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Comment by aetherspawn | Hacker News Reader

I guess you could have a heuristic that takes into consideration the number of lines of code from the projects source repository, the last date of commit (i.e. exclude projects that are unsupported for >3mo), the number of contributors, whether the author has opted-in up to receive donations and some heuristic on the number and size of commits to try and estimate the number of hours spent authoring.

And then of course, manually approving each hours/month estimate above a certain amount i.e. 10 hours per month.

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> heuristic that takes into consideration the number of lines of code from the projects source repository

Not only is this a horrible metric of value, it’s ridiculously easy to game.

It’s pretty hard to measure objective value of software. I think the closest is letting the market set a price and that has lots of flaws.

One of the upsides of OSS is that it bypasses that whole aspect.

I think the best approach is to let projects choose their own license according to their goals. If they want to charge, let them. If they want to be free, let them.

I wish there were a vetted Open Source license that:

- allowed the code to be visible and available as a general rule

- allowed an individual user to use it and modify it for non-commercial use

- disallowed redistributing modified versions (distributing patches would be fine)

- disallowed commercial use

Basically, a license that would allow free experimentation and grassroots adoption and all kinds of open-source goodness for individuals, while not giving FAANG profiteers a handout for RMS' ideological reasons.

What you're describing would preclude someone from forking the project, even to maintain it after the author lost interest. That's one of the main risks I seek to avoid by using Free software.

Well, perhaps there could be a small modification that would allow "use in perpetuity" and rights of survivorship, or whatever. The important part is just that profiteers have to negotiate with the creator(s) so that they get some slice of the pie they've helped create.

I would never use any software with that license. I rarely have software I only want to use for non-commercial use.

Even simple stuff like note taking where it’s 95% personal, I still want to use at work.

I’d rather seek out an open source tool.

I’m not sure what the motivation is to prevent FAANG’s use. All of those companies contribute lots of open source.

Would you rather be back in the 90s where the giant tech companies kept everything proprietary and didn’t contribute anything back. Early 90s Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun sucked and I’d rather have FAANG contributing their open source stuff nowadays than make them pay for projects and stop contributing.

You can totally use the software for non-commercial use. You'd just have to pay for it! I don't understand why FOSS supporters insist on the software being free-as-in-beer, when that has never been the point (even if many people and corporations enjoy the spoils of zero-cost software made by passionate artisans). Open Source Software is awesome, but imagine how much better it could be if there were a way for those passionate artisans to eke out a modest livelihood from their efforts!

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