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Comment by spockz | Hacker News Reader

If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit. A license expressed in terms of profit instead of revenue would be suitable for you.

I thought a while back there were some products that had dual licenses, a fairly open license for private use, use in small companies, but requiring purchase and/or contribution back when used in something like a cloud providers SaaS.

I like open source, but I also can understand the nagging feeling when your (and your contributors work) is used for pure corporate greed.

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> If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit. A license expressed in terms of profit instead of revenue would be suitable for you.

I like this idea, but the devil is in the details. "profit" is less defined than revenue. You have to specify your accounting principles. What counts as an expense that deducts from revenue to help define profit?

It's not impossible, but there's a lot more variance depending on locality, business structure, etc. than there is with just "revenue".

Of course, I suspect it all comes down to whether the entity offering the license is large enough and well-enough legally armed to force an audit of the organization taking the license. If they're not able to do that, it's all self-reporting anyway.

And even if everything is "legit", plenty of corporations make close to no profit because they're "licensing" or paying whatever other fees to a different company that magically happen to track whatever cash they have on hand at the end of the year.

See all these multinationals paying close to no taxes in the countries where they operate.

So. If we fix that loophole we both get proper tax revenue and we get to fund OSS better. I say win-win. Although it will be hard to implement in practice.

> If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit

Maybe they mean their org makes a lot of money the money for their parent corp, but little of that ( goes into / is reflected in ) their own orgs budget?

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