this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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In my opinion it's criminal just how often this happens. Big business making obscene profit off the back of volunteer work like yours and many others across the OSS community.
Definitely agree, maybe it’s time to share Paul Ramsey’s talk on the subject again
Bruce Perens is currently working on a new licensing model called Post Open requiring that business with sufficient revenue to pay up.
https://postopen.org/
I hope it catches on!
I doubt it. It is basically equivalent to buying a proprietary software license for 1% of a revenue. I doubt any large business would be willing to spend that much on a single piece of software. And it would always be only one piece of software at a time.
Still better than being exploited
to be quite honest I don't want to see any large business around my project unless they are paying. They are not my target audience, and I'm not writing to funnel money into their pockets
Then release your software under a license that forbids it.
I believe it's 1% for access to the "entire post-open ecosystem", rather than 1% per project which would be unreasonable. So you could use one or thousands of projects under the Post-open banner, but still pay 1%.
It will take years to develop the post-open ecosystem to be something worth spending that much on.
Why only "with sufficient revenue"? All commercial use should pay. Adding "with sufficient revenue" only makes it more difficult to enforce and introduces loopholes.
I've looked into this very briefly before and I think part of the reason is that tons of things we wouldn't necessarily call commercial usage are considered commercial usage. This was in relation to favoring the non non-commercial usage Creative Commons licenses though. (The ones they call free culture licenses.)