
Ask HN: Concept for Monetizing Open Source Projects - jppope
Looking for feedback on a concept:<p>I&#x27;ve been reading a lot about the financial hardships of open-source software and I had an idea for a solution.<p>It seems that the value OSS has on a business should be returned in some way but OSS creators seem to have difficulty getting companies to donate (or pay) for their software.<p>What if there was a license that explicitly laid out company by company what contribution they must make to use the OSS... this license would be available to all OSS so that it was relatively efficient for the creators to use generically. E.G. &quot;Sun Microsystems must donate $50 a month to use this software, Netscape must pay $50 a month to use this software... etc&quot; The costs could be simply relative to the companies valuation.<p>Interested in feedback... (yes I do understand its basically creating a large company database)
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gus_massa
It's not "open source" with the most common definitions of open source
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition)

It's not clear how much and who you have to pay if you use an aggregate of
projects. It's not clear what happens if you are using a fork or a patched
version. It's not clear what happens if you are using only a tiny part of a
project.

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jppope
Fantastic observations. I appreciate you mentioning them. You are totally
right I'm colloquially using "Open Source" to basically mean code that is
under a permissive license... and not really covering all the basis with the
comment. important to consider.

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gus_massa
I think that the magic part of open source is that it is easy to fork, so the
BDFL (or equivalent) must be nice. For example, in the node.js vs io.js fork
or the OpenOffice vs LibreOffice fork. This ensure the community that they can
continue with the project on their own if there is a big enough problem.

If everyone must continue to pay the original project, it's not possible to
make a meaningful fork.

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ljw1001
i'm not sure about the specifics, but i applaud any attempt to return
something to contributors.

There are difficulties as always. The most important I think is that it might
discourage free contributions if the core developers got paid and no one else
did.

Second most important is how to handle payments made to one project, when it
uses similarly licensed software from another. If the purchaser had to pay
double and the money were split we might have a new industry aggregating
software.

If those hurdles weren't fatal, I might consider a simplified pricing model:
say $X for commercial use, free for other uses, coupled with a system for
handling the payments. Otherwise the payment part might be onerous.

I call my new license "Fee and Open" Source.

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jppope
love the "Fee and Open" Source. Gave me a chuckle...

these concerns are totally valid... I appreciate the follow up and will think
through it.

