[yebyen]

> Hey, you can use this for free if you don't make any money, but we want 10% if you're using this in a paid product

Is that an actual license? Because that's not what I've seen most often recently, at all.

An honest FOSS license + dual licensed for commercial would say "it's fine if you make money, and we don't need a cut... unless you've integrated our software AND you don't want your final product to be similarly open-source."

The recent example that's coming to mind is the new CKEditor real-time collaborative version that came out recently. You can integrate this in a commercial product, as long as the users of the product are free to stand up their own instance (instead of paying you to host it, using their editor product as an integrated part of your commercial product.) If your product is closed and you want it to integrate their CKeditor, the other license that is available costs $25/mo per 25 Monthly Active Users.

Even if your product is open-source and users are free to go off and host their own instance, it seems likely that many will opt to pay you to host it instead. Doing this supports your development effort and keeps you in business, meanwhile entitling your paid users to whatever degree of support you're offering subject to availability.

If it's not worth $X/mo per user to you, to keep the users locked-in to the product that you borrowed part of, and such that the users don't have this other option in case your company goes belly-up, then maybe you should really be open-source? Or maybe you should just build your own whatever-it-is that you wanted for free, to make a part of your product.

[michaelt]

  An honest FOSS license + dual licensed for commercial
  would say "it's fine if you make money, and we don't need
  a cut... unless you've integrated our software AND you
  don't want your final product to be similarly
  open-source."

I think the "problem" the commons clause is aimed at is where AWS starts selling managed deployments of your product, and they make $$$$ from your work without giving you a cut. And maybe your business plan was to do that, but AWS has an existing billing relationship with everyone making them a much lower friction choice.

[yebyen]

So, the model that AGPL was designed to combat, right?

Under the AGPL, Amazon would be free to do that, as long as they released the code for their managed deployment systems.

(This doesn't get you any money, but it saves you from the sense that your FOSS-work has been exploited by a commercial entity that doesn't give anything back, so long as it's actually enforceable.)

[Bartweiss]

I think this is a lot of people's complaint with the Commons Clause.

It's defended by citing a real problem, but the AGPL also addresses that problem. Meanwhile, its impact on non-Amazon players like "some random user who wants to write and share a handy tool" is much less pleasant, because it effectively turns that user into a free profit source for the license holder.

I can imagine a healthy role for some intermediate license that goes beyond AGPL to say "actually Amazon, you have to pay us for this". But it would need to not distort what FOSS means for everybody the way this does.

[slededit]

AGPL says nothing about monetization. It only says Amazon would have to open any modifications they made.

Unless Amazon becomes the new primary developers it does not solve the problem of paying the people actually doing the work.

[yebyen]

Right, what it does potentially solve (comparing GPL to AGPL) is this:

Amazon takes your work and solves the "service layer" story, but having never distributed any binaries, they are not obligated to share their modifications in any way.

Under the AGPL, if you solve the core issue, and they borrow your solution adding a proper service layer to it, that would need to be released as source code, in a way that users could repeat the deployment on their own.

I say "potentially solves" because nobody is solving 80% of the problem better than anyone else can and releasing their 80% solution as AGPL, saving "Amazon jobs" for the Amazon people. And if they were, it would be easily circumvented; Amazon would simply never take the bait. Best case, they would figure out what makes your solution so much better and then implement those ideas for themselves in a clean-room.

[dragonwriter]

> Unless Amazon becomes the new primary developers

Which, if they really are the dominant beneficiary, they probably will; whoever is making the most money from the software has the most financial interest in maintaining it, and that's the reason so many big corps that benefit from FOSS invest heavily back into those projects, either via sponsorship of projects or paying their own developers to work on the codebase or both.

But that doesn't serve the interests of the investors in the company doing the initial work, who invested in the hopes of capturing the downstream revenue later development of the work would produce. Which is understandable, but they shouldn't attempt to trade on the popularity of open source licenses with their non-open alternatives.

And that, not the “people doing the work”, is what the Commons Clause is about.

[slededit]

Doesn't really happen with Openssh. Or MySQL or Postgres for that matter. With Open Source there are a lot more takers than givers.

[dragonwriter]

> Doesn't really happen with Openssh.

Who is the big player dominating revenue from OpenSSH? Projects with extremely diffuse benefit like that (or, perhaps more clearly, OpenSSL) do often have a problem here, but that's not what Commons Clause claims to be directed at.

> Or MySQL or Postgres for that matter.

Postgres definitely gets lots of support from significant commercializers of Postgres like EnterpriseDB, Postgres Pro, Citus, and Heroku.

MySQL, maybe not, but a GPL arrangement, especially one requiring copyright assignment, discourages third-party commercial contributions, especially when the owner is actively dual-licensing. Who wants to pay for development of IP someone else can sell more freely than you can?

(Permissively-licensed SQLite, OTOH, has huge contributions for downstream commercial users.)

> With Open Source there are a lot more takers than givers.

By design. There are also more givers than with propietary-licensed software, also by design.

[calgoo]

Reminds me a bit of the QT licenses which are dual: "Qt for Application Development is dual-licensed under commercial and open source licenses. The commercial Qt license gives you the full rights to create and distribute software on your own terms without any open source license obligations. With the commercial license you also have access to the official Qt Support and close strategic relationship with The Qt Company to make sure your development goals are met.

Qt for Application Development is also available under GPL and LGPLv3 open source licenses. Qt tools and some libraries are only available under GPL. See the comparison chart for details. The Qt open source licensing is ideal for use cases such as open source projects with open source distribution, student/academic purposes, hobby projects, internal research projects without external distribution, or other projects where all (L)GPL obligations can be met."

https://www1.qt.io/licensing/

[skykooler]

Fusion 360 has a license like that - free for personal use, but you have to pay if you use it to make anything you sell.

[yebyen]

Fusion 360 is not in any way open code though, right?

I'm thinking of any _open_ product that says you have to pay once your derivative product goes commercial, even if it's also open. That would be decidedly non-free in the sense of restrictive and as an example, this is something that is not compatible with standard GPL, and not included in the basic general BSD/MIT licenses.

My definition of a free license would include the right to sell (any developer hours for bounty, support, stickers, socks, CDs, anything I want for cash, including unmodified copies of your software) without restriction or liability from upstreams, no obligations, other than that I must include the source code and my distribution must also be similarly unencumbered and without additional restrictions.

There's no comparison to be made with "free for personal use, binaries only." (But thanks for advancing the discussion...)

[Bartweiss]

This is an interesting idea, but I wonder how fees would be assessed?

At one remove "source available, but pay for commercial use" seems very workable. The tricky part is handling it 3+ commercial layers out, where you're either building up a pyramid of fees or making direct payments several notches back along the chain. The first threatens to strangle commercial use past a few removes, the second might work better but opens all the "find the license holder" issues music has already.

I don't mean to dismiss the idea, rather I'm interested to think through what a low-impact way of implementing this might be.