[ralmidani]

Maybe I am missing something. If you release something under a non-copyleft license, as long as I make proper attribution, what I do with it should not be your concern. If you do not want people making money from your software without paying you, use dual copyleft/proprietary licenses instead.

"Faircode" seems like an attempt to have it both ways: squeezing money out of people without being labeled copyleft (because that's not cool in some circles).

There is nothing "fair" about making a company's revenue a criterion for deciding which license terms the company enjoys.

What if I make more than $1M but am willing to release all of my modifications? Does that make me less of a friend to the community than people who sell non-free versions, but have had less success with their business model?

I am trying to avoid the word "shakedown", but this strikes me as exactly that. From the Medium post announcing the license:

"Some people have asked my about the difference between this and donations. I think that for a project like Ungit small individual donations would never work; we’d have to convince thousands of people to part with small sums of money. We’re simply not big enough for that. With LYC the idea is to ask a few big players who benefit commercially from the project to part with bigger sums instead."

Source: https://medium.com/@fredriknoren/trying-a-new-open-source-mo...

[jrochkind1]

I don't see the relation. Copyleft licenses and what the faircode license are attempting to do are pretty different things. I don't see any relation between them, other than that they are both licensing terms. They are different licensing terms.

I do think the terms of this new license are going to be confusing and make it difficult to figure out how to use it legally. As with most if not all "non-commercial use only" licenses (including CC-NC), of which I'd consider this a subset (non-commercial use or commercial use by companies with income under X). But non-commercial-use-only terms and copyleft 'share alike' terms are different things.

[ralmidani]

I understand that "Faircode" is not trying to protect downstream users from non-free software. That's my point; It's not about principle, it's about extorting money while appearing to be principled.

Copyleft licenses force people to release their modifications as source code, or pay the copyright owner for an exception (if the owner is open to providing the exception)

Non-Copyleft licenses say "do whatever you want, just give us credit."

"Faircode" says "Even if you release your source code, if you make enough money, you still have to pay us."

[amyjess]

You misunderstand the purpose of the license.

This is proprietary commercial software with a 100% discount for hobbyist customers. It's very common in other industries, such as with fonts (this is almost identical to the model Blambot uses for some of their comic-book fonts). And there's nothing wrong with that.

[luma]

I don't think there's anything "wrong" with nearly any license. If your project has been written without including other open-source components, feel free to license it under whichever license you choose. Closed-source commercial licensing is an option, and might be the best option if you're actually expecting to make a living from the code in question.

Just don't be surprised when the community doesn't respond well when you take an open-license project, accept unpaid contributions from others, and later convert it to a non-open license to pay nobody other than yourself.

[ralmidani]

While I generally disagree with distributing non-free software, at least those who do it usually do not call their software "Open Source". That's what makes "Faircode" so offensive.

[amyjess]

To be honest, I am so thoroughly sick and tired of the zealotry in the FOSS community that I no longer have any desire to release software under a FOSS license.

Normally, I couldn't care less what someone does with any software I release, so I'd normally prefer to just release code under an MIT or Apache license, but I've reached the point where I honestly no longer want to help the free software movement grow, so I'd like to release my future personal projects under a subtly non-free license. Faircode looks like a very nice option. I remember Tuomo Valkonen, the creator of Ion, moving to a license that would ban LTS distributions from distributing outdated versions of his software (basically, every time he released a new version, all distributions carrying it have 28 days to remove the old version from their archives and replace it with the new one, no matter how stable the distribution is intended to be).

Honestly, the older I get, the more my views on free software are converging with Valkonen's. Half of the reason for the license change was because he was tired of LTS distros carrying old development versions filled with bugs that have already been fixed in newer versions (he was getting flooded with bug reports for things that had already been fixed), but the other half was that he was aggravated by free-software zealots and wanted to make sure he wasn't doing anything that could be seen as contributing to their movement, and he swore that all future software he releases would be closed-source.

I do agree that I wouldn't want to call it "open source", though.

[jrochkind1]

> Non-Copyleft licenses say "do whatever you want, just give us credit."

Wrong. "Non-copyleft licenses" are, well, anything that is not a copyleft license. It doesn't have to say "do whatever you want." A standard commercial license is one kind of license that is obviously _not_ a copyleft license.

I'm not really following what point you are trying to make.

Selling software is selling software. Do you consider any kind of selling software to be 'extorting money' (I think that could be a reasonable position honestly, I'm not going to dismiss it out of hand), or something special about the 'faircode' license that gives the software free to some entities but sells it to others that makes it 'extortion'?

[ralmidani]

By "non-copyleft" I mean licenses like MIT, BSD, etc. I thought this was obvious from the context, but I should have used clearer language.

[mkesper]

Copyleft licenses force people to release their modifications as source code

Only if you distribute the software.

[tyingq]

Is AGPL copyleft? If so, it broadens your definition of "distribute".

[e12e]

Sort of. I think it strengthens "the user is free to run the code", to implying that a user who has that freedom (to run the code) - has the same rights as someone who got a copy of the binary. To (be able to) ask a server to run code through an api, is seen as similar to run code on your own computer (a device, which might not in fact control either, hardware being what it is). It highlights the fact that the GPL is for users. If you use a webmail service, you should be able to fix issues with the code - just as if you ran a desktop mail user agent.

So sure, it changes the definition of "distribute" as it is used in the GPL - but my understanding of the "why" is to to be explicit about what is really needed to guarantee users the four freedoms (run, study&fix, copy, share fixes).

[tyingq]

Sure. I was just noting it for the "only if" part of the GP comment.

[59nadir]

> I am trying to avoid the word "shakedown", but this strikes me as exactly that.

Yes, the $90/month cost is going to hurt all the companies that have revenue greater than $1,000,000/year. This will put them out on the streets, I'm sure.

Let's be real: This does not apply to you, and on the off chance that it does, why are you complaining about paying $90 per month for something you should probably already be donating more to?

If your business depends on a tool/library and your revenue is in excess of $1,000,000, and you haven't yet donated to that project, you're just a leech. I guess we could both hope that your revenue falls below the limit so that you can escape these unfair shakedown licenses and continue not contributing in any way to the things you use.

[ricardobeat]

What if the company makes contributions to open-source through other projects - for which no one is paying them? Is it ‘fair’? Who is the leech?

Even a $1m/y company (which is not big at all) will be hard pressed to pay 1k/year for a git wrapper. The whole idea of OSS is that everyone benefits from the exchange and costs are distributed. This won’t scale at all - count your current open source dependencies and imagine paying that sum for each of them.

[alien_]

If they do have a problem paying $90 or even $1000 for a piece of software they really need, they are free to ask one of their developers to write one in house from scratch and see how much this sunken time would cost them.

The sad reality is that costs are not distributed, most companies just grab whatever open source software they can and only contribute the least they can get away with, most of the times nothing at all.

Many projects survive just because of dedicated individual developers and maintainers spending their limited spare time, who end up being burned out.

In an ideal world open source software that brings significant value for companies should be considered as part of their stack, they should either hire or assign someone for supporting it, or pay the existing maintainers, and ideally this should be somewhat proportional to the value they get out of it.

Unfortunately donations as method of payment rarely work(usually end up being paid by individual employees from their own pocket), so the only option to get money from the company itself is to somehow get it charged.

They usually have no problem with being charged money, as long as the price is reasonable for the value it brings and less than would cost to write the same code in-house or to even have a meeting about acquiring it. It also should be significant, they wouldn't go through the bureaucratic procedures for a 10€ one off payment.

Developers don't expect to become rich out of this, they often would settle for less than their full time job, as long as they can work full time on the project they care about and still make a living. But because so few companies share the costs, they tend to be significant for those who do pay, so the prices will be higher at first but should decrease quickly as more companies share the burden.

[bitwize]

In the USA, software is licensed, not sold. The licensor is free to set whatever terms they wish on the license (within the bounds of the law and reason), violation of which revokes your right to use the software.

[ralmidani]

Then we should stop pretending "Faircode" has anything to do with freedom or open source.