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Comment by JacobKfromIRC | Hacker News Reader

Despite the submission title, I don't think I would call this proposal a way to force companies to pay for free software. They could choose not to pay if they don't want to use the software. If they've already downloaded the software, then they wouldn't need to pay unless they want to download it again, but they are free to make as many copies as they want so re-downloading is mostly going to be a matter of convenience I think.

I believe free software is better than proprietary software, so I think it's good to better incentivize the production and maintenance of free software.

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Using nicer language doesn't change the argument. You're still suggesting that corporations be required to pay for the software, which is a reversal of the terms of the license.

Let's ignore for the moment that this is manipulative behavior (switching from free to paid after the fact, the same thing users complain about corporations doing). This is likely also illegal. The software license is a contract. Permissive FOSS licenses grant the use of the software in current and future forms without payment. To withhold the source code until receiving payment would be a violation of the contract terms. All of the copyright holders would have to agree to change the license to no longer be Open Source, and even then a judge may well find it illegal.

It's also a bad idea because it would split the community. I find this action so unethical that I would no longer contribute to or use any FOSS that required payment. I didn't get into this community to shake companies down for cash. If you want to make money off software, go do that somewhere else, or do it with services and support.

You don't need to change the license at all in order to do this. Withholding source code while providing an executable would violate some free licenses, but all free licenses allow withholding both an executable and corresponding source code simultaneously.

An action like this could split the community, but I don't think it would be very visible to people contributing to the software, since I imagine the source code would still be available on a public git repository with the same license, for the purpose of development. Do people complain about Krita being on Steam [1]? It's not exactly the same situation, since Krita never was on Steam before, but do you think the situation would be so different if Krita had been free-to-download on Steam and then they changed it?

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita/

FOSS licenses don't allow requiring payment for source code. Even if they did, they would have to do it for all users and not just corporate users, or they'd be violating their own terms against discrimination on fields of endeavor. What they can do is charge for binaries of the software, which is completely different. And they can't stop anyone else from redistributing it for free. So the first person who pays for it can just give it to corporations for free, and the copyright holder can't do squat about it. These are all features of the licenses, to prevent nasty developers from putting up roadblocks and gates to prevent the collaboration and sharing of the source code.

A corporation is a user too. Imagine if instead of corporate users, we were talking about rich users. Or imagine if 99% of the public used the code, and none of them paid, so people started talking about forcing the public to pay for the code.

Nobody asked the developers to make this code. Nobody asked them to put a FOSS license on it. Nobody ever promised payment. But now that they see dollar signs, the developers want theirs. It's greed, pure and simple.

FOSS was not created to give volunteer developers a living. It was created to give people freedom. No more, no less.

Free licenses all allow requiring payment. A license that disallows charging for the software as a whole would be a nonfree license. An example of a license condition that does this is the "Commons Clause" [1]. See the FAQ question on that page which says "Is this “Open Source”?" (short answer: "No.").

If someone decides to charge businesses more than individuals, that is arguably discrimination based on fields of endeavor, but if the discrimination isn't written into the license, the software could still be free. Corporations are still free to use free software however they wish, but they can't force software repositories to choose to distribute software to them directly.

It's true that someone could set up a different software repository that offers largely the same software to corporations at no charge, so the proposal only works if companies would prefer to pay the fee rather than set up a different repository. It sounds like companies already pay to use an intermediary repository, if I'm correctly understanding what Artifactory is, so maybe the proposal wouldn't actually work.

If 99% of the public used a piece of software, there's a good chance people really would be forced to pay for it through taxes. This apparently already happens with some proprietary software (though I didn't look into it); see "Public Money, Public Code" [2]. Taxes are a different situation though.

Software freedom can't exist without free software. The better funded free software is, the more free software will be able to compete with proprietary software, and the more free the world will be, with regards to software freedom. The proposed system of charging corporations could conceivably be better even from the perspective of the corporations, if it leads to free software becoming more reliable.

I know you don't mean "nobody" literally, but I actually have asked people to write free software and to license existing nonfree code with a free license. It might be true that you didn't ask for people to make free software, but would you prefer a world in which they didn't?

[1] https://commonsclause.com/ [2] https://publiccode.eu/

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