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Comment by mac-mc | Hacker News Reader

Lets make a new license: If you wont hire me, use my library and make over $100m in revenue a year, you must pay a commercial license to use my software equivalent to the total cost (equity grants included) of an average principal engineer or director who manages 50+ people at your company in your highest COL metro, whichever is higher. For OSS work that isn't mostly one author, make it go to the foundation for the OSS project instead and apply the rule to principal maintainers. You could even scale it in multiples of revenue in principle engineer units of $1b per principle engineer of global revenue.

IMO I think foundational projects that every single bigtech uses like ffmpeg should get on this licence yesterday. They would start getting millions because it still would be way cheaper than making it themselves in their bloated cost structures.

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I agree with the spirit of this comment, but I worry about the implementation.

See the comment of Manly read in this section. Once the threat of payment approaches, you can just switch to a free fork. A single person can't really win a trial against a big, well-funded company.

They can fork it, but can they find the maintainers? If it's just their own internal employees, then they definitely have less expertise in that codebase.

Might as well hire the actual expert.

I don't really see how this is an issue, depending on the license text it's trivial to make the license apply in the same manner. As for winning, I think that's more of a US-centric view, if you sue elsewhere in the world there's plenty of courts that are happy to slap big tech.

Genuine question that might sound trollish: do you please have examples of such cases?

I think Jacobsen vs Katzer [0] is the most relevant one to the discussion here, but there a number of successful cases on this front. If memory serves, BusyBox has also managed to enforce GPL in court on a number of occasions.

[0] https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/jacobsen-v-katzer

Suing a major corporation still seems like quite a bit of work, and what's the end goal? Is it to humble a major company, or to get paid? Because if it's the latter, it feels like there are easier ways to do so.

This is obviously a subjective opinion, but at least in my mind, the point is to defend your rights. No one else is going to come along and defend you against the corporate steamroller.

If the license were copyleft forking would not be a solution.

Fails the desert island test then.

But maybe that's fine. The world is different from 1980's. Different license approaches are needed and Richard Stallman is not God.

It's crazy. I used think his ideas were completely unrealistic and him being a general loon. He has certainly had the last laugh (or first tear, really). I still think he's definitely not correct on all fronts, but I pay more attention to his opinions on tech.

It’s a nice idea but couldn’t a big company simply move its engineering team to a subsidiary that doesn’t get sales revenue?

(I’m not an accountant!)

Would be hilarious to bury a clause like “Modified MIT license — head of HR must publicly announce any employment application rejections of the maintainers while wearing a chicken suit).”

The idea is to make it cheaper to pay you than it is to do silly stuff. 1 principal engineer is a fart for these huge companies, but can be $500k-$3m/yr, which is huge for OSS projects. Small companies that are not big tech in the USA don't pay that much so they will get a cheaper price, etc.

Companies usually have no problem paying for stuff that saves them money, but need to be forced to do so if there is a cheaper alternative. There is a very specific reason why I put the cost matching their own staffing costs, it's so the company will choose the easier and cheaper option vs. doing the more expensive option of hiring staff to make it themselves.

They can also get it even cheaper by hiring the maintainer at a sr or staff eng cost. You create the financial ammo so staff inside can do the right thing.

And these shenanigans are usually sidestepped with subsidary type of language that places like the EU uses for enforcing laws.

That would just open the door to commercial competitors to undercut the price by reverse engineering it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design). You'd be playing on the proprietary software industry's home turf and they will straight up curb stomp you.

No, because it's still significantly cheaper than any commercial option will be. You think the commercial place will charge less than 100 principle engineers to Google, lol no.

Couldn't they just get Opus to rewrite the lib?

The model probably has the lib in it tbh.

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