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 @[email protected],

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/[email protected] 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 :)

@[email protected] 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?