Comment by apexalpha
7 days ago
I guess we need a new type of Open Source license. One that is very permissive except if you are a company with a much larger revenue than the company funding the open source project, then you have to pay.
While I loath the moves to closed source you also can't fault them the hyperscalers just outcompete them with their own software.
Various projects have invented licenses like that. Those licenses aren't free, so the FOSS crowd won't like them. Rather than inventing a new one, you're probably better grabbing whatever the other not-free-but-close-enough projects are doing. Legal teams don't like bespoke licenses very much which hurts adoption.
An alternative I've seen is "the code is proprietary for 1 year after it was written, after that it's MIT/GPL/etc.", which keeps the code entirely free(ish) but still prevents many businesses from getting rich off your product and leaving you in the dust.
You could also go for AGPL, which is to companies like Google like garlic is to vampires. That would hurt any open core style business you might want to build out of your project though, unless you don't accept external contributions.
IANAL, but the Polyform Project (https://polyformproject.org/) apparently are, and they drafted a suite of licenses for these purposes.
Also, I'm not sure how anathema AGPL is. It's true I rarely see AGPL projects being hosted by big clouds, but AGPL is also just less popular as a license. I know AWS hosts AGPL Grafana, but iirc, they had to work out some deal with upstream.
That would be interesting to figure out. Say you are single guy in some cheaper cost of living region. And then some SV startup got say million in funding. Surely that startup should give at least couple thousand to your sole proprietorship if they use your stuff? Now how you figure out these thresholds get complex.
Server Side Public License? Since it demands any company offering the project as a paid product/service to also open source the related infrastructure, the bigger companies end up creating a maintained fork with a more permissive license. See ElasticSearch -> OpenSearch, Redis -> Valkey
Inflicting pain is most likely worth it in the long run. Those internal projects now have to fight for budget and visibility and some won't make it past 2-5 years.
I would say what we need is more of a push for software to become GPLed or AGPLed, so that it (mostly) can't be closed up in a 'betrayal' of the FOSS community around a project.
The hyperscalers will just rewrite your stuff from scratch if its popular enough, especially now with AI coding.
1. Completely giving up is worse.
2. You're forgetting bureaucracy and general big company overhead. Hyperscalers have tried to kill a lot of smaller external stuff and frequently they end up their own chat apps, instead.
you won't get VC funding with this license which is the whole point of even starting a business in the wider area