That's the tragedy of the open source world : mission critical for everyone, but no actor willing to maintain it properly. It's Heartbleed all over again.
That might be a new license, but it is by definition not open source. And, no, companies like Google won't “automatically” buy commercial software with that style of license; from their perspective it's worse than regular commercial software since it has all the downsides of traditional commercial software plus gives a competitive advantage to upstart competitors.
EDIT: How about instead a “new” license that, if you feel the software isn't maintained adequately for the needs of your organization, allows you to hire whoever you want to maintain it to your requirements, instead of impotently raging that other people aren't supporting it?
> EDIT: How about instead a “new” license that, if you feel the software isn't maintained adequately for the needs of your organization, allows you to hire whoever you want to maintain it to your requirements, instead of impotently raging that other people aren't supporting it?
It makes sense for the people that are getting the most profit from a piece of software to be the ones paying for basic maintenance/cleanup/improvements.
If you want customizations or new features, that's when it makes the most sense to 100% self-fund.
> it has all the downsides of traditional commercial software plus gives a competitive advantage to upstart competitors
On average, I'd expect it to still be a lot cheaper than commercial closed-source software.
And what exactly do you mean by competitive advantage here?
It often does make sense for them, and you can see lots of cases where this is is done with actual open source software without resorting to a commercial license that discriminates on scale. If it doesn't make sense for the people you want to pay, making a free-for-everyone-else license isn't going to convince them that it does, it's just going to convince them that they are better served elsewhere.
> If you want customizations or new features, that's when it makes the most sense to 100% self-fund.
I would argue that it makes sense to 100% self-fund the additional work whenever you want something more than the open-source offering provides and doing so is less expensive than commercial (off-the-shelf or bespoke) solutions, whether the additional work is basic maintenance or something else, and if you are using an open source solution and it's not maintained adequately for your need, the responsibility for addressing that isn't on other users that you’d like to have subsidize your use.
After a certain amount of time passes, the software reverts to an open source license of the author’s choosing:
https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/
Example: use restricted to non-production use, reverts to GPLv2 in four years:
The clock protects users from lazy / out of business vendors. If few enough improvements have been made recently for it to make sense, the customers simply fork an old version of the project, and deploy that instead of paying for ongoing “development.”
(The business source license is not “open source”, but I think it is close enough to be a good compromise in practice)
I think we need more experimentation with solutions to the (open-source) public goods problem before we can say that the others are worse. Ditto with experimentation on variants of democracy. Significantly harder to experiment with that than with open source funding though.
I don't really get the democracy comment.