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.
This business model is still massively preferable to fully closed source in my view.
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.
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.
It doesn't have to always be at 1%.
You could have a "negotiable" license as well but it becomes quickly non-trivial to document what the negotiated terms are in your SBOM.