Comment by BFatts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BFatts | Hacker News Reader

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This seems antithetical to the OSS movement, almost like a "Yeah, we released our code as open source, so everyone can learn, extend, and distribute. But we've changed our mind and SURPRISE - now we want a payday!" Open source only applying to other open source? C'mon - who are you, Stallman?

If companies have to pay for licenses to OSS they will simply stop using it. It makes sense to a business to benefit from the freedom of others. If devs are expecting a payday, don't release as open source. I know that sounds like I'm saying "stop being a jerk" and I am.

The idea of OSS has been the sharing of software with limited license responsibility, but adding in a specific license for commercial use thru a command-line interface is going to be too much of a nightmare to manage.

This will end up turning into another GPL border dispute (to use Heather Meeker's term). Which code is covered by the open-source part, and what's covered by commercial? Where does my software start and yours ends? I figured that if devs don't want software used by companies, they could use the CC-NC licenses.

Many companies have no problem paying reasonable fees to license software they find useful. I don't see why they should stop paying, on some kind of ethical principle, if a developer decides to publish some or all of a product's source code on GitHub with a restrictive, noncommercial-use-only license.

Why should a developer be accused of greed for publishing code openly, but with paid licenses for commercial use? How is this not better, in absolute terms, than remaining closed source?

> I figured that if devs don't want software used by companies, they could use the CC-NC licenses.

From what I can see, this is exactly what L0 provides, with the added _option_ that if a company _does_ want to use the software for commercial purposes, they can pay for a license with a credit card.

CC-NC is not a license for code.

Creative Commons has spent a while trying to pin down what counts as "commercial use" for art and data, but they'll tell you flat out that code is out of scope. Ideas like "dependencies" or "linking" are not considered by CC licenses.

Furthermore, they spent maybe close to a decade wrangling with trying to better nail down NC and, as far as I can see, basically punted. Anything unambiguously NC is mostly something that you’d hopefully never see an issue around anyway, e.g. making a print of a photo for your house. Everything else, someone will argue is commercial even if it’s not an unambiguous commercial use like an ad.

That's a good point. It seems about right that license terms are all about the cases where the code is used "commercially", for some sense of "commercial". If the code is never used commercially, there's never a reason to enforce the license.

Maybe the most effective non-commercial code license is the most popular license on GitHub: the null license.

(If someone's about to reply "You can't just use code you found on GitHub without a license, you can get into all kinds of trouble that way", that's exactly my point about using code with a "non-commercial" license.)

While I agree with your comment, there are at least two big OSS projects that manage to disagree with this remark:

> If companies have to pay for licenses to OSS they will simply stop using it.

Qt and Red Hat Linux.

And SUSE. And Canonical. And LibreOffice. And OwnCloud. And NextCloud. And any number of other projects.

They pay for support, not the software. If you want to sell support around your open source project, you don't need a new license for that.

Paying for a binary is a model that only makes sense in proprietary software, and IMO it doesn't make much sense in that model either. Supported seats is a far more usable model.

Businesses pay for LibreOffice? For what?

Businesses pay for LibreOffice support (like other forms of software support). Usually as part of a distribution extension (both Red Hat and SUSE have something similar on this front), but LibreOffice themselves have some support contracts as well as a certification program.

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