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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I suppose open source projects could change their license such that big FAANG companies have to pay for their use, and individuals and small business could still use them for free.

I see no downsides: if my company ever grew to FAANG proportions, I'd be happy to pay a few million dollars (then pocket change) to open source projects I used.

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That would make them "formerly open source" projects.

I don't know, e.g. Qt has a license for commercial use, but most people would say the project is open source.

Only QT for device creation [0] is proprietary, everything else is under (L)GPL. If on the other hand you are talking about the optional commercial license for those who don’t want to comply with the (L)GPL, alternative licenses are something completely different.

[0]: https://www.qt.io/qt-for-device-creation/

According to this reddit thread [0], some important parts of Qt are not Free and Open Source software. That includes the Qt Quick compiler. It's true that some of what's under the 'Qt' umbrella, is available under the permissive 'weak copyleft' LGPL licence.

More generally:

When a library is released under a strong copyleft licence like the GPL, then you are welcome to make use of it, but you are required to release your software under that same licence (i.e. to make it Free and Open Source), if you publicly release it. They do not prohibit you from making money, nor do they single out large corporations for special hostile treatment. Any licence that does, is unlikely to be considered a Free Software licence, or an Open Source licence.

(The AGPL licence goes even further than the GPL, and can apply even if you don't release your software. This is relevant for the software-as-a-service model.)

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/803fx9/qt_comm...

AGPL or "pay for a commercial licence" is becoming more common. Still open-source, but if you don't want to open source all of your services, then you can pay for a commercial licence instead

I imagine this whole mess could have been avoided if the major 'managed service' providers/software-as-a-service providers chose to kick some of their profits up to the Free and Open Source projects they're profiting off.

As it is, we have Free software projects feeling cheated (understandably), and their only recourse is to change to more restrictive licences.

I don't imagine going AGPL would mean much for curl though, or other such applications. It's projects like MongoDB (no longer Free and Open Source software, according to Wikipedia at least) that we're normally thinking of when it comes to AGPL.

I like how MS has done with this VS Community. It's full fledged VS Pro, but only free for companies with fewer than 250 PCs and less than $1M in ARR.

I would use GMAFIA instead of Netflix. I don't see them at the level of Apple, Google ... and the likes.

It's odd to have an acronym that includes Netflix but not Microsoft - I'll give you that.

What does the 'I' stand for?

My guess is IBM

Intel?

IBM

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