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Comment by sandstrom | Hacker News Reader

An admirable idea, but I'm doubtful it would work. Happy to be proven wrong though.

Another idea on this topic:

Someone should try an open-source license where any company with more than, say, 500 employees need to pay a small tribute, for example a fixed $1000 / year. Small enough of an amount that any large org could pay for it, and large enough that if you have 10+ large companies you'll get good money from your open-source project.

500 dependencies would be 500 000 a year, which should be sustainable for most 500 employee the company.

Don't really know how to enforce it or build an org around it, and there are likely several hurdles to overcome.

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>Someone should try an open-source license where any company with more than, say, 500 employees need to pay a small tribute, for example a fixed $1000 / year. Small enough of an amount that any large org could pay for it, and large enough that if you have 10+ large companies you'll get good money from your open-source project.

There are projects out there like this; I would say Unreal Engine is one. However, I wouldn't consider this open source (it's source-available).

That said, it's way more likely that someone working at that big company, if the need was strong enough, would just write their own and open source it (and everyone would use that project), or just buy a vendored solution (and in that case, if that company is you, you are now running a company and you also have to provide support; which is no different from how things exist today).

Qt does something close to this; dual licensed LGPL and proprietary. Generally larger companies would rather pay the license than risk being noncompliant with some confusing piece of the LGPL. (Also certain stuff like the mobile framework is only proprietary.) Although their proprietary license cost is more than 'a small tribute'...

Anyway, you could maybe have a tri-license:

- GPL/LGPL

- small-company proprietary license ($0)

- large-company proprietary license ($1000)

Although the proprietary licenses mean that despite providing a GPL license, you wouldn't be able to take advantage of outside GPL code. Plus I think you'd need to have any open-source contributors sign away the copyright of their code to you/your project's foundation.

Seriously, most open source projects have a relatively small number of contributors. A license that requires a small fee for commercial users over a certain size is a no-brainer. Proprietary closed-source projects are also commonly priced by customer size.

The OSI zealots will attack you for violating some vague moral values, but that’s a small price to pay I think.

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