If you license your code to anyone under the Apache License, that person is then free to redistribute the code under the terms granted by the Apache License, which is obviously missing this $1,000,000 revenue restriction.
They’re not trying to both have and eat their cake. They chose a license with a known exploit because they think it’ll be best for their users, and they accept the consequences of that. This is (IMO) a good balance to strike, and better than I imagined before reading through the license itself and its rationale. It’s explicitly:
- we want to impose the least burden possible on those least able to bear it
- we think we’ll be more sustainable because in balance those able to bear it are more likely to choose to with this model than the previous one… excepting those who wouldn’t regardless of the terms.
Quite a lot of mutual good and goodwill is the product of norms which are effectively social agreements rather than enforcement protocols and regimes. Will some jerk take advantage of this and eat their cake? Yeah, duh. But it’s better for probably the vast majority of their users than a more onerous license which is viral, and (AFAICT) no worse for anyone but themselves. A one-sided compromise in favor of everyone else.
This situation, not so much. They're making a fully open source version available on purpose.
In the summertime I lock my exterior door(s) when I go to bed, even if I have left the windows open. It’s obviously trivial to enter my home if you’re motivated. I’m aware of the contradiction. Closing and locking the door isn’t impenetrable fortification, but it is a clear expression of my will. Opening the window isn’t an invitation to enter my home, it’s a flaw I’m willing to accept to enjoy cool air after hot summer days. If you come into my home through my window under those circumstances, you’re clearly availing yourself of an obvious loophole in my home security arrangement… but you’re being a jerk nonetheless.
People set expectations all the time in all sorts of flawed ways where their expectations might not be met. This is one of them. I agree with the quote in my previous comment: not even a perfect license with no conceivable loophole will prevent someone from exploiting the obvious loophole that a license is a social agreement with its own limited capacity to enforce. Even if you theoretically have bulletproof legal recourse, you have to have legal resources to get it. There’s no license I can imagine which doesn’t have that loophole.
But yeah so, “jerk” was hardly the point of my comment. But if that’s the nit you want to pick, violating someone’s express permission to their belongings because you understand their intent but you’ve found an exception in how it was expressed… that does mean you’re being a jerk. You’re welcome to disagree however fundamentally, but you know what their intention is in limiting how they share their resources and you know you’re only entitled to it by disregarding that to take what you want.