[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.

Laws and definitions have to change with the changing times - the technological economy is different today than it was 20 years ago when tech companies weren't so big or able to throw their weight around. Staying true to the original spirit of FOSS and sharing, means that we have to find ways to support independent FOSS business.

The loudest arguments I hear at forcing the FOSS definition to remain static and blind to revenue, is from big tech companies or wealthy people being paid by big tech companies, because it benefits them. People working for a small FOSS companies understand the realities of competing in today's tech environment, and understand that revenue-sharing far from stifling FOSS, will allow it to flourish properly.

[willvarfar]

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

This would just lead to Hollywood-accounting, where a AWS-Tools subsidiary does all the software at a loss, and AWS-Cloud is just a user etc.

[infinity0]

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.

[joshspankit]

Is there a way to structure a license so that this kind of accounting is much harder?

In Hollywood’s case, it’s pretty clear when movies are making money (same with games to a large degree), but I don’t know if there’s a way for “tool” companies to leverage that.

[langitbiru]

So can we cheat Unreal with Hollywood-accounting because they offer this kind of license (although it's not open source)?

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/download

[willvarfar]

Yes, game projects absolutely use Hollywood accounting. Dev studios pop up for one project, and often close at launch, and some other legal entity gets all the subs after that. And so on. Game dev financing is infamously horrid.

Unreal, though, is in a different negotiating position with the game publishers than, say, an open-source software with a new pay-us-if-you-make-money clause. Its the distinction between source-available (like Unreal Engine) and open-source which the article tries to make?

Timescale's new license is an interesting move in this direction.

[orlandohill]

You can achieve something similar by dual-licensing under a paid license and the source-available license, Polyform Small Business.

https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0

[infinity0]

That license is specifically targeted in favour of small businesses for some reason, omitting individuals etc. This potential FOSS license I am talking about would only target against big tech companies.

[theamk]

Is this going to be fixed/known price? then you are describing "source available" model. I don't think we need another word for it -- it exists, and it works pretty well (even Microsoft uses it sometimes)

Or are you describing some sort of system where the authors get the fixed share (%) of user's company revenue? I think this is not going to work very well... just imagine a big company which is not focused on computers. Or a computer startup which wants to be bought by FAANG for billions of dollars.

[infinity0]

No, "source available" does not generally allow one to distribute and sell your own modifications.

This license would be exactly like today's FOSS, except to force large tech companies to the negotiating table to share revenue.