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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> Rather, businesses need to take a step back, understand the culture and priorities of open source and then try to fit in.

Companies don't care. They don't even care about the law these days (see Uber, AirBnB, Facebook & privacy, etc. etc.)

If OSS wants companies to behave in certain ways, it should be encoded in the license that comes with the software, at a minimum.

My suggestion would be to have a license that makes the software free to use for anyone and companies with a maximum net profit of (say) $1M. Above this, companies need to negotiate a different (paid) license. This would enable OSS authors to have an income from their work, while not changing anything else about OSS as the price of software is basically pennies for big companies.

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This is a well known practice and recent trend actually (Redis, Mongo, Confluent, ES...the list goes on). You choose a license that is restricting the usage of the software for certain class of users, whether that is cloud providers, SaaS services, your direct competitor, based on review or what not. By OSI definition this is not any longer open source software, but source available. There is a simpler way too: just pick a business unfriendly license and sell exceptions that is the dual licensing too. Check licensezero for how to automate this.

I have worked for a gigantic company that faced this exact license term and chose to simply use something else for free rather than pay for it. The capitalist priority is always to reduce cost and increase profit, after all. (Though they also happily pay to reinvent the wheel, because business doesn't understand yet that that actually results in lost value)

It would be better to incentivze companies to donate their engineers' time and work into improving the source code. Often they refuse to do that because they're petrified of patent, licensing, and intellectual property rights issues. Make that a no-brainer for them, and maybe suddenly they'd see the value in not only paying for it, but even contributing to it. I think the true value big companies can bring is an entire software development team and the 'test environment' of a big production use case.

> My suggestion would be to have a license that makes the software free to use for anyone and companies with a maximum net profit of (say) $1M.

This is how you get a million pointless subsidiaries and/or Holloywood accounting.

> My suggestion would be to have a license that makes the software free to use for anyone and companies with a maximum net profit of (say) $1M.

The Polyform Small Business license does this, though the threshold is $1M in revenue, not profit.

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

I assume what you're getting at here is that the licence you're suggesting would allow companies to use the software gratis until they reach a certain size after which they'd be willing to pay for it, helping them to grow. This would be less open to abuse if you charge based on maximum revenue instead of maximum profit. Better still, make the price of the single user licence proportional to the company's revenue divided by its employee count.

> My suggestion would be to have a license that makes the software free to use for anyone and companies with a maximum net profit of (say) $1M.

But wouldn't that make it non-free software? (according to the FSF definition).

Yes, but mega-corps are exploiting free software and killing it in a way. Personally I believe it would be in everyone’s interest to fight back. Maybe we could have “human-scale free software” alongside the traditional model.

"mega-corps" have been using free software in the same way for 20 years. If they were killing it, wouldn't it be dead by now?

No, because paying for the software is now a luxury-problem. You make money from the software, so you're effectively paying a negative amount already.

Anyway, this is not about definitions.

In the end, it might be in the interest of companies too if every company paid for their FOSS. Right now, it is not in the interest of companies to pay because that would be an advantage to their competitors. So in a way, it's a vicious cycle that needs to be broken.

> Right now, it is not in the interest of companies to pay because that would be an advantage to their competitors.

This is illogical. This would mean companies would never pay for any software - proprietary or FOSS - because either way, whoever is getting that money is turning around and also giving/selling the software to your competitor.

Literally the only reason companies don't pay for FOSS is they are pathologically disinclined to buy things if they don't have to. They're perfectly happy to spend money to make products, however, which is why they'll spend $500K on development of some half-baked internal tool rather than spend $200K on a license. (they also have no control over their bloated tech departments, who are full of engineers who'd rather churn out new backend tech shit than build good products for end users)

Forcing them to pay for FOSS will just result in them building more crappy things. They don't care that the result will suck or be a waste, they just don't want to buy things.

> Anyway, this is not about definitions.

But it is. If people cannot run your software freely, for any purpose, then it is not free software (and that includes users who are big companies). There's really no way around that. If you are worried that companies may use your software without giving back to the community, the best is to use a copyleft license like GPL or AGPL. You can also dual-license your software as AGPL/proprietary, and sell proprietary licenses at different prices according to the client. This is a fairly common setup, and many companies appreciate it (the only issue is that all external contributors to your project must surrender their copyright to you).

Correct. It's FOSS. But for companies it is OSS.

In other words, it's free software. But for big companies not free as in beer.

Perhaps you should explain your objections against big companies paying for open-source software? That would be more helpful than focusing on whether it's called free or not, or on how organizations defined things in the past.

GPL isn't always adequate because some OSS authors might want their software to help entrepreneurs bootstrap their businesses.

> Perhaps you should explain your objections against big companies paying for open-source software?

My own objection is against non-free software. It's alright that companies pay for software. In my experience big companies are really happy to pay for free software (regardless of its license), as long as they can steer the software towards their needs, have an assurance that development does not break their tests and use cases, etc.

The GPL has no provision against entrepreneurs using it for bootstrapping their businesses; I do not understand your remark in that sense.

> profit of (say) $1M

Hasn't Amazon often had no profits? Not even Hollywood accounting, but plowing revenue into growth. Are governments and nonprofits free? This doesn't seem like a promising direction to me, even though I share the goal of economic traction for free-software development.

when I pay taxes it's not on my profits but on my income. should be the same here.

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