Open Source

31227 readers

256 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

111

Is there a License that requires the user to donate if they make revenue? (lemmy.giftedmc.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

143 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I tried a couple license finders and I even looked into the OSI database but I could not find a license that works pretty much like agpl but requiring payment (combined 1% of revenue per month, spread evenly over all FOSS software, if applicable) if one of these is true:

the downstream user makes revenue (as in "is a company" or gets donations)
the downstream distributor is connected to a commercial user (e.g. to exclude google from making a non profit to circumvent this license)

I ask this because of the backdoor in xz and the obviously rotten situation in billion dollar companies not kicking their fair share back to the people providing this stuff.

So, if something similar exists, feel free to let me know.

Thanks for reading and have a good one.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

@cyclohexane @x1gma

> It is about transparency, the ability to contribute, and the community driven product as a result. It is about the ability to pick up the project if the original developer stops using it, even decades later. It’s about the ease of interfacing with said software.

That's... exactly what the FSF and OSI definitions are all about.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The FSF and OSI do not allow licenses that limit corporate leech or restrict profiting of software without giving back.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

@cyclohexane Yes, but.. For many people, the appeal of open source has nothing to do with how easy it is for corporations. So any license that limit "corporate leech" is NOT FOSS because FOSS is about having no such limits. At the same time FOSS doesn't say you can't charge money, because FOSS is NOT about restricting profit.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

I am pretty sure that if you ask most open source developers if they are happy about corporations profitting off their software without giving back, they would say no.