Comment by bravesoul2
4 months ago
Needs a GNU GPLJ license. You can use this for commercial purposes only if you offer the copyright holder a job.
4 months ago
Needs a GNU GPLJ license. You can use this for commercial purposes only if you offer the copyright holder a job.
As it stands right now, if the code was under a GPL license, nothing stops them paying the author to get it under another license.[1]
Sure, they could offer a job as payment for said license, or just pay cash.
This approach would be "necessary" (for some definition of necessary) for GPL code, but isn't necessary for MIT code.
[1] this assumes there's 1 (or nearly 1) copyright owner. If there are multiple contributors, and no CUA in place, this approach is generally not possible.
Personally, and different people have strong feelings on this both ways, with GPL code I'd get contributors to sign a CUA. It keeps the door open for commercial opportunities like this, especially if the code is "mostly yours".
I almost believed that was a thing, but I don't see any indication that it is. Not a bad idea IMO
It could never be a GNU license because it violates freedom 0 as outlined by the FSF: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I guess with a benign modification it does work: it’s just dual licensed (a)gpl and commercial license, the latter available when offered a job. The former always available but of course they’d have to release their entire stack’s source, which Anthropic almost certainly wouldn’t want to do. That’s not OP’s fault though and the license stands as pure (a)gpl.
It would be very, very hard to make this work in practice.
What does it mean to offer a job? Can they offer a job that pays a dollar a year and call it a day? Or can you force them to offer you a job that pays a billion dollars a year?
Can they offer you a job, but only in Antarctica? What about visa sponsorship?
Of course, you can write whatever ill conceived terms you want in your license. But if your license is badly written, any decent company lawyer would strongly advice staying away from your code. And if that's the outcome you want: you might as well open source it with a 'non-commercial use only' license.
Worse things have been tried.
That actually doesn't sound so bad. (Designing the job requirements!)
1 reply →
Hah. Well it is now...just copy & paste the GPL's text and append that one condition.
> Hah. Well it is now...just copy & paste the GPL's text and append that one condition.
Section 7 of the GPL (version 3) explicitly gives the user the right to remove that additional condition. So if you want it to be effective, you will at the least need to remove section 7 from your copied GPL. Then, you'll need to remove the preamble and instructions to avoid the Free Software Foundation's ire (they're being generous in allowing you to modify the license test at all).
Ultimately, it goes against the spirit of the GPL so much (and against the point of FOSS in general) that it would be entirely unjustifiable to use the GPL as the foundation for such a proprietary, source-available licence.
The FSF holds the copyright to the text of the GPL, and they allow anyone to freely redistribute verbatim copies, but they don't permit just anyone to create derivatives.
2 ... spend $1m on the law suit
3 ... profit!
It is probably a bit late for that, as the company could simply use an earlier release, that was still under MIT license and develop it from there. They would have to maintain it of course, but if they are truly unwilling to hire, they might just do that. Nevertheless it would be a good move to move to a copyleft libre license.