[infinity0]

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.

Ofc, the license would have to figure out how to share revenue with major contributors too.

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

[hansvm]

Seems problematic. You've excluded subsidiaries, but what about companies which aren't controlled by the larger corp? They can buy hosting from whomever from companies they don't control in the slightest, and if there's a market for your software it seems likely those would spring up on their own. What do you do?

(1) Ignore the problem -- your license has no teeth.

(2) Hold the larger corp responsible for payment anyway -- pretty sure this can't be accomplished purely within copyright law, and if it can then it's still not great because implementation details of the hosting company now matter in terms of the larger company's liabilities.

(3) Hold the hosting company responsible -- fine enough, that can probably be a valid term in your license. Suppose another company inserts themselves in the middle though; does your license exclude them because they're transitively connected to megacorp, or do we again find that your license has no teeth? The first case is an issue because now you're exposed to risk from your customers' customers, over whom you have no control.

Not every piece of software can be meaningfully hosted and resold by a chain of corporate entities, but it's not exactly an uncommon behavior in the wild either.

[infinity0]

> what about companies which aren't controlled by the larger corp?

Include these companies in the definition?

> What do you do?

Generally, there will be situations that are hard to define in a license, as is the revenue sharing part of it - and that's probably why no such license exists yet. The easiest way around this is for a blanket catch-all clause such as "you have 1 year to start negotiations with us, after which this license automatically expires".

If you choose >X correctly, there are only a small number of companies with >X revenue in the world, so you only have to negotiate with that many companies. The idea is not supposed to extract money from small companies or individuals.

> pretty sure this can't be accomplished purely within copyright law,

AGPLv3 is enforceable by contract law, same as other EULAs that big tech companies frequently employ.

[hansvm]

> Include these companies in the definition?

Surely not by name if they don't exist yet? And the rest of the bullets were pointing at why it's difficult to pinpoint them with additional terms.

> The easiest way around this is for a blanket catch-all clause such as "you have 1 year to start negotiations with us, after which this license automatically expires".

Which is great if you have some kind of legal foothold on megacorp, but if they're sufficiently legally isolated from you via intermediaries then additional clauses won't help.

> AGPLv3 is enforceable by contract law

In some jurisdictions (and copyright law in most others), but it doesn't magically hold third-parties responsible. It holds first-party users of your license responsible in a way which transitively affects third parties (copyleft being the mechanism). You might then claim that you could just do that for this contract too, but that's precisely my 3rd point above; doing so is unnecessarily restrictive to <X randocorps.

Elaborating on those restrictions, if randocorp is directly responsible for transitive users then they take on a huge risk whenever they have any customer because that customer might acquire megacorp as a customer at any point in time unbeknownst to them. If randocorp is not responsible for transitive users, then the mechanism for generating a connection between you and megacorp needs to be something like copyleft, but critically it has to somehow apply to contracts and interactions beyond copyright. At least it does if I'm understanding you correctly -- hypothetically, if you build a search tool, randocorp hosts the search tool, and megacorp buys searches from randocorp, would you like them to be targeted by the revenue sharing portion of your >X licenses? Anyway, assuming that's what you meant, copyleft by itself doesn't suffice, and you'd need something significantly more invasive than AGPLv3 to accomplish your goals.

[infinity0]

> it doesn't magically hold third-parties responsible

Whatever scenario you imagine where some $bigtech benefits from using the software, there is some identifiable chain of events from where the software was produced, which can, with some effort, be defined and specified in a general way in the license, in terms of a contract that allows each party in the chain to supply to the next party in the chain.

From that perspective they will never be an independent third party, and therefore you can specify that in a contract. So I don't see a theoretical problem to this, just a practical one of specifying this both precisely enough to be enforceable, and general enough to cover all real cases.

[insertnickname]

You can write such a license if you want (or hire a lawyer to write it), but it's not FOSS and it never will be. Why is it important to you that such a license is recognized as FOSS?

[infinity0]

Like laws, definitions change with changing times and circumstances. I am a Debian Developer and very happy to discuss this with other members of the community. Why is it important to you that such a license is not recognised as FOSS?

[cycloptic]

I can't imagine it would go down well at all with Debian users if random packages (in the free or the nonfree repo) came with clauses saying you now owe royalties to random parties. If you installed 10 packages on your company's server that each ask for 20% royalty, your company now would owe 200% royalties. It would just make the distro unusable by companies.

[infinity0]

That's simply not true. ">X revenue a year" would affect nobody except the largest tech companies. Apart from this, it would strictly benefit existing users, because it means the projects that are properly contributing to the FOSS ecosystem, including importantly its diversity, are getting a fair share of income.

[yarrel]

These wouldn't be FOSS, and wouldn't have the effects people hope for.