Is there a License that requires the user to donate if they make revenue?

I tried a couple license finders and I even looked into the OSI database but I could not find a license that works pretty much like agpl but requiring payment (combined 1% of revenue per month, spread evenly over all FOSS software, if applicable) if one of these is true:

the downstream user makes revenue (as in "is a company" or gets donations)
the downstream distributor is connected to a commercial user (e.g. to exclude google from making a non profit to circumvent this license)

I ask this because of the backdoor in xz and the obviously rotten situation in billion dollar companies not kicking their fair share back to the people providing this stuff.

So, if something similar exists, feel free to let me know.

Thanks for reading and have a good one.

143 comments

You can put up a non commercial license and write that if this is for a commercial application they can get in touch with you and you can discuss together a new license for their use case.
- Yeah, I'm thinking of a more easy to understand thing. "Get in touch" is too much of a barrier imo. "Agpl but you need to pay 1% of your revenue to FOSS software"
  
  They would have to get in touch to figure out how to pay 1% either way, no?
  
  From my experience, companies would rather just pay for a commercial license. Anything abnormal gets trashed and banned in my company.
  I think it's more easy to understand "pay exactly this amount to use commercially" than the legal and accounting teams trying to work out how much to pay when you say 1% of their revenue to FOSS software. You can always donate the profits anyway

Generally, a free software license has to grant the 4 freedoms to be compatible to the gpl and co.
Freedom 0 is running the program however you wish, for any purpose. Imagine if that wasnt standard for free software, and having to read every license of every program you are using to find out if you are allowed to run it!
So your funny license would sadly be incompatible with other free software. Consider dual licensing it instead, with agpl + a propriatary license for businesses that hate free software, and make them pay through the nose for it.
- That's the FSF definition. Most users and developers of open source do not care at all about that, and certainly do not care about protecting corporate right to use their software without giving back.
  To many of them, open source is about transparency, community driven development, open contribution model, forkability, etc.
  
  no, thats also the open source definition point 6: No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor.
  A license that reatricts use would be a "source-availible" license aka corporate bs "work for me for free" licenses.
  Also, with strong copyleft licenses, businesses must give back, namely when expanding the program. I think thats what many programmers like about open-source and free software. And yeah, a free software license is a precondition to bazaar style development.
- I dont know why my license idea would be funny but thanks for elaborating. I‘ll read up on dual licensing.
  
  They meant funny "different", not funny "haha".

If you want to sell proprietary software, why not just write and sell it? Or as others have suggested, dual license it? Hell, even the old shareware model could work for what you’ve described.
Unless you’re paying enforcers, how would you know if a corporation paid the right amount to use the code? How would your union determine distribution amounts to projects? How far upstream would payments go? How will disputes among developers be resolved?
- Lots of foss use dual license: free for individual or non-profit use, but pay for commercial use, or even commercial use above a specific threshold. As part of my job, I’ve had to remove several of these, where the developer thinks it’s free but the corp can’t comply with the free licensing. It works.
  Here’s an extremely well known example
  https://docs.docker.com/subscription/desktop-license/
  I still haven’t decided what kind of company mine is with respect to foss. Its a good thing that they put effort into complying with licensing terms, they do support developers making contributions back, and historically they’ve “bought” a few foss projects (hire the developer, include that in his job responsibilities)! However I haven’t yet seen them make a corporate contribution and the first response with being out of compliance is to remove the dependency.
  So it’s good that we take it seriously, and good that we historically contributed, however we don’t seem to co tribute much anymore and clearly get more benefit from foss than we give back
  
  I thought Docker is FOSS but Desktop is not.
  Branding confusion aside they are distinct, but complimentary, products with distinct licensing.
- I dont want to write proprietary software. I write foss software. But i dont want you to make money off of my invention without giving back, easy as pie.
  The rest would obviously have to be determined. A union is a separate entity, same as the linux foundation seems to distribute donations (from another comment) it would have to be discussed and agreed upon.
  Still, those who use foss, make money and dont donate upstream are scum imo.
  
  This is not FOSS then. FOSS puts no restrictions on downstream use of your software other than that you acknowledge and credit the original authors.. This is "Open Source" with strings attached. It's no different than being forced to sign an NDA to see your code.
  You either make it free for everybody, or then it isn't free software.
  
  i dont want you to make money off of my invention without giving back
  Why do you think that you're interested in writing FOSS software? Nothing you've posted here supports that claim. You do, however, speak like a textbook entrepreneur who wants to be paid for their innovation.
  
  Yeah, that's cool and all, but your software isn't FOSS if ppl have to pay to use it... Just license it under the AGPL and call it a day
  
  Just make it proprietary. Hear me out. I get that FOSS comes with altruism, but you also have no obligation to share with someone (or corporations) that don't share our values. Make a proprietary version for them and if you still want an open version for who ever might find it.
  
  @hauilemmy That's like saying "I want to fly but without losing touch with the ground" - it is possible, it's just called "walking". If you "don't want someone to make money off of your invention" then that's called "proprietary".

It doesn't matter how hard you want to call it FOSS, but with this licensing terms you describe it is not FOSS, period. And to be honest, you calling out various people for not getting what FOSS is, while you fully ignore the agreed on definition by people who are actually doing FOSS is you discrediting yourself.
You haven't found a license like this, because your model is flawed: A licensing like this will disqualify you from any kind of usage in an actual FOSS licensed environment. Personal users, which will not be providing revenue, will not be really affected by this, and are irrelevant for your point. Corporate users, which you will mostly target by this new license probably won't be able to use your funky new license because they will need to check with legal, and your software will need to have a lot of USPs for someone to bother with that. A 1% corpo-richness-tax will not be approved by any kind of bigger company, because it's a ridiculous amount from the perspective of your potential customers.
You're taking yourself way to important. Open source software is not replaceable as a whole, but individual projects are. If you want to earn money with your project, that's good on you, license it accordingly, but do not try to upsell it as FOSS.
And I fully get your point, and I'm currently working on the same problem in my in-development project, and I'm not sure yet whether to dual-license it, for similar reasons you stated, and live with the consequences of providing OSS, but non-FOSS software, or do FOSS and provide it for actually free.
Edit: Also, the xz backdoor has nothing to do with funding. Any long time maintainer (as in not just a random person contributing pull requests) going rogue can happen in funded scenarios as well.
- it is not FOSS
  If you take the OSI or FSF definition, sure. Not all of us take that definition.
  For many people, the appeal of open source has nothing to do with how easy it is for corporations. It is about transparency, the ability to contribute, and the community driven product as a result. It is about the ability to pick up the project if the original developer stops using it, even decades later. It's about the ease of interfacing with said software.
  Again, you may quote the FSF, but there are too many users of open source, as well as developers, who got into it for the reasons I stated. I can assure you that they are not doing it so that corporations can profit off their software without giving back.
  
  Again, you may quote the FSF, but there are too many users of open source, as well as developers, who got into it for the reasons I stated. I can assure you that they are not doing it so that corporations can profit off their software without giving back.
  If you are developing open source, you are not necessarily developing FOSS. If you are developing FOSS, you are also developing open source.
  FOSS is well defined by the FSF, and it has been for ages, and to be frank, therefore no one cares for anyone's personal definition of it.
  What I am against is having the cake and eating it, as it's being proposed with this licensing. Either you do FOSS, or you don't. Either you do open source, or you don't. Either you do proprietary software, or you don't. It's really that simple, because depending on your project, you take the terms that you see fitting and live with the consequences. The whole goal of this proposal was to be taken more serious as open source developers and projects, and to ensure funding for further development. Cherry picking the best parts of every model, and making irrational demands does not achieve that.
  As I said, I'm absolutely on board that open source licensing and open source development being taken for profit by corpos absolutely sucks, and the usual licensing models have not aged well with the much wider adoption and usage of open source, and there is a need for change - as it's being done e.g. by elastic, redis and others with their dual licensing.
  
  @cyclohexane @x1gma
  It is about transparency, the ability to contribute, and the community driven product as a result. It is about the ability to pick up the project if the original developer stops using it, even decades later. It’s about the ease of interfacing with said software.
  That's... exactly what the FSF and OSI definitions are all about.

No, there isn't and there won't be any since what your saying is absolutely against FOSS values. You are in non-commercial/commercial license territory, give a look at winrar's/unity's and the like, gpl is not for you.
- Could you elaborate how it is against foss values to keep people from being exploited?
  
  "Forcing donations" is just a fancy way of saying "charging licensing fees".
  
  Another user, toothbrush, has already posted a link to the 4 freedoms, I'd recommend reading that entire page for a most thorough explanation.
  But basically your plan goes against three of them (assuming you're going to release the source code, if you don't your not granting any of them). Freedom 0 says you can use the software however you like, for any reason including for profit. You can charge the users but once you give them the (Free) software it's completely theirs. Freedoms 2 and 3 state they can redistribute copies or distribute their modified version in any way they want provided that the give their users the same freedoms they were given.
  
  A fee for comercial use or corporate users sounds like "discrimination against fields of endeavor" to me.

Technically those wouldn't be freedom licenses because it applies restrictions based on use and scale and profits. Such a license would be incompatible with open-source licenses and it turns it more into a source-available license. It's basically a "free for personal use" license.
This is why Elastic, MongoDB, and recently Redis are changing their licenses, to stop big companies freeloading on them for profit without contributing upstream.
Whether this is okay is a matter of opinion and there's good arguments going both ways.
Also, just as an example of how your license could be problematic: lets say AWS uses XZ compression internally for their S3 object storage service: 1% of monthly revenue would likely be millions if not billions. What does the XZ project do with this much money, and who gets it? All the contributors based on total lines of code attributed to them? What about those who disappeared or whose identity beyond their screen name is unknown? What about downstream sellers? If I sell an Ubuntu ISO on a DVD, do I now need to calculate how much I owe every project in Ubuntu?
Also of course it would automatically be incompatible with the GPL and even MIT/BSD licenses. So now if someone wants to use your software, it also can't be GPL or any other open-source licenses.
- It’s basically a “free for personal use” license.
  Not sure I 100% agree on that.
  If there was a license that i.e. required a certain percentage of all revenue that can be attributed to the usage of the software, a for-profit company could utilise it without paying a cent if they used it without generating revenue with it.

Fauxpen source licenses such as this are the answer to the wrong question.
"Other people making money with my stuff" was never a problem in the software-freedom community. Whether this means "selling my stuff" or "using my stuff in a commercial setting" ("commercial use" restrictions are confusing in this way). In the free-software world we just accept that our work belongs to the community and the community can use it in ways we don't approve of.
(Edit: Likewise, it has never been an issue to sell copies of free software, although I should point out the very nature of software freedom makes it more difficult to guarantee a revenue stream in this way)
Rather, this is a symptom of the proprietary software world's reaction to free software and co-option of it (in the form of the open source movement). Tom Preston-Werner, founder of GitHub, opined that proprietary software companies should open source almost everything - "almost everything" being anything that does not "represent business value." In other words, open source cost centers but keep profit centers proprietary. Ideally, these companies would cooperate on widely used components (and some do!), but practically they spend as little as possible because capitalism. This is also why we see so many projects turning fauxpen source lately; these companies imagined they were developing cost centers and then realized they could be profit centers instead.
What was (and still is) a problem is people making proprietary derivatives of free software, and copyleft is the solution to that. If you want to extract license fees from proprietary software developers you can dual-license under a strong copyleft like (A)GPL for the free software community and sell proprietary licenses. Believe it or not, Stallman explicitly does not object to this - mainly because, if selling GPL exceptions to enable proprietary development is wrong, then releasing under a permissive license must also be wrong because that also enables proprietary development.
- I think this has been the best explanation together with the least condescending attitude in this whole thread. Thank you very much for making this easily understandable. I feel understood and can now grasp this a lot better.
  If more people were like you, this world would be a much better place. You have my deepest respect.
  Have a nice day.

That's not FOSS. All you'll do is guarantee that no one will contribute to your project and will just wait for someone else to make their own FOSS version, or encourage corporations to write their own version in-house.
I think we're far from solutions to ensuring money from FOSS goes to contributors, but moving to licenses that enforce it at the expense of the projects themselves is naïve at best
- By now I get that FOSS mostly implies free work for corporations. I‘ll just go with agpl to ensure they get nothing from my work.
  
  Sure. The point being though that companies will explicitly avoid projects that expect payment except for very specific circumstances.
  And, as much as corporations get the work for "free", so do other free software projects who will also explicitly avoid anything that adds further costs to their own work.
  If you're that afraid of someone getting your software for free then you might as well make your project proprietary because you're misunderstanding, fundamentally, how FOSS works.
  
  I use GQIS and OSM professionally. My company also contributes to both projects. You WANT companies to adopt free software because they'll put resources into improving it, which improves it for everyone.
  Are they doing it to make money? Yep.
  But it's good for the product and every user of the product. It allows hobbysts and individual users to benefit from corporate resources without ever giving the corporations money or data.

I want to say that all this backdoor incident (s, not the first and certainly not the last) only shows how well the FOSS model works. Not only for catching it promptly before it even was released, but these attacks which require a good amount of skill and time, and therefore probably money, demonstrate that some bad actors are fearful of FOSS. Also I want to point that voluntary FOSS contributors are not exploited even if some big corp uses their software without paying anything, as long as they respect the freedoms they have to give to their users. Also many (maybe most idrk) contributions to FOSS aren't made by volunteers, but through foundations/donations models paid professionals or companies putting developer time to them (I suspect this could be the case here with the guy from Microsoft that caught it).
- I agree that it shows that the model works. It also shows where it can be improved. Markedly by paying the initial maintainer so they would have been able to make this their only job if they so chose (which would be no problem I assume if companies had to pay 1% of revenue in total to all FOSS they use and which take donations).
  
  @hauilemmy Look, I think we all agree that the maintainer financing needs to be improved, but what you are suggesting is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You would remove the whole "F" of the "FOSS" by adding restrictions on the freedoms. So we just need to keep looking, this is not it.

You may be looking for the Big Time Public Licence: http://bigtimelicense.com/
- This is pretty cool. I've got a couple repos that Microsoft uses for VS Code. I switched one of them to GPLv3, but maybe I'll switch the other to this license.
- Thats pretty good! I havent found anything of the source code being available but I am in a hurry so I skimmed through it fast.
  
  Even proprietary software can be "open source", you just wouldn't have any freedom to use that code without paying.

Reminds me of this one : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beerware and the fact that some projects have dual licensing like https://www.qt.io/licensing/open-source-lgpl-obligations Not what you are asking for but I can imagine that a project can make commercial companies pay for the usage of the source code and have it free to use for non commercial purposes.
- Dual licensing seems to be a good idea. Although I'd like something like "it's agpl but making revenue means you pay 1%"

Yeah its called an End User License Agreement.
If you pull this shit, nobody will use your application. And don't pull that double dip like Redis is doing, all you're doing is dooming your project.
- As you can see from upvotes, the demand for fair treatment of developers by financial benefactors is there.
  But since 90% of folks here dont get the issue and rather troll dan dogpile on someone instead of discussing possibilities, I will just stay with agpl to make it impossible for companies to use my stuff.
  I wanted to go a different route but the scorched earth solution is okay too.
  
  Don’t confuse Lemmy upvotes with Reddit agreement or Facebook likes. As often as not, upvotes here just mean “You gotta see this!”
  
  I definitely understand that paying OSS developers is a growing concern, and if not addressed, a lot of software will go back to being proprietary. The Redis/Terraform double dip is the solution they want, but it just means PlaceholderDB and OpenTofu have to pick up the pieces.

Now I get it. OP wants to turn FOSS into a Ponzie scheme: https://lemmy.giftedmc.com/comment/768869

Isn't QT's dual licence policy basically this?
- Thanks for mentioning it. I searched for it but I cant find the clause you're referring to. Feel free to provide a source.
  
  That's because "Dual License" means there are two licenses. Anyone can use it under the terms of the LGPL. If a company doesn't want to abide by those terms, they can pay them not to by buying one of the commercial licenses

Interesting idea. A couple questions:
How would it work if the open source maintainer is a commercial company?
AFAIK there are no restrictions on when an Open source maintainer can change their license. They can do it even after their work has already been used.
So couldn't a company like, Facebook (since they own open source React) just change their React license to this one and all of sudden start charging everyone for it? 🤔
- The old version will still be available under whatever license it was released with
  
  Sure but new versions are released pretty often, which essentially means they can change their license whenever they want.
- Thanks!
  From my pov, a maintainer or user who just works on the software for their own pleasure (witch markedly no use in their company/revenue stream) would probably have to be excluded for fairness reasons.
  Afaik it depends on the license. I think the agpl can never be changed. Someone once called it a viral license of something because it taints every project it touched because every project that uses the code must be agpl from that point forward.
  But there are far more knowledgeable people than me out there, maybe someone can explain it.
  If facebook change to my idea of a license, they would get part (as in shared with every other FOSS project said company uses) of 1% of every companies revenue that uses react. Thats quite a lot probably.
  Thanks for chiming in. :)

Man, lemmy will just let anyone moderate.

Hi @haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com,
fyi icymi due to this thread someone posted this other thread asking "Is it appropriate for someone to be a mod here when they don't understand open source, and insult users in the community?".
I don't have time to read all ~200 comments in these two threads, but I do think that being a moderator of /c/opensource@lemmy.ml requires knowing what FOSS is to be able to remove posts promoting things which are not.
Hopefully the replies here (again, I have not read even half of this thread...) have made you better informed?
In case you haven't yet, I would highly recommend that you read these two documents (you can start with their wikipedia articles and follow links from there to the actual documents):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition
In short, the answer to your question ("Is there a License that requires the user to donate if they make revenue?") is yes, there are many such licenses, but they are definitively not FOSS licenses (despite what some people who haven't read the above definitions might try to tell you).
I won't enumerate any of the non-FOSS licenses which attempt such a thing, because I recommend against the use of such licenses or software licensed under them.
BTW, I saw you wrote in another comment:
By now I get that FOSS mostly implies free work for corporations. I‘ll just go with agpl to ensure they get nothing from my work.
While corporations benefiting from FOSS while failing to financially support it at all is extremely commonplace, I vehemently disagree that that is what FOSS "mostly implies". In fact, the opposite is more common: the vast majority of free software users are not paying anything to the companies who have paid for an enormous amount of the development of it. A few hundred companies pay tens of thousands of individual developers to develop and maintain the Linux kernel, for instance.
Regarding the second sentence of yours that I quoted above, in case you haven't understood this yet: the AGPL does not prevent commercial use of your work. If you write a web app and license it AGPL, you are giving me permission to run it, modify it, redistribute my modified version, and to charge money for it without giving you anything.
What the AGPL does, and why many companies avoid it, is impose the requirement that I (the recipient of your software) offer the source code to your software (and any modifications I made to it) under that same license not only to anyone I distribute it to but also to anyone using the software over a network on my server.
If the software were licensed GPL instead of AGPL, I would only be required to offer GPL-licensed source code to people when I distribute the software to them. Eg, I could improve a GPL web app and it is legal to not share my improvements (to the server-side code) with anyone at all because the software is not being distributed - it is just running on my server.
By imposing requirements about how you run the software (eg, if you put an AGPL notice in the UI, I am not allowed to remove it) the AGPL is more than just a copyright license: violations of the GPL and most FOSS licenses are strictly copyright violations and can be enforced as such, but violating the part of the AGPL where it differs from the GPL would not constitute copyright infringement because no copying is taking place. Unlike almost every other FOSS license, the AGPL is both a copyright license and a end-user license agreement.
For this reason, many people have misgivings about the AGPL. However, if you want to scare companies away from using your software at all (and/or require them to purchase a different license from you to use it under non-AGPL terms, which is only possible if you require all contributors to assign copyright or otherwise give you permission to dual-license their work) while still using a license which the FOSS community generally accepts as FOSS... AGPL is probably your best bet.
HTH.
p.s. I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, etc etc :)

@hauilemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com there are products out there that offer a dual license, one for companies with more than X employees and a free one otherwise.
How to enforce such licenses though seems to be the more difficult question
- Thanks for explaining. I appreciate it.

Does CC BY-NC-SA meet your intentions?
- Creative commons licenses are not recommended for software.
- CC BY-NC-SA
  Thanks for mentioning it. I read through it a couple of times already in my search. I want a more clear cut and specific license which says "you may sell it but if you make money, you donate to all foss you use".

143 comments