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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

So, we need an open source license that makes the software not free for large corporations (say > $10M revenue).

Check out the Polyform Project's Small Business License. It has a threshold of 100 employees and contractors, and 1,000,000 USD in annual revenue.

Of course, the OSI's Open Source Definition precludes these kinds of restrictions, so it isn't "open source" by that definition.

https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0/

> Of course, the OSI's Open Source Definition precludes these kinds of restrictions, so isn't "open source".

One would almost think there are some large corporations behind that organization and its definitions ...

Actually these kinds of restrictions have always made the software "non-free" all the way back since GNU. Long before any large corps got involved.

OSS inherited this and was always very clear with it also.

I believe we need a way to charge companies of any size for the value that they generate out of using open source tools as part of their SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc. offering. If your cloud makes money by hosting an open source project as a service, that open source project should be entitled to a share of the revenue.

And, actually, we already have something quite similar, but I predict it won't fly with open source communities, most of which hate it unequivocally:

patents

Dual license: AGPL and commercial. Simple.

AGPL requires you to disclose any changes to the source you make to an SaaS. But it allows making money.

If you want to disallow making money you have to use an even stricter license.

No free license disallows making money. But the requirement for making source code available means people dont need to pay.

To make money you need to offer something more than just one program. Adding value outside the code itself is viable.

Patents are broken. But they can perhaps be fixed by effectuating a challenge-period after a patent application starts, whereby the patent can be invalidated if someone comes up with an implementation. Also there should be better protection against trolling, for example by requiring the holder of the patent to have a product implementing that patent. Further, a patent should not provide a strict monopoly on the technology for a given period (blocking competitors), but the rules should be so that anyone can buy a license for a reasonable price.

The issue with patents was that they were used for silly landgrabbing of obvious stuff and locking them up for a long time.

Now that things have matured a bit, I think 5-10 year long patents would be perfectly healthy.

AGPLv3 isn't precisely that, but it may as well be since it scares corporations like Google shitless.

I disagree. The AGPL would still allow someone to rake in millions without sharing if they run an unmodified binary of an open source project.

https://medium.com/swlh/understanding-the-agpl-the-most-misu...

That's why I say it's not precisely the license requested. But if your aim is to scare off corporations, it works pretty well.

While that is a problem it's a fairly harmless one to have, the company can't profit any more off of your work than anybody else can and you're not really losing anything by the company doing this. Contrast this to using the GPL where companies can effectively treat your code as proprietary and profit immensely off of it at the expense of everybody else who publicly contribute to your work but don't receive any kickbacks from big companies.

But we don't want to scare large corporations. Instead, we want them to financially support the development of open source projects ...

Not 'we'.

You can write any license you want and claim it's an open source license. It won't be OSI approved of course and, you almost certainly won't build a meaningful community around it but there's nothing keeping you from creating one.

Why won't you build any meaningful community ? If you only charge from big companies , why does it matter for some lone developer?

And as for big companies , as long as there's decent value and reasonable fees, why won't they contribute(to also help themselves) ?

Many big companies (especially vendors) do contribute with people and otherwise--because, as you say, it does often help themselves--and most significant developers of major open source projects are doing it as part of their day job.

There's a long history of licenses in the PC freeware/shareware space of being only for personal use/educational use/etc. That usage-based restrictions did not make it into the FOSS world is an important reason that it's been so successful IMO.

But what if I could pay members of the community using profit made from selling licenses to corporations?

I hate to be flippant, but that's a well-known business model called "contracting". It's possible, absolutely, but it requires a substantial investment of time and effort in business concerns on top of the actual software development. In practice, most leaders of contracting businesses don't have time to write code, and most contracting businesses end up deciding they need to release closed-source extensions.

How would e.g. Mozilla fit in that view?

As far as I know Mozilla doesn't sell any software licenses. They were almost entirely subsidized by Netscape from 1998 to 2003, then by Google from 2005 to 2014, and by a variety of search engines competing for Firefox default status since then. That kind of "cash cow" model gives you a lot more organizational freedom than software licensing.

Then you've re-invented being a software vendor that can't even pay it's developers reliably?

Why not reliably?

And why would you compare it to a regular software "vendor" when it produces free open software for 99.9% of the people, and non-free open software for 0.1% which are large corporations?

AGPL will prevent them from using it for SaaS. A dual license will then force them to pay creators.

If they are otherwise "selling" GPLed software that's kind of on the buyer to notice they dont need BigCorp to use it.

So in essence a closed source license.

Part 6 of the osi definition is: "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor"

That's the OSI definition. Not everyone may agree on that definition especially as views change. Only one thing everyone agrees on is that "open source" is software for which the source code is published, and an "open source license" is a license attached to such software. This is not an extermely useful definition as far as the license is concerned, so if you want to be more specific you (and OSI) have to use more specific terms instead of the broad term "open source".

I disagree, otherwise we end up down in the rabbit hole of things like microsoft's "shared source" BS. Where terms loose meaning.

Its not just OSI either, its just most explicit there. This idea is also incompatible with DFSG and FSF definitions. It simply isn't FOSS to have license terms only apply to people you like. Either its Free for everyone or you are making glorified shareware/freeware.

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