Hacker News Reader

Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I think open source licenses are ripe for an update with the following clauses to deal with FAANG companies:

    This software shall not be used on platforms that hinder users in their free choice of software.

    This software shall not be used to create or in conjunction with adware, spyware, or other malicious software.

(Perhaps after a lawyer has reworded it properly so people can't pretend to not understand what is meant here)

Another one I'd like to see is:

    This software is free for personal use, and for commercial use by companies with an annual revenue less than $1B.

    (For commercial uses that are not covered by this license, please contact our licensing department)

View on HN

> This software is free for personal use, and for commercial use by companies with an annual revenue less than $1B.

I've been advocating for something similar:

> This software is free for any entity that does not contain material stakeholders (bond holders, debt holders, etc) that are billionaires. A yearly licence fee of $1m waives this requirement.

Something like that. I'm sick of wealth centralization. If a startup wants to use the software, great! Once Peter Thiel invests though it's $1m a year. My core beef with billionaires is that they do not pay their fair share in taxes. The push all their money into shell companies or park it overseas and we end up with doctors that actually save peoples lives paying double or triple the tax rate that the ultra wealthy pay.

"My core beef with billionaires is that they do not pay their fair share in taxes."

Mine is pretending they're not freeloading. A close second is the performant persecution complex. Third might be the rationalist rhetoric about slippery slopes (eg anything less than Freedom Markets™ is socialism).

“This software shall not be used on platforms that hinder users in their free choice of software”

That’s the GPL, isn’t it? Version 3 was specifically created to close loopholes w.r.t. to that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization: “Tivoization is the creation of a system that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license (like the GPL), but uses hardware restrictions or digital rights management to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware“)

No that line is different from the GPL. For example, you could still sell the software without distributing the source or without allowing users to link against your code.

I appreciate your eagerness and positivity but I fear it's not a solution. After all, who defines 'hinder', 'adware' or 'spyware'? (I'm reminded of the phrase "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".) Any company willing to make adware/spyware probably isn't above ignoring a plea in a license agreement. There are laws against burglary, assault, embezzlement, murder, too, and even with very harsh penalties (e.g. death penalty) they are not always sufficient to deter all criminal behavior.

A $1B limit? no problem - "we'll just send this over to our little 500M subsidiary."

the root problem is the consumer doesn't care and there is a cultural lack of care and trust and humanity. I don't know of any solution to this but the problem runs extremely deep. In fact, there may be no cure, as these problems are noted as the cardinal sins the Christian bible documented and Dante' famously illustrated : Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Pride. Solve that and the rest comes easy.

> who defines 'hinder', 'adware' or 'spyware'? The new license should define this.

> A $1B limit? no problem - "we'll just send this over to our little 500M subsidiary."

The new license can acknowledge this too

The developer account is much cheaper than lawyers and process required to set up a 500M subsidiary, so I don't think we even need to think of this edge case.

These would be "field of use" restrictions. Licenses with these kinds of restrictions are normally not considered open source (see items 5 and 6 of both the DFSG and the OSD).

If malware is going to ignore a variety of other things, do you honestly think they'd abide any licensing? I doubt they really care and will happily break that agreement and they're fine doing so until someone can take them to court to stop it (who's going to pay that fee? and I doubt finding the author of such malware is going to be particularly easy, never mind their country of operation may not even make any of this straight forward at all)

Companies do care, see the JSLint case:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866

Reply on news.ycombinator.com