Is there a License that requires the user to donate if they make revenue?

You can put up a non commercial license and write that if this is for a commercial application they can get in touch with you and you can discuss together a new license for their use case.

Generally, a free software license has to grant the 4 freedoms to be compatible to the gpl and co.

Freedom 0 is running the program however you wish, for any purpose. Imagine if that wasnt standard for free software, and having to read every license of every program you are using to find out if you are allowed to run it!

So your funny license would sadly be incompatible with other free software. Consider dual licensing it instead, with agpl + a propriatary license for businesses that hate free software, and make them pay through the nose for it.

If you want to sell proprietary software, why not just write and sell it? Or as others have suggested, dual license it? Hell, even the old shareware model could work for what you’ve described.

Unless you’re paying enforcers, how would you know if a corporation paid the right amount to use the code? How would your union determine distribution amounts to projects? How far upstream would payments go? How will disputes among developers be resolved?

It doesn't matter how hard you want to call it FOSS, but with this licensing terms you describe it is not FOSS, period. And to be honest, you calling out various people for not getting what FOSS is, while you fully ignore the agreed on definition by people who are actually doing FOSS is you discrediting yourself.

You haven't found a license like this, because your model is flawed: A licensing like this will disqualify you from any kind of usage in an actual FOSS licensed environment. Personal users, which will not be providing revenue, will not be really affected by this, and are irrelevant for your point. Corporate users, which you will mostly target by this new license probably won't be able to use your funky new license because they will need to check with legal, and your software will need to have a lot of USPs for someone to bother with that. A 1% corpo-richness-tax will not be approved by any kind of bigger company, because it's a ridiculous amount from the perspective of your potential customers.

You're taking yourself way to important. Open source software is not replaceable as a whole, but individual projects are. If you want to earn money with your project, that's good on you, license it accordingly, but do not try to upsell it as FOSS.

And I fully get your point, and I'm currently working on the same problem in my in-development project, and I'm not sure yet whether to dual-license it, for similar reasons you stated, and live with the consequences of providing OSS, but non-FOSS software, or do FOSS and provide it for actually free.

Edit: Also, the xz backdoor has nothing to do with funding. Any long time maintainer (as in not just a random person contributing pull requests) going rogue can happen in funded scenarios as well.

No, there isn't and there won't be any since what your saying is absolutely against FOSS values. You are in non-commercial/commercial license territory, give a look at winrar's/unity's and the like, gpl is not for you.

Technically those wouldn't be freedom licenses because it applies restrictions based on use and scale and profits. Such a license would be incompatible with open-source licenses and it turns it more into a source-available license. It's basically a "free for personal use" license.

This is why Elastic, MongoDB, and recently Redis are changing their licenses, to stop big companies freeloading on them for profit without contributing upstream.

Whether this is okay is a matter of opinion and there's good arguments going both ways.

Also, just as an example of how your license could be problematic: lets say AWS uses XZ compression internally for their S3 object storage service: 1% of monthly revenue would likely be millions if not billions. What does the XZ project do with this much money, and who gets it? All the contributors based on total lines of code attributed to them? What about those who disappeared or whose identity beyond their screen name is unknown? What about downstream sellers? If I sell an Ubuntu ISO on a DVD, do I now need to calculate how much I owe every project in Ubuntu?

Also of course it would automatically be incompatible with the GPL and even MIT/BSD licenses. So now if someone wants to use your software, it also can't be GPL or any other open-source licenses.

Fauxpen source licenses such as this are the answer to the wrong question.

"Other people making money with my stuff" was never a problem in the software-freedom community. Whether this means "selling my stuff" or "using my stuff in a commercial setting" ("commercial use" restrictions are confusing in this way). In the free-software world we just accept that our work belongs to the community and the community can use it in ways we don't approve of.

(Edit: Likewise, it has never been an issue to sell copies of free software, although I should point out the very nature of software freedom makes it more difficult to guarantee a revenue stream in this way)

Rather, this is a symptom of the proprietary software world's reaction to free software and co-option of it (in the form of the open source movement). Tom Preston-Werner, founder of GitHub, opined that proprietary software companies should open source almost everything - "almost everything" being anything that does not "represent business value." In other words, open source cost centers but keep profit centers proprietary. Ideally, these companies would cooperate on widely used components (and some do!), but practically they spend as little as possible because capitalism. This is also why we see so many projects turning fauxpen source lately; these companies imagined they were developing cost centers and then realized they could be profit centers instead.

What was (and still is) a problem is people making proprietary derivatives of free software, and copyleft is the solution to that. If you want to extract license fees from proprietary software developers you can dual-license under a strong copyleft like (A)GPL for the free software community and sell proprietary licenses. Believe it or not, Stallman explicitly does not object to this - mainly because, if selling GPL exceptions to enable proprietary development is wrong, then releasing under a permissive license must also be wrong because that also enables proprietary development.

I want to say that all this backdoor incident (s, not the first and certainly not the last) only shows how well the FOSS model works. Not only for catching it promptly before it even was released, but these attacks which require a good amount of skill and time, and therefore probably money, demonstrate that some bad actors are fearful of FOSS. Also I want to point that voluntary FOSS contributors are not exploited even if some big corp uses their software without paying anything, as long as they respect the freedoms they have to give to their users. Also many (maybe most idrk) contributions to FOSS aren't made by volunteers, but through foundations/donations models paid professionals or companies putting developer time to them (I suspect this could be the case here with the guy from Microsoft that caught it).

That's not FOSS. All you'll do is guarantee that no one will contribute to your project and will just wait for someone else to make their own FOSS version, or encourage corporations to write their own version in-house.

I think we're far from solutions to ensuring money from FOSS goes to contributors, but moving to licenses that enforce it at the expense of the projects themselves is naïve at best

You may be looking for the Big Time Public Licence: http://bigtimelicense.com/

Reminds me of this one : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beerware and the fact that some projects have dual licensing like https://www.qt.io/licensing/open-source-lgpl-obligations Not what you are asking for but I can imagine that a project can make commercial companies pay for the usage of the source code and have it free to use for non commercial purposes.

Now I get it. OP wants to turn FOSS into a Ponzie scheme: https://lemmy.giftedmc.com/comment/768869

Yeah its called an End User License Agreement.

If you pull this shit, nobody will use your application. And don't pull that double dip like Redis is doing, all you're doing is dooming your project.

Isn't QT's dual licence policy basically this?

Man, lemmy will just let anyone moderate.

Interesting idea. A couple questions:

How would it work if the open source maintainer is a commercial company?

AFAIK there are no restrictions on when an Open source maintainer can change their license. They can do it even after their work has already been used.

So couldn't a company like, Facebook (since they own open source React) just change their React license to this one and all of sudden start charging everyone for it? 🤔

Hi @haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com,

fyi icymi due to this thread someone posted this other thread asking "Is it appropriate for someone to be a mod here when they don't understand open source, and insult users in the community?".

I don't have time to read all ~200 comments in these two threads, but I do think that being a moderator of /c/opensource@lemmy.ml requires knowing what FOSS is to be able to remove posts promoting things which are not.

Hopefully the replies here (again, I have not read even half of this thread...) have made you better informed?

In case you haven't yet, I would highly recommend that you read these two documents (you can start with their wikipedia articles and follow links from there to the actual documents):

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition

In short, the answer to your question ("Is there a License that requires the user to donate if they make revenue?") is yes, there are many such licenses, but they are definitively not FOSS licenses (despite what some people who haven't read the above definitions might try to tell you).

I won't enumerate any of the non-FOSS licenses which attempt such a thing, because I recommend against the use of such licenses or software licensed under them.

BTW, I saw you wrote in another comment:

By now I get that FOSS mostly implies free work for corporations. I‘ll just go with agpl to ensure they get nothing from my work.

While corporations benefiting from FOSS while failing to financially support it at all is extremely commonplace, I vehemently disagree that that is what FOSS "mostly implies". In fact, the opposite is more common: the vast majority of free software users are not paying anything to the companies who have paid for an enormous amount of the development of it. A few hundred companies pay tens of thousands of individual developers to develop and maintain the Linux kernel, for instance.

Regarding the second sentence of yours that I quoted above, in case you haven't understood this yet: the AGPL does not prevent commercial use of your work. If you write a web app and license it AGPL, you are giving me permission to run it, modify it, redistribute my modified version, and to charge money for it without giving you anything.

What the AGPL does, and why many companies avoid it, is impose the requirement that I (the recipient of your software) offer the source code to your software (and any modifications I made to it) under that same license not only to anyone I distribute it to but also to anyone using the software over a network on my server.

If the software were licensed GPL instead of AGPL, I would only be required to offer GPL-licensed source code to people when I distribute the software to them. Eg, I could improve a GPL web app and it is legal to not share my improvements (to the server-side code) with anyone at all because the software is not being distributed - it is just running on my server.

By imposing requirements about how you run the software (eg, if you put an AGPL notice in the UI, I am not allowed to remove it) the AGPL is more than just a copyright license: violations of the GPL and most FOSS licenses are strictly copyright violations and can be enforced as such, but violating the part of the AGPL where it differs from the GPL would not constitute copyright infringement because no copying is taking place. Unlike almost every other FOSS license, the AGPL is both a copyright license and a end-user license agreement.

For this reason, many people have misgivings about the AGPL. However, if you want to scare companies away from using your software at all (and/or require them to purchase a different license from you to use it under non-AGPL terms, which is only possible if you require all contributors to assign copyright or otherwise give you permission to dual-license their work) while still using a license which the FOSS community generally accepts as FOSS... AGPL is probably your best bet.

HTH.

p.s. I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, etc etc :)

@haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com there are products out there that offer a dual license, one for companies with more than X employees and a free one otherwise.

How to enforce such licenses though seems to be the more difficult question

Does CC BY-NC-SA meet your intentions?