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Comment by ThrustVectoring | Hacker News Reader

This suggestion is missing the incentives present for software writers. Open source drives adoption and the network effects of Google-ability and stack overflow Q&A, along with prestige for the creators. Straight up removing free commercial use does some real damage to the network building - your license prevents it from getting used for many projects.

What you want is a license that allows use in "cheap" situations without giving away your right to price-discriminate against companies that have large checkbooks. So, some sort of simple price discrimination screen built into the license. Something like "Does your company have 1000 or more employees? If so, pay us. If not, you've got a free license and 90 days to get into compliance if you change categories".

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The L0 public licenses come with grace periods, essentially free trials. Right now they're at 90 days, but will almost certainly shorten, perhaps to 30 days or less.

The utility of L0 is to make it possible to offer one set of public tools with, say, a noncommercial use limitation, but offer those who need to use commercially an easy way to buy the right to do that. "License Zero", as in near-zero friction.

Zero is impossible of course, because there will always be some friction in the additional step of getting a different license, versus not needing a separately license at all. But it's up to developers to decide what's best, in terms of optimizing leverage to command support, on the hand, and minimizing friction that puts a brake on adoption, on the other. Purely proprietary software with closed source is at one extreme. Hyper permissive licenses like 0BSD are on the other.

My point is that "commercial" versus "noncommercial" isn't the same distinction you want to use for "pay us" versus "don't pay us". The proper price point for many commercial uses of software products is still zero.

Agreed. Some may opt for the reciprocal public license for that reason, since it allows unmodified use for commercial purposes.

Leaving the terms behind for a moment, to focus on context: Many users, both individual and business, don't have any money to sue for. They're judgment proof. But if they make it to cash flow, they should pay. They'll almost certainly have paid for other goods and services, like AWS or SaaS, before then.

I agree that price discrimination can be a useful thing, but question the idea that only very large or wealthy companies should pay anything at all. What if licenses are low friction and affordable?

If we had a nice repertoire of flexible licenses available to play with, developers could experiment and try all sorts of ideas, including what you describe.

Non-FOSS-licensed software isn't going to play the same role in the ecosystem as FOSS software, but it doesn't have to. Plenty of room for different kinds of people/companies/software to co-exist.

>I agree that price discrimination can be a useful thing, but question the idea that only very large or wealthy companies should pay anything at all.

Because the more developers use a piece of software, the more valuable being able to use the software is. It's a classic network effect. Being able to write your commercial web app in Ruby on Rails is more valuable than being able to write it in a functionally equivalent framework with much fewer users of the software. This is straight from being able to hire developers familiar with RoR, access Q&A discussions, use third-party RoR tooling, etc.

Large companies tend to not be early adopters anyways, and they have the fattest checkbooks to raid for the value you're supplying, so it gets the most financial gain for the adoption loss you're causing.

I can see how that is true for some kinds of software. For many examples, network effects don't matter.

The first license I can remember paying for was Metafizzy's 'Isotope', a jQuery layout plugin. Great documentation and performance. I can't remember the price at the time, maybe $40 (now it ranges from $25 - $320). It was totally worth it, I was making money and clients were happy.

https://isotope.metafizzy.co/license.html

Nothing is stopping anyone from granting a license for $0

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