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Comment by clcaev | Hacker News Reader

Could we please change the title to say : "Gumroad is source available"?

This license is clearly fails OSD and is not open source by the industry standard; perpetuating a false statement is unhelpful.

https://opensource.org/osd

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The license is actually pretty restrictive: you can only use this if you own a small company or work for government / non-profit.

Most average human's (including myself) can't use the source code in any way:

> You may use the software under this license only if (1) your company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total revenue in the prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD (2024) GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-profit organization or government entity.

The way it's been phrased, it seems like if you want to use the code to run a small webshop for some goods, you can use it, but if you're actively trying to run a resale platform, that's when you get in trouble.

I don't think not being open source is that big of a deal in this situation, they aren't the only player in this space anyway. (Woocommerce to my knowledge still dominates the "small business webshop" market and probably always will for as long as the typical shared webhost webstack is still an AMP stack.)

It's risky if you have any chance of ever crossing $1M in company revenue because the license will terminate as soon as you reach that and you'll have to rewrite everything.

> The licensor grants you a copyright license for the software to do everything you might do with the software that would otherwise infringe the licensor's copyright, but only as long as you meet all the conditions below.

To be fair, getting a platform for free that can potentially bring you to $1M is a very good deal, I'm quite sure you ll figure out a strategy before you get to $1M, and perhaps even get a good deal on the license from them. However I do think they should've been more upfront about the licensing.

1M revenue isn't that high a bar to clear in retail, just takes one popular/meme product. After all the COGS/fixed costs are tallied up, that could leave you with significantly less with which to contemplate custom development or platform changes.

I'm sure if you're lucky to get near 1 million in revenue you can reach out and pay for a license.

You are not required to rewrite everything if you exceed $1million in annual revenue. You are required to get a commercial license from them, which costs money.

That's not the same thing. And quite frankly, if you're making over $1 million in annual revenue you should be able to afford the license fee for the most important part of your company.

There's no guarantee that a commercial license will be available at a reasonable fee, or available at all. You'll have nothing to negotiate with because the alternative is to rewrite or shut down immediately.

Isn't that true of anything?

At renewal software provider X might hike license fees for Y to an unreasonable fee, or decide you're not worth the time at all.

I assume you can get a commercial license at any point, not only after you reach X revenue too?

It's true for proprietary software yes. The title of this post was "Gumroad is open source" (which has now been fixed).

Must be awesome to use this software in a country that does not use the US Dollar as its currency :)

let me tell you about currency exchange rates...

License only mentions USD. So as far as you have no USD revenue, you are fine.

Exactly :) Good luck non-US companies! :)

The intepretation would be done by a court. Not sure they would agree that the intention was to allow unlimited revenue in other currencies.

LMAO. Everybody keep quiet..... Don't let them change their license.

And even if they change their license , we need to fork this with this specific license right now!!

Going to fork it right now

That's not how it works, of course.

It's your FX-converted revenue, meaning, whatever currency you use converted to USD. The license doesn't bother to state this because they assume basic common sense on the part of the licensee.

If that's not enough, they have the backing of several decades of industry practice[1] and several centuries of law.

[1] For example, take a look at the Steam and Epic creator agreements, which also use USD for financial thresholds even though their stores operate in dozens of countries and accept dozens of currencies.

They are probably also trying to get free contributions to the codebase. Gumroad is infamous for underpaying and using cheap labor where possible.

> Gumroad is infamous for underpaying and using cheap labor where possible.

What? Where do you get this from? It's quite the opposite.

> The license is actually pretty restrictive: you can only use this if you own a small company or work for government / non-profit.

I wonder if this can be worked around by setting up an OpenAI-style non-profit arm to use Gumroad.

So true. A very misleading title. This license is far away of any approved OSI or FSF Foss license. Gumroad is a great service, the value is imho not in the software. But in the execution of it’s mission and the very simple way to lower the bar to sell digital goods without upfront costs.

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