[topham]

Sigh. Bane of my existence is any service which does this.

My org theoretically makes hundreds of millions, unfortunately none of that money is ours. So I get forced into a procurement process for anything that costs more than (ridiculously small limit), and get stuck using the worst in class because it's cheaper.

[2ndorderthought]

It would be great if github or someone did something to support licenses like this. So procurement was more like a cloud spend. Companies could put caps on the monthly spend for the projects they use. Organizations should be used to paying for products from individuals just like how they do from megacorporations.

[Chris2048]

Would a third party 'productising' FOSS be acceptable to the FOSS community?

for example, adding support, bug fixes, corp-friendly licencing and pricing models, private code/package repos, code/package signing, etc. Providing biz ppl to be available for meetings, legal protection, PII, etc.

To foster goodwill, they could even send some of the profit back to the original maintainer, ala pikapods: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31312682

[2ndorderthought]

I'm not suggesting productizing but if someone skimmed 0.5-5% off of some of my packages licenses and gave me the rest without me having to do anything I would be happy with that. I think the important thing would be, customers would likely expect less support so licenses should be cheaper.

People who don't want tiered licenses could definitely just mit it and walk away of course.

I do like the idea of paying back the original maintainers otherwise people could sandbag projects to fork them later.

[Chris2048]

> skimmed 0.5-5% off of some of my packages licenses

What do you mean by this? A FOSS product that has a paid packaged version?

[marcus_holmes]

So... Spotify but for OSS?

I'm not sure this worked out as well as we thought it might do for the musicians.

[duskdozer]

May be inconvenient to you, but the point of licenses like that is that inconvenience to companies that aren't willing to pay for the work.

[marcus_holmes]

I think the point was that this is a company that is willing to pay for the work, but corporate procurement doesn't work like that.

If you don't have a discretionary spending limit that will accommodate it, then trying to get OSS through procurement is difficult. Who is providing the support contract? What level of indemnity insurance is the supplier covered by? Can you get a spread of three quotes from competitive providers?

Not to mention that if the supplier isn't VAT/GST registered, the accounts department can be operationally incapable of accepting an invoice or issuing payment.

Not malicious, this is best practice for a large organisation that needs to prove that it is not doing fraud. But it does present a huge obstacle to buying from small organisations, startups, and one-person OSS maintainers.

[freakynit]

Agree. Does solving this itself a good product idea? A company specializing in making these deals happen? Taking on the legal and corporate aspects? Kinda like freelancer platforms work.., but, more corporate forcused?

[marcus_holmes]

I'm not a corporate procurement specialist - I've just hit this wall before. So I might be talking out of my arse in terms of solutions.

One way around it is that you get an existing consultancy, who is already on the corporate approved suppliers list and has jumped through all the hoops, to resell the product. They take a hefty cut, usually, but can also pay more punctually (in general large corp purchasing departments negotiate/demand looong invoice payment deadlines).

That still leaves more problems - like the sales cycle, it can take two years or more for a large corp to go from an "we want to buy this" from a department head to an actual purchase order from procurement. You could short-cut that if you were already an approved supplier, and had a team who knew the process and could respond much more quickly to the insane amount of bureaucracy involved.

You'd need to be large (large corps hate buying from small companies), well-funded (so there's no argument that you'll run out of funds, or not be able to compensate them if something goes wrong), heavily insured (see above), with a team who knows their way around everything that a large procurement department could throw at you. You could pro-actively try getting on the approved suppliers list for every large corp in a sector, and then advertise your services to OSS/startups/small corps, who would be your customer.

Not stupid, certainly. I've heard worse ideas ;)

[freakynit]

Dayuum!!! I guess then we should focus only on making that "pay something to this OSS developer" easy.. everything else still stays the same... no guarantees, no offloaded liabilities, no expedited timelines, etc.

[marcus_holmes]

Yeah it's tough.

I'm not sure making the payment part easy is going to help that much. The ideal, of course, is to get the cost under the departmental discretionary budget; most large corps allow small purchases to go through with less oversight.

Atlassian managed to do this during their initial B2D selling-to-devs stage, so it might be worth reading up how they did it.

[spockz]

If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit. A license expressed in terms of profit instead of revenue would be suitable for you.

I thought a while back there were some products that had dual licenses, a fairly open license for private use, use in small companies, but requiring purchase and/or contribution back when used in something like a cloud providers SaaS.

I like open source, but I also can understand the nagging feeling when your (and your contributors work) is used for pure corporate greed.

[hoistbypetard]

> If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit. A license expressed in terms of profit instead of revenue would be suitable for you.

I like this idea, but the devil is in the details. "profit" is less defined than revenue. You have to specify your accounting principles. What counts as an expense that deducts from revenue to help define profit?

It's not impossible, but there's a lot more variance depending on locality, business structure, etc. than there is with just "revenue".

Of course, I suspect it all comes down to whether the entity offering the license is large enough and well-enough legally armed to force an audit of the organization taking the license. If they're not able to do that, it's all self-reporting anyway.

[vladvasiliu]

And even if everything is "legit", plenty of corporations make close to no profit because they're "licensing" or paying whatever other fees to a different company that magically happen to track whatever cash they have on hand at the end of the year.

See all these multinationals paying close to no taxes in the countries where they operate.

[spockz]

So. If we fix that loophole we both get proper tax revenue and we get to fund OSS better. I say win-win. Although it will be hard to implement in practice.

[Chris2048]

> If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit

Maybe they mean their org makes a lot of money the money for their parent corp, but little of that ( goes into / is reflected in ) their own orgs budget?

[jumpconc]

Sounds like whoever is getting that money is hamstringing your organization on purpose so they can keep more of your money.

[8organicbits]

Is there a measurement that would work better for your organizations setup?