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Comment by DethNinja | Hacker News Reader

Why not change the license to a revenue share agreement with a cap on total amount of revenue?

For example, if a company uses ffmpeg on their products and product generates a yearly revenue of 1m then they will pay you 1k.

Current open source agreements do nothing to help smaller companies or the maintainers and honestly I find it stupid and destructive.

Charge larger companies more depending on their revenue and let small size companies with less revenue basically use it for free. Isn’t this more ethical than letting FAANG use these software for free?

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I really don't understand this mentality. This is what we've all been fighting for since the 90s. A free (as in beer) and open stack of software that anyone can pull off the shelf and use.

So many commercial platforms rely not just on ffmpeg and vlc but also on nginx, php, python, nodejs, linux, mariadb, and everything else you can imagine. We also pay for some very niche things that are simply not available from the open source community.

If my company was liable to have to pay out for each one of these projects we would be bled dry and our business would no longer be profitable. A bunch of people would also lose their jobs in the process.

At my company we have revenue sharing so the idea of having to cut out a piece of the pie for an open source project would not be popular among staff. Most of them aren't even in tech.

> If my company was liable to have to pay out for each one of these projects we would be bled dry and our business would no longer be profitable.

Unfortunately, building a business on a limited resource that is -currently- "free," is not a particularly wise decision.

VideoLAN and ffmpeg are amazing tools, but a lot of folks have made a lot of money on wrappers (some of which, are eye-wateringly expensive). I'd be unsurprised to find a number of license violations in some of these wrappers.

History is filled with examples of people making money on resources that are not sustainable. These folks make a lot of money, until they wipe out the resources.

OS is a limited resource.

Open source developers can still release things to everyone for free. Seems fair to say that companies derive value from open source in proportion to their scale. How about a $1m value generated threshold before it's considered impolite for a company to not at least give a little something back?

Ultimately these tools have already been released for free so asking for a rent seeking style payment after the fact is a little bit like sour grapes. What stops me from just forking the project? Really nothing. If anything open source maintainers that want to get paid should look into a model that mirrors the bug bounty programs. Have bounties for features. Generally these projects only really need security updates.

I mean it's true that once the code is published it's out there. So if you are only interested in the code up to a certain cutoff date I don't think you need to pay.

But that's not how people use them- people commit to a solution not only because it works today but also because they are likely going to keep using it for the foreseeable future. It's the maintenance that is the costly part. Maintaining a library is a lot more involved than producing it and then vanishing w/o a trace.

Ultimately somebody publishing and maintaining a good library is a positive externality for society. It's like giving kids a good education- it helps everyone. So big corporations relying upon open source w/o putting their money up to help allow the actual 'boots on the ground,' so to speak, get the job done, is kind of like getting a good free education as a kid, making a ton of money as a grownup, and refusing to pay teachers along the way.

Is it "sour grapes" if I bring a big dish to a potluck to share and I get mildly irritated if someone walks over and takes the whole thing to their table, ensuring nobody else gets any of it? Is it fine if a crowd of strangers shows up to my potluck without bringing anything, takes all the food, and leaves? Should I be able to go to a food-bank-for-the-poor and walk out with a big crate full of food since it's free?

At some point you have to recognize that a lot of our society operates on the expectation that people will behave in accordance with norms so that we don't have to bake every single thing down into extreme rules and have them enforced by armed goons. You're certainly free to ignore norms and do whatever benefits you the most at expense of others, but if other people did that to you constantly you'd probably end up pretty grumpy. There are lots of ways you can inconvenience someone without breaking the law.

Personally, I gave away a very useful free software package for ~4 years that I maintained solo, and multiple corporations repackaged it to sell to people without ever contributing fixes. Then when I stopped maintaining it for free, they all sent me emails offering to sponsor it (at pathetic rates). Seems like my free labor was worth something after all!

It's not a potluck, though. There is no meritocracy, even if you believe there is one.

Instead you brought your big dish to a food stall on a street corner that has the sign "FREE FOOD" in large font. Folks of all backgrounds, shapes and sizes show up and soon your food is gone.

If after that, instead of feeling warm and fuzzy that you did the world a solid, you wonder if any of those patrons were wealthy and could afford to pay for what you gave away for free, then maybe next time you should put a price tag on it.

What stops a company from forking and paying 200,000 a year for someone to maintain vs paying 20,000 back? Money.. cheaper to support than fork.

Most of the open source tools used could be forked and used as is with no need to change them for years. Sure you could say they need security updates but I could also just silo off that stuff from anything important.

In those cases they could take the tool as is and incorporate it into their workflow..make local changes or not.

The problem happens when you want to maintain your version with the current version (for security / features) or push those local changes to the project so you can stop maintaining. At that point you have to assign local resources or hope your patches are accepted which takes usually requires a relationship.

"If my company was liable to have to pay out for each one of these projects we would be bled dry and our business would no longer be profitable. A bunch of people would also lose their jobs in the process. At my company we have revenue sharing so the idea of having to cut out a piece of the pie for an open source project would not be popular among staff. Most of them aren't even in tech."

As a small business owner I understand this perspective, but if you expand it out it becomes transparently exploitative. "If my company was liable to pay for employees' health insurance, we would be bled dry and our business would no longer be profitable." I pay 25-35% of my income every year via taxes, if I didn't have to do that my profit margins would increase. It's not hard to find someone who claims they're being "bled dry" by taxes. Egress and ingress bandwidth is expensive, imagine if you didn't have to pay for it? Companies like Walmart are able to offer low prices in part because taxpayers fund them by providing food stamps and welfare to their employees.

At the end of the day the stuff you rely on costs SOMEONE money, if you're not paying for it, someone else is paying for it with their time and possibly money. If you can't do business profitably after paying for the stuff you use, your business is already insolvent and someone else is funding it for you.

So your argument is that people shouldn't be paid for their labor because the companies profiting from that labor might not be able to profit?

The labor was already given away for free. Don't maintain open source projects if you don't like the license.

If my company was liable to have to pay out for each one of these projects we would be bled dry and our business would no longer be profitable.

To put that another way, your profit is derived entirely from arbitraging the value of open source software for your customers. If you were actually paying what the software is worth to you there'd be no money left. Effectively, you are taking some of the value of the work done by open source developers and keeping it for yourself rather than passing it on (that's not a criticism btw, it's how practically every "supplying goods" type business works.)

That's very unfortunate. You're not really creating much value, so I imagine your business is too small for anyone to worry about. In the case of something like YouTube that clearly that isn't the case though; they create far more value from the open source software they use. YouTube absolutely could afford to pay a fair fee for what they use. If nothing else, it protects YouTube from a problem like the log4j issue this conversation has arisen from.

It's not even shared infrastructure like roads, since software is durable and the cost of use (and copy) is zero. Free and open source software is like science and technology. Like the modern wheel, candle, and cooking.

Plus some folks are tweaking and fine tuning it from time to time to be compatible with road 5.2 and with axle 3.1 and so on.

GitLab uses a delayed release (open core). Paying customers get the features first and months/years later they get into the free tier.

The math probably doesn't check out. Paying 0.1% (1e-3) revenue for a core business dependency is a no-brainer (if you have reasonable margins). When you go from dozen to hundreds, you will not only bleed dry, you will be paying more than a fair share of what is needed to sustain/develop the dependencies.

When your software is used by billions (1e9), a adequate/fair share may be around 0.00001% (1e-7) with huge variability, but try paying 2c for your favorite logging library, 3c for gcc, 1c for task manager, 0.1c for a tool you never heard of ...

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