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bobblywobbles

A new licensing model where it's prohibitive to make a profit off of this work.

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And without any intellectual property rights, what prevents someone from simply ignoring the license?

Exactly! Only because of IP rights you can enforce a license.

The more restrictive the license, the more it drives potential users and collaborators away.

That being said, do you have a concrete licensing model in mind?

The Unity licease works.

I think any licease that takes 50% of revenue would be fair to both parties with a minimum for the small user.

50% of revenue might make sense for Unity, where Unity provides clear value. But it absolutely would not make sense for some small library that gets used for a few operations. It also would not make sense for high profit work. Personally I’m seeking an end where everyone shares basically everything they do and no one extracts anything out of the duplication and re use of information.

That end is incredibly sad. We still have to pay our mortgage and our dentists, but can't ask for a fair pay for our highly skilled work. I guess we deserve the ad-based monetization model that has taken over the world. Brave new world, let's shill for megacorps with all the clickbait we can possibly muster.

This is a misunderstanding of my goal. Even if we share everything we can there is always novel work someone needs done, and we can get paid to do it. But also if we share everything we can then most of life will become much cheaper. My end goal is to reduce the marginal cost of living to near zero and then arrange society to provide for everyone. In that case you wouldn’t need to pay the dentist or the mortgage. But IP restrictions add costs everywhere, and those costs must be eliminated. Perhaps we can’t eliminate a mortgage, but we can make your car cheaper to repair and we can make the goods you need much cheaper. Remember my goal is to make life better for all. And I know it is counter intuitive. That’s why I say we need economists to study it. But the goal isn’t sad, the goal is to thrive. The status quo, where a majority of people slave away their entire lives even in the wealthiest nation on earth... that is sad.

> But also if we share everything we can then most of life will become much cheaper.

This is an extraordinary claim that demands actual evidence. Eliminating IP costs might make things cheaper, but physical goods (like food) will still need material, energy, and labor inputs to produce for the forseeable future. How do you plan to bring these costs down to “near zero”?

If you want economists to study this, you’ll need to convince them it’s plausible. That requires at least some back-of-the-envelope reasoning from data that already exists, even if it’s not a perfect example of the policies you’re advocating. There are records from times & places where IP law was either nonexistent or unenforced; what do they say about your theories? If you expect things to be different this time, what leads you to think that (with specifics)?

You're looking for the GPL. Richard Stallman shared your end goal. The GPL has been in decline for a long time though; most people concluded it was a bad idea.

The GPL does not solve our cultural problems. We’ve got to be doing advocacy for open collaboration and study its effects on our economic systems. If people do not understand the importance of open source the license won’t do much to help. And you’re right that GPL has its detractors. It’s highly restrictive. I use CC0/BSD licenses now. It’s perhaps overly permissive but it’s good to experiment.

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