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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

"there is probably the option of negotiating a different license for your use."

I feel most people don't understand that their projects are unbillable and "negotiating" is not an option.

If you project is avaliable through AWS/GCP console I could "pay" at my discresion.

If there was a clear price and billing details, I can email my boss and get it authorised

If something needs to be negotiated, we have to get senior stakeholders involved - those people don't move for less than 100k, you will never get paid.

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This is a great point, and something that definitely needs to change. However, as you say, the solution to "you don't have an easy way for me to pay you" isn't best solved by "so make your stuff free".

I'd guess that most simply don't care as this is really just an issue for the company, not the author. If the project is licensed with MIT/BSD it still isn't really likely that the company will contribute/donate/whatever. So I'd argue that companies not wanting to negotiate doesn't really change anything for >90% of OS projects, they would not gain anything with a more permissive license either.

Companies certainly are to blame, but most OSS projects need support and I want to support them, but they make it impossible.

Why do you want to negotiate? Large corps are burocracies. I can only get mine to donate to a registered charity, is your project one? To pay a bill is easier.

There are few people that have authority to negotiate and their time is expensive. If they spend two hours to "negotiate", they are charging a pile of money the company could have paid you instead.

Sorry, that might have been a bad choice of words on my part (not a native speaker). I agree that this process would be simple and easy in an ideal world but we can't reasonably expect every developer to think about price structures for their small OSS projects. So this will most likely involve at least some sort of talking between both parties. Ultimately the company plans to make mony off of the OSS project, surely those two hours won't make the whole business case invalid.

> There are few people that have authority to negotiate and their time is expensive. If they spend two hours to "negotiate", they are charging a pile of money the company could have paid you instead.

Right, but making my code MIT won't get me paid either.

I will just spend more of my free time offering free support to some large enterprise that can't even figure out how to make a 1h negotiation happen without wasting boatloads of money.

On behalf of FOSS developers, I am very sorry for the dysfunctions of your employer.

> I feel most people don't understand that their projects are unbillable and "negotiating" is not an option.

That is a valid point in some cases.

But counterwise I feel that many people on the other side of this need to accept that in many cases the creator(s) of the GPL covered code simply don't want it used that way and that is their prerogative, and they don't agree with the assessment that either they, the project, or the world at large, would be better off some other way. In those cases billable or not is a moot point, as is negotiation for that matter and you will be rebuffed (hopefully politely, there is no need to be dickish about it).

then write it yourself, we do now owe you anything.

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