Comment by LeBit
7 hours ago
If I made 500M$ using an Open Source library and didn’t send at least 1M$ to the author, I would be an objectively bad person.
7 hours ago
If I made 500M$ using an Open Source library and didn’t send at least 1M$ to the author, I would be an objectively bad person.
But you probably depend on over 500 open source libraries and tools, mostly ones you're not aware of. (Do you ever use a linux VM to run or just develop your stuff? Ever use git or curl etc? Did you know that tools and components in turn use other open-source libraries that you didn't pay for?) The main reason you use such things is so that you don't have to worry about this question.
That’s a fine perspective, but the whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes. The license could easily say “if you make more than $500M, you must pay me $1M”. Why is that not an acceptable solution here?
An interesting approach is the dual GPL and commercial license. This is used for example by the CGAL geometry library [1]. In this case, a user of the library has the choice of either paying for the library, or open sourcing the code of their software.
[1]: https://doc.cgal.org/latest/Manual/license.html
Have you ever taken part in a legal dispute? The "whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes" sounds like someone who has not.
The easiest, most "acceptable solution" is to obviously throw the oss maintainer who made your hundreds of millions possible a bone. It's not that complicated. Why you find this such an odd notion I find rather strange.
I find this whole conversation baffling. Licenses and contracts are not a replacement for being a decent person.
Sure, but contracts is the remedy society has developed to the problem that there are lots of indecent people around (not to mention that reasonable persons can disagree without being unreasonable).
Only if you can afford to sue
You can't have a good contract with bad people.