I think open source licenses are ripe for an update with the following clauses to deal with FAANG companies:
This software shall not be used on platforms that hinder users in their free choice of software.
This software shall not be used to create or in conjunction with adware, spyware, or other malicious software.
(Perhaps after a lawyer has reworded it properly so people can't pretend to not understand what is meant here)
Another one I'd like to see is:
This software is free for personal use, and for commercial use by companies with an annual revenue less than $1B.
(For commercial uses that are not covered by this license, please contact our licensing department)
I don't know about free software, but I suspect there will still be a lot of people releasing code under open source licenses, including most developers working for companies.
Maybe there should be a standard license for non-commercial source code, but that could be called a "source available" license.
That's why as a user I tend to consider the license of software I use and sometimes even the legal status of the entity behind it.
By no means my statement implies that software developed under a free software license by a nonprofit organisation will for ever keep being fit for my use case scenarios but I do believe that changes that constitute planned obsolescence wouldn't be the case.
Of course such a model has limitations, you can't go on funding rounds but still it's an interesting model.
We need popular non-free license which would require from big companies to pay fees to the creators, but allow small companies and individuals to use that software for free. Along with some company to handle payments and control usage, so developers won't bother with that.
The 'Why Software Should Be Free' case assumes the software exists at all. I think this is the case for a lot of common infrastructure software and I think these will continue to move to open source.
But without a license payment much software might not be available at all.
Yes! It's a huge peeve of mine when two well-meaning free software projects can't share code because of unintentional licence incompatibility. Throwing non-commercial licences into the mix would worsen things a lot.
That’s great in this one case but it doesn’t solve the open source compensation problem. We need a new set of licenses that allow the general freedoms of free software but also force people making large sums of money with free software to send some of it back to the open source projects they depend on.
I think that developers _should_ think about how they licence their software. Software licences are a cornerstone of the free software movement, and people should really consider what they believe people should have the right to do with their code.
One of the problems is that if your target market is other devs, there is a knee jerk demand that your software should be foss and free (as in beer).
I hope that we'll see a move away from foss licensing to source available licenses over the next few years and an increased acceptance of this model in more areas.
Dropping the non discrimination clauses in open source licenses while giving licensees the right to view and modify the source and integrate it with their own software, but not the right to redistribute, is to me a good middle ground for a lot of projects. This would allow developers to charge different rates (or not charge) depending on the licensee and ensure that they can capture more of the value from their work if they need to do so in the future, or if their project becomes popular. It works for Epic with Unreal Engine and more generally in the game industry where it is common to have source available licenses.
While free software has its place in certain areas (academia, government, hobby projects), and I agree you should be able to audit and fix the software that runs on your own devices, it also has downsides and I don't think foss licensing should always, or even usually, be the default outside of these cases.
Free and open source software licenses are redundant in a world where copyright and intellectual property laws don't exist, and no form of media (including software) can legally be owned by anyone.
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