[okraigher]

I think an open source compensation system could work similar to how artists are payed when their song is played on the radio.

Radio stations in Sweden pay a fee to an organisation which distributes the money to artists in proportion to the amount of playtime.

Imagine a new type of open source license that mandated paying a membership fee to a global foundation to use the code commercially. Non-commersial use would still be free.

Companies would have to pay royalty to this organisation in proportion to their size or some other metric. The organisation would distribute the money to projects according to some usage criteria such a download count or similar.

For it to work there would have to be one or very few such organizations to that it is easy for the companies to handle. It should also not be very expensive for the companies. But even if it gets every company to contribute just a few thousands to open source it would still inject a lot more money into the system.

[tzs]

Such a system has been proposed for copyrighted works in general. The general idea is that you change copyright law so that making copies does not require permission of the copyright holder, but you also put a tax on something that correlates somewhat with copying. The government would then distribute that tax money to copyright owners in some manner dependent on how much their work was copied.

Even Stallman has suggested such a system [1], with the amount a given copyright owner gets for a work being proportional to the cube root of how much it is copied.

A common suggestion for the tax is a tax on internet access.

For entertainment such as movies and music and games that could probably work well. Probably also for closed source software. For open source software it might be too difficult to figure out how to allocate the money.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.en...

[okraigher]

Yes I think it needs to be centralized and aggregated.

I am sure many companies realize that they gain value from open source. Thus they are willing to pay something. However they do not want to handle transactions with every transitive dependency they use. Just like a radio station doesnt want a contract with every artist. This is why isolated commersial licenses wouldnt work for anything but the very largest projecys.

[johngossman]

There is a similar debate going on among musicians about how very few are compensated much if at all while a few at the top get extremely rich.

[cxr]

> Imagine a new type of open source license that mandated paying a membership fee to a global foundation to use the code commercially.

That would by definition not be open source.

[okraigher]

I would not care so much about the definition of open source.

My ideal scenario is that code is open, can be improved and reused among commercial and non-commercial endeavors. I also would like that some of the value created by users of the open code flows back to the creators.

Individual commercial licenses do not create this ideal as they are monolithic and does not reflect that open source is a network of many dependencies.

Companies would be willing to pay for open source but they do not want to manage each node in their dependency graph individually. Thus the need for some centralized tax and redistribution system.

[worthless-trash]

This is the most underrated comment in this whole thread.