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No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

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Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#431

Post by bregma »

Lio wrote: post #324
cercatrova wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You offer a copyleft license like AGPL but also offer a paid license for those who don't want to deal with AGPL. Since you as the creator own the copyright, you can license it however you want, including multiple licenses simultaneously.

Forgive me for a naive question but how do external contributions to the AGPL code find their way back to the commercially licenced code? Are all contributions to the "original" pre-licenced source? If so is there some extra legalese to ensure that the changes will always end up in the AGPL source too? I know of many successful projects using dual licencing so it must work, I'm just wondering how on a legal front.

Outbound licenses (say, the GPL or proprietary) and inbound license for contributions are orthogonal. If you intend to dual license outbound, you need to clarify that in your inbound CLA.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#432

Post by nevon »

xiphias2 wrote: post #421
nevon wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about organizations _demanding_ that you do work for them for free, it's the constant _expectation_ of it. I experience it myself quite often where users of my software ask about timelines for bug fixes or new features, but very rarely offer to chip in and certainly never to sponsor the work. Of course these organizations have no way to force me to do anything, but it is emotionally draining to constantly ha…

I would be happy if somebody asked for timelines for feature requests, because it would mean that I have the option to extract money by prioritizing those features. Just make the companies bid against eachother, writing a bidding system (maybe second price auction for a work point where you set the number of work points needed for a feature) is really easy.

I already offer both sponsorship as well as tailored consulting, but I haven't found any success in trying to sell that in response to issues. The moment I mention that I can provide commercial support, they tend to become silent. Maybe it's viable if you have a truly massively successful product like Redis or something, but it hasn't been for me at least.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#433

Post by MaxGabriel »

3pt14159 wrote: post #63
ganafagol wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your sentiment, but this is not the right reaction. It won't improve anything. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? You are free to adjust the license to prevent this. But then tomorrow everybody comes and rants about that the GPL is too restrictive. That's the price we pay for this. It's the license that keeps…

I don't want GPL. I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That's it. That's all I want. MIT-Billionaires. Want to take funding from A16Z? That's a million a year for the license or something that maybe scales with a market cap just to level the playing field between a funded startup and Apple Computers. Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don…

Andreesen Horowitz primarily focuses on early stage startups. A company with 5mm in investment isn’t able to spend 1mm on a single open source license.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#434

Post by freemint »

echelon wrote: post #45
ganafagol wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your sentiment, but this is not the right reaction. It won't improve anything. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? You are free to adjust the license to prevent this. But then tomorrow everybody comes and rants about that the GPL is too restrictive. That's the price we pay for this. It's the license that keeps…

GPLv4 needs to address a number of new problems: * "any user data serviced by this software must be easily exportable; no attempt must be made to block other 3rd party companies or services from consuming this data" * "if this software is itself sold as a service, any automation or tooling built in service of this system must also be made available as open source" * "any devices using this software must not actively…

This is a bad idea. All licenses released under GPLvX or later where XThe whole reason why we are in this mess and why GPL died is because the people behind GPL wanted to push their political views using the weight of persons using GPLv2 or later. The Linux kernel reacted by switching GPLv2 only. The only reason why would might want to name it GPLv4 is to use the weight of code of GPLvX or later people. Don't do that In addition some of you clauses have been shown to be easily enforceable by laws like GDPR and attempting to use contract is a crutch. They way to some of your points is phrased might be unenforceable in court and might void the complete license if it is ever testing in court. -> very bad

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g somewhere around 25 min it starts

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#435

Post by ghaff »

icebraining wrote: post #336
StavrosK wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s like a catch-22 though. If I start a company using open source and must give away the software I then build on top of it as open source then I likely fail to capture revenues and my company fails. How is that the open source author's problem? Open source is meant to enable user freedom, not to save corporations money. If you want to use something, contact the author and get a commercial license.

I agree. I guess what's missing is some coordination mechanism for the "contact the author and get a commercial license" part. If it's one author it's easy, but if it's eighty, it's hard to contact each even if they would all be willing to provide such a license. That's not a problem of open source itself, of course.

If you want to dual license, you probably should have a contributor license agreement. (It may be possible to relicense absent such an agreement, especially if it's permissively licensed, but a CLA certainly makes things clearer.)

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#436

Post by ghaff »

bregma wrote: post #427
kortilla wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but then can shut down any further development and support. Not really. A fork can easily continue developing and supporting it.

The original copyright holder can require the fork be distinguishable and non-confusable with the original project. There is plenty of precedent in that respect. There isn't much that can be done with lax distribution licenses, but there is still much that can be done under copyright law.

>fork be distinguishable and non-confusable

You're mostly talking about trademarks at that point, not copyright.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#437

Post by nmfisher »

roel_v wrote: post #376
nmfisher wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extending restrictions to affiliates/related bodies corporate is absolute bread and butter commercial legal work. Most lawyers are writing these kind of clauses week in, week out. What you are presumably referring to is transfer pricing, which is a completely different beast.

While I have never practised as a lawyer, I do have a law degree, and I've written several papers on IP and IP licensing when I was in law school. And I will also add that I did not do my degree in the US. Still, I am quite convinced that it is very hard to codify the intention of what the OP wants to do in a generic software license (i.e. one that you do not draft specifically for each client). I do not have the mot…

I don’t know why you think it’s not possible (or that it’s anything more than trivial). Revenue, affiliated companies, third party service providers, etc are all basic legal concepts.

The risk is far more likely to be inadvertently making the licence overly narrow and preventing usage by companies that you would actually intend to allow (or at least contemplate should be allowed).

Regardless, the text doesn’t really matter. Most companies will run for the hills as soon as they see anything remotely like the contemplated licence. It’s just not worth the risk for them.

Source: former lawyer.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#438

Post by puranjay »

kybernetikos wrote: post #347
ratww wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 1000x. I used to work at a company that pivoted into "growth hacking" and it seriously made me sick how at the end we had 1500 freelancers being paid peanuts to write about subjects they had minimum knowledge about, using other similarly shallow articles as their only reference. Today I can't search anything on the internet without coming across those. It's always the same: a shitty Wordpress blog and a 1500-wor…

Review sites are the worst. I frequently start reading reviews I've looked up on google that seem pretty legitimate, only to realise by part way down that it's clear the 'reviewer' has never actually seen the product and is just aggregating content from amazon reviews and spec sheets.

It's come to a point where I have to search for reviews on YouTube because there, I can at least be assured that the person reviewing it has the product in their hands

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#439

Post by orlandohill »

rusk wrote: post #116
3pt14159 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want GPL. I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That's it. That's all I want. MIT-Billionaires. Want to take funding from A16Z? That's a million a year for the license or something that maybe scales with a market cap just to level the playing field between a funded startup and Apple Computers. Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don…

What is wrong with saying “all rights reserved. You are free to use this software for educational and nonprofit purposes but once you start to make money off it you must request permission in writing” - I’ve seen a few licences like this. I guess the down sides are it might send some people elsewhere and you might be on your own trying to enforce it in court.

There are source-available licenses for this:

Polyform Non-Commercial License

https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0

Prosperity Public License

https://prosperitylicense.com/

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#440

Post by pietrovismara »

solatic wrote: post #397
pietrovismara wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not what OP meant at all. He's asking for a license that lets regular devs use your project freely, but require fortune 500 like companies to pay.

Who do you think a "regular dev" is? If it's software for personal use, then the GPL is just fine. The GPL is explicitly designed to protect personal use. If it's software for commercial use - I mean, that's exactly what the issue is here. Commercial users ought to need to pay for the software they use. Just because you offer a commercial license doesn't mean you need to charge a million bucks for it - if someone ema…

> Who do you think a "regular dev" is?

Someone who's not employed by a fortune 500 company, probably the 99% of devs?

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