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by infinity0 2021 days ago
I wish there was a FOSS license with a clause along the lines of:

- if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it.

Ofc, they (FSF/OSI/DFSG) would have to relax their FOSS definition(s), but with more projects dying in this way hopefully more FOSS organisations will take heed and think about this.

Ofc, the wording of the license has to be precise enough to avoid something like fobbing off the servers to technically be controlled by subsidiaries with 0 revenue.

1 comments

> "if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it."

That would just be a proprietary license with source availability. It would also dry up any community contributions since contributors are generally not going to help a for-profit project without themselves getting paid.

The Mapbox people make the point that, at least in terms of their core functionality, there wasn't really a community outside of mapbox employees.
Sure, the license would have to figure out how to share revenue with major contributors too.

> contributors are generally not going to help a for-profit project without themselves getting paid.

Contributors already contribute to for-profit open source projects without themselves getting paid. This license would make the situation strictly better for them.