Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

With regard to percentage change, that is not a factor of whether or not a reproduction should be allowed, but rather if something can be considered a reproduction. That should be a task for domain experts, and I think historically that has been done, Even Philip Yorke did that.

It is certainly not cut and dry, generally I tend to argue precisely that point when it comes to the details, but the guiding principles are clear.

Ideas are not copyrightable.

The laws involved are supposed to benefit society as a whole.

Patents provide some protection in the area of ideas. While heavily misused they are intended to incentivise development to make things actually work granting some exclusivity as a reward. A pure idea should not be considered enough (but often is) it ought to be the application of the idea.

Copyright is intended to promote creativity by offering a means to generate revenue from a creative work. The goal was to produce more (or at the least avoid inhibiting) works providing rewards to those who produce them.

There are issues today with laws being influenced to benefit a minority. A lot of IP laws were created in this way. I think the solution is to advocate and work towards laws that benefit society as a whole. Unfortunately people seem to see the imbalance and it normalizes the view that you should leverage the notion of intellectual property to get something for yourself (or your tribe).

The world is changing, when the notion of copyright was first Expressed, there was no ability to create a thing and then sell a million of them with no extra effort. When mass production and then mass media enabled this it allowed more creative works by allowing the cost of the work to be distributed across many. It was never the intention for copyright to enable a few people to get wealthy from a few popular works. As soon as the dominance of those few popular works made it harder for other creatives to make things themselves, copyright law started acting against the principles that it was founded upon

That said, a few entities are advocating for something like this, e.g. Bruce Perens with Post Open (https://postopen.org) or FUTO with "source first" (https://www.futo.org/about/futo-statement-on-opensource/).

A big hangup with all of this is, who is "us"? Whom do you owe money to?

The original author? What if I end up forking the software without the original authors involved, am I going to do it for free with all the proceeds going to people who aren't working on it anymore?

Or all future contributors? Using which formula to divvy up that money? Lines of code, useful bug reports written, number of tasks triaged, number of tasks resolved, documentation authored, users supported - what determines the relative amount of your contribution? Who receives the payment(s) from $megacorp, can they be trusted to redistribute it among contributors? What happens when the original maintainer / payment receiver steps back or scales back their contributions? How to avoid the divvy-up metric being gamed by people who care more about the money than the quality of the software?

Yes, it's possible; no, "just add to the license" doesn't cut it. This is a much bigger question. How you answer these questions determines whether your project even preserves open source's main (user-side) benefit of forkability.