[antipurist]

Your comment, and this line in particular:

> A license is like a constitution for an ecosystem for how people will interact, a check-and-balance on the monopoly power of the license-holder, and a community contract.

finally gave me an answer to the question that bothered me for a while: how do we reconcile the goal of making FOSS available for everyone to run/tinker with/distribute freely with the issue of corporations leeching off community-created FOSS? Now the solution is clear to me: less focus on licenses, more focus on people interactions and actual contracts.

Instead of writing some code and throwing it to the MIT-license winds with little hope to gain anything in return it should be possible to create software cooperatives, i.e. real legal entities, with a simple premise: the code is free for non-commercial use; any person whose contribution was accepted is free to join the cooperative; any company that wants to use software stewarded by the cooperative has to pay for it, with said payment being shared among the members and/or saved for later. That would be an overkill for a tiny personal weekend FOSS project, but for serious products the overhead of formalizing the community would likely be totally worth it.

I'm pretty sure I'm not the first to come up with such an idea, I wonder if anyone has already implemented it in practice.

[MaxBarraclough]

This is contradictory.

> less focus on licenses, more focus on people interactions and actual contracts

This gives the impression you support sticking to truly Free and Open Source software licences.

> the code is free for non-commercial use

A licence that explicitly forbids commercial use in this way is neither a Free Software licence nor an Open Source licence, by definition.

> I wonder if anyone has already implemented it in practice

The Business Source Licence (aka BSL, or sometimes BUSL for some reason) pretty much does this. [0] It is neither a Free Software licence nor an Open Source licence. (They're pretty upfront about this, which is good.)

[0] https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/#osl

[Macha]

> The Business Source Licence (aka BSL, or sometimes BUSL for some reason)

BUSL/BuSL gets used as BUSL is the SPDX identifier. It's the SPDX identifier as BSL was already taken, by the Boost Software License, which predates it.

[MaxBarraclough]

Interesting, thanks.

[antipurist]

You and Symbiote are technically correct, what I'm suggesting wouldn't match The Open Source Definition [1]. But being "correct" matters little to me, what matters is promotion of the idea & usage of free software.

> Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free. [2]

I believe you'd agree that everything-as-a-service and tivoized products do not make users free, even if they technically don't violate the terms of FOSS-licensed code that they incorporate.

> The Business Source Licence

Yes, I've heard about that license, but I think it's mostly applicable when an already existing company decides to make its product more open, while I was thinking of the opposite — a group of independent contributors realizing "hey, we've made something big, let's protect our work (and potentially get rewarded for our efforts)" and creating a more formal entity around it.

[1] https://opensource.org/osd/ [2] https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

[MaxBarraclough]

> what matters is promotion of the idea & usage of free software

It's not a mere technicality, it's an important point of principle.

The FSF used to use the term semifree for such licences, but now just call them proprietary or nonfree. [0]

Similarly the OSI page you linked shows that the OSI considers non-commercial restrictions to breach criterion 6, No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor.

> you'd agree that everything-as-a-service and tivoized products do not make users free, even if they technically don't violate the terms of FOSS-licensed code

Tivoization was addressed in GPLv3. The SASS point is less clear-cut as it's not obvious how to define the relevant boundaries, but roughly speaking the AGPL addresses this.

Not all problems can be addressed by software licences though.

> a group of independent contributors realizing "hey, we've made something big, let's protect our work (and potentially get rewarded for our efforts)" and creating a more formal entity around it

The point remains that if they adopt a licence that prohibits commercial use, the project is no longer Free and Open Source software. There's certainly a place for formal organisations though, and there are many of them in the FOSS world: FSF and GNU, OSI, SFLC, Linux Foundation, Apache, Mozilla, Eclipse Foundation.

There's also TideLift which seems to be doing well raising funds for FOSS contributors while also improving software quality. [1]

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html

[1] https://medium.com/general-catalyst-amplified/introducing-ti... (I would link to their official About page but it's pretty uninformative)

[Symbiote]

That's a non-commercial licence, which is not FOSS.