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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

They are indeed beating around the bush.

What the end goal of these so-called opensource companies want is to have you use their "free" demo, but when you get slightly big and is somewhat locked in, or need some feature considered enterprise (coz you got bigger or have revenue), they extract a partial income stream off you.

This revenue model isn't bad per se, but why not just be upfront about it?

Look at unreal engine - their license explicitly states this. You give them some % of your revenue if it reaches $1 million or something like that. Why can't this be more normalized?

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Couldn't agree more, I'd love to see a range of standard licences for this business model, in a similar way to what we have with MIT, GPL etc.

This business model is still massively preferable to fully closed source in my view.

It would be nice to see a standardised set of proprietary licenses that you can easily dual license a copyleft project with.

Given the way that SPDX is set up, I imagine the ideal way to do it would be to create some standard proprietary licenses and then add exceptions for "small" users that don't want to use the copyleft license and would eventually like to get big.

i.e.

- Commercial-Royalties-1pct

- Commercial-Royalties-5pct

- Commercial-Royalties-10pct

- Commercial-Royalties-Negotiable

- Commercial-Seats-Negotiable

with the following optional exceptions

- Under-100k-USD-Revenue

- Under-1M-USD-Revenue

- Under-5M-USD-Revenue

- Under-10M-USD-Revenue

There's a certain amount of inflexibility that comes from trying to standardise license terms in a way that's compatible with SPDX but maybe an extension to SPDX in the future might improve that and allow you to specify certain terms on licenses more than just basic exceptions.

Love the idea, but for unreal engine 1% royalty is fair, you've built your entire product on it.

But what about 1% of revenue for a UX libary or database product from uber?

I'd say that the old elastic licence is great to standardise and so is the 0.5%, 1%, 1.5% or 2%; over a Million, 5 Million or 10 Million.

i mean, surely you can have tweak the license (i.e., have the wording be a "variable" which is set at the point of agreement).

It doesn't have to always be at 1%.

Ehh that's kind of the problem with using a SPDX license tag.

You could have a "negotiable" license as well but it becomes quickly non-trivial to document what the negotiated terms are in your SBOM.

Yeah you could definitely do smaller royalty rates or a step up fee schedule but I know SPDX isn't too keen on people dumping a thousand licenses at their feet to include and until you can easily plug in custom license parameters, I'm not sure if there is a better approach without absolutely blowing up the SBOM with custom licensure.

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