Comment by em-bee
19 hours ago
yes, and no. there is profit and there is excessive profit. if i build something to make my linux experience better and share that with the world, and a few consultancies use that to make the linux experience for their customers better, then that is fine.
but if my tool becomes popular and a megacorp uses it to promote their own commercial closed source features alongside it, then that's excessive. that's one reason i like the AGPL, it reduced that. but in my opinion the ideal license is one that limits the freedom to smaller companies. maybe less than 100 or 500 employees, or less than some reasonable amount of revenue. (10 million per year? is that to high or to low?)
and even for those above, i don't want revshare, just pay me something adequate.
Who is stopping you from licensing your code that way then?
It's not open source, because the definition of open source doesn't allow you to place any restrictions on who can use it or for what purpose. It's why licenses like "Don't use it for evil" or "Everyone except Anish Kapoor" aren't acceptable for a lot of Linux distros.
In practice your best bet is probably a license where everyone can use it, but which is incredibly hostile to use in a for-profit environment. Think AGPL, where you risk being forced to open source your entire unique-selling-point proprietary software stack.
some people are working on that, among others there is bruce perens: https://web.archive.org/web/20251206160538/https://perens.co... (sadly his site seems broken, the static files still work however: https://perens.com/static/DEVELOPMENT_LICENSE.txt )
FUTO is also exploring this space: https://sourcefirst.com/