you’ll do is guarantee that no one will contribute to your project and will just wait for someone else to make their own FOSS version, or encourage corporations to write their own version in-house.
I think we’re far from solutions to ensuring money from FOSS goes to contributors, but moving to licenses that enforce it at the expense of the projects themselves is naïve at best
Yeah its called an End User License Agreement.
If you pull this shit, nobody will use your application. And don’t pull that double dip like Redis is doing, all you’re doing is dooming your project.
As you can see from upvotes, the demand for fair treatment of developers by financial benefactors is there.
But since 90% of folks here dont get the issue and rather troll dan dogpile on someone instead of discussing possibilities, I will just stay with agpl to make it impossible for companies to use my stuff.
I wanted to go a different route but the scorched earth solution is okay too.
Don’t confuse Lemmy upvotes with Reddit agreement or Facebook likes. As often as not, upvotes here just mean “You gotta see this!”
I definitely understand that paying OSS developers is a growing concern, and if not addressed, a lot of software will go back to being proprietary. The Redis/Terraform double dip is the solution they want, but it just means PlaceholderDB and OpenTofu have to pick up the pieces.
That I can agree with. One reason why this will happen is because people are unwilling to see that solutions need openness. Being able to disagree without shitting on someone seems to be a rare skill in the IT community as a whole.
Look at the thousands of reports of people who wanted solutions for their problems and asked them online just to get dogpiled on and laughed out of the room.
I have a cynical joy in thinking that everything will go to shit because of these disgusting creatures.
All it takes is for people to say „I disagree“ without calling the other person an idiot for ten seconds.
No, there isn’t and there won’t be any since what your saying is absolutely against FOSS values. You are in non-commercial/commercial license territory, give a look at winrar’s/unity’s and the like, gpl is not for you.
Could you elaborate how it is against foss values to keep people from being exploited?
Another user, toothbrush, has already posted a link to the 4 freedoms, I’d recommend reading that entire page for a most thorough explanation.
But basically your plan goes against three of them (assuming you’re going to release the source code, if you don’t your not granting any of them). Freedom 0 says you can use the software however you like, for any reason including for profit. You can charge the users but once you give them the (Free) software it’s completely theirs. Freedoms 2 and 3 state they can redistribute copies or distribute their modified version in any way they want provided that the give their users the same freedoms they were given.
I still dont see how this breaks any of these. They get the source code and they get to sell it (or whatever), they can change it however they see fit. They still have to provide fair upstream financial kickback imo.
They still have to provide fair upstream financial kickback imo
Then it’s not FOSS. I don’t see how it’s very different from Unity (for example) licensing model. So maybe a license like that can have a place, but not in the FOSS space and it will be definitely not compatible with any gpl.
Unity is insane, asking for money per download, leading to completely lopsided situations where you get ruined if you have too many users for free.
And thanks for your opinion. My opinion is that this is what foss needs and its very much foss. The foss principles I read clearly state free as in freedom, not free beer. Putting in an elaborate payment scheme that benefits small companies and individuals and makes large companies pay their share to help counter the thankless grind of foss development is totally in line with the principles imo.
Your opinion is at odds with the rest of the FOSS community though, and always will be. You can license your software however you feel fit for your project, but don’t expect to get any traction from the Libre community when you do.
“Free as in Freedom” means a lot to people. Restrict that freedom and you’re out.
I see you quoting “Free as in Freedom” but you seem to imply that FOSS also means “Free as in gratis”. That is not true. FOSS does not grant you the freedom of receiving everything for free (gratis).
A fee for comercial use or corporate users sounds like “discrimination against fields of endeavor” to me.
I think it perfectly aligns with the freedom 2 “redistribute to help your neighbor”. It you dont make money with it, you dont have to pay anything, if you do, you should give back, simple as that.
“Forcing donations” is just a fancy way of saying “charging licensing fees”.
It’s clearly a license fee. I don’t see how a license fee stands in conflict with FOSS though. FOSS is Free as in freedom, not free as in gratis.
The godfather of all FLOSS licenses himself (GPL) contains explicit terms to allow license fees too.
The freedom in Foss is freedom to redistribute (under the same license).
Is the the distributor or the og developer getting the licensing fees? Neither makes any sense to me.
That’s the hard part: Who has claims to how much of the license fees. That’s an extremely tough question to answer because it necessitates quantification of code contributions which is far from a solved problem.
Technically those wouldn’t be freedom licenses because it applies restrictions based on use and scale and profits. Such a license would be incompatible with open-source licenses and it turns it more into a source-available license. It’s basically a “free for personal use” license.
This is why Elastic, MongoDB, and recently Redis are changing their licenses, to stop big companies freeloading on them for profit without contributing upstream.
Whether this is okay is a matter of opinion and there’s good arguments going both ways.
Also, just as an example of how your license could be problematic: lets say AWS uses XZ compression internally for their S3 object storage service: 1% of monthly revenue would likely be millions if not billions. What does the XZ project do with this much money, and who gets it? All the contributors based on total lines of code attributed to them? What about those who disappeared or whose identity beyond their screen name is unknown? What about downstream sellers? If I sell an Ubuntu ISO on a DVD, do I now need to calculate how much I owe every project in Ubuntu?
Also of course it would automatically be incompatible with the GPL and even MIT/BSD licenses. So now if someone wants to use your software, it also can’t be GPL or any other open-source licenses.
It’s basically a “free for personal use” license.
Not sure I 100% agree on that.
If there was a license that i.e. required a certain percentage of all revenue that can be attributed to the usage of the software, a for-profit company could utilise it without paying a cent if they used it without generating revenue with it.
Now I get it. OP wants to turn FOSS into a Ponzie scheme: https://lemmy.giftedmc.com/comment/768869
It doesn’t matter how hard you want to call it FOSS, but with this licensing terms you describe it is not FOSS, period. And to be honest, you calling out various people for not getting what FOSS is, while you fully ignore the agreed on definition by people who are actually doing FOSS is you discrediting yourself.
You haven’t found a license like this, because your model is flawed: A licensing like this will disqualify you from any kind of usage in an actual FOSS licensed environment. Personal users, which will not be providing revenue, will not be really affected by this, and are irrelevant for your point. Corporate users, which you will mostly target by this new license probably won’t be able to use your funky new license because they will need to check with legal, and your software will need to have a lot of USPs for someone to bother with that. A 1% corpo-richness-tax will not be approved by any kind of bigger company, because it’s a ridiculous amount from the perspective of your potential customers.
You’re taking yourself way to important. Open source software is not replaceable as a whole, but individual projects are. If you want to earn money with your project, that’s good on you, license it accordingly, but do not try to upsell it as FOSS.
And I fully get your point, and I’m currently working on the same problem in my in-development project, and I’m not sure yet whether to dual-license it, for similar reasons you stated, and live with the consequences of providing OSS, but non-FOSS software, or do FOSS and provide it for actually free.
Edit: Also, the xz backdoor has nothing to do with funding. Any long time maintainer (as in not just a random person contributing pull requests) going rogue can happen in funded scenarios as well.
it is not FOSS
If you take the OSI or FSF definition, sure. Not all of us take that definition.
For many people, the appeal of open source has nothing to do with how easy it is for corporations. It is about transparency, the ability to contribute, and the community driven product as a result. It is about the ability to pick up the project if the original developer stops using it, even decades later. It’s about the ease of interfacing with said software.
Again, you may quote the FSF, but there are too many users of open source, as well as developers, who got into it for the reasons I stated. I can assure you that they are not doing it so that corporations can profit off their software without giving back.
> It is about transparency, the ability to contribute, and the community driven product as a result. It is about the ability to pick up the project if the original developer stops using it, even decades later. It’s about the ease of interfacing with said software.
That’s… exactly what the FSF and OSI definitions are all about.
The FSF and OSI do not allow licenses that limit corporate leech or restrict profiting of software without giving back.
@cyclohexane Yes, but… For many people, the appeal of open source has nothing to do with how easy it is for corporations. So any license that limit “corporate leech” is NOT FOSS because FOSS is about having no such limits. At the same time FOSS doesn’t say you can’t charge money, because FOSS is NOT about restricting profit.
I am pretty sure that if you ask most open source developers if they are happy about corporations profitting off their software without giving back, they would say no.
