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Comment by bk | Hacker News Reader

Call me naive, but I think it would be great for OSS to have a license that is free (as in freedom), but free as in beer only as long as a certain revenue threshold is not passed, basically, a "pay when you can" model.

Why shouldn't a company that makes 100k/month using linux, etc. spend 0.5% or whatever of their revenues supporting that infrastructure. It could go a long way to improve OSS project funding, quality and long-term maintenance. (I guess it would be akin to a tax).

Another interesting idea with so much hosted software today would be to adopt a sort of "Affero LGPL" (require hosted software to publish the source & modifications of the code, but don't force the whole code base to become GPL). Perhaps allow a fee for keeping modifications proprietary. Not for ideological purists, but pragmatic imho.

Just trying to throw some ideas out there for discussion.

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The problem is that it makes things very, very complex. What if GE has 10 linux servers - how much do they pay? How about a little startup (that makes 100K per month) that is entirely based on doing custom Linux work? What if I'm in charge of a "skunkworks" project at IBM, with just me and two people working on a new project - do we have to pay?

Basically, you take away one of the critical freedoms of free software with that kind of license, as much as it would be very, very tempting to get some of that money recycled into developer salaries.

And further, who would actually receive the payments? The programmers who wrote the code? The folks who packaged up the distributions?

Would it be useful to have some sort of open source payment organization, a la ASCAP for composers, such that a general fund comes from donations from happy software users, and based on some formula, members of the organization get payouts based on the frequency of the usage of their software?

What happens in the case of forks? If I decide to fork some open source software under this license, make a bunch of changes and start selling it under this license, what do I owe the original authors? Now how about if the changes were minimal or amounted to a complete rewrite?

I'm not really sure that I can think of a way to have a license like that which doesn't rapidly become overly complex when forks are thrown in. And if the freedom to fork is taken away, I don't think that I would consider the license to be free as in freedom.

Why mix the business model with the license? If you are the sole owner of the code, first release it for pay/donations whatever, then once you cross a revenue threshold, release it as open source?

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