This one is something that were brought up a lot by developers including me who are very weary about corporations profiting off of our work for free and this basically put us off from contributing to open source in general.

We get a bunch of dialogues about this such as:

Developers like me: “Many of us who create are concerned about our work being exploited. The possibility of corporations profiting from our open-source contributions without giving back to the community disincentivizes us from participating in such endeavors.”

Open-Source Advocates: “The AGPL exists to mitigate such concerns. It requires derivative works to also be open-source.”

Developers like me: “While I appreciate the intention behind AGPL, there is a loophole - a ‘condom code’ if you will. Even though Linux Kernel prevents such strategies by refusing to merge these changes and that it’s difficult for a singular corporation to force an adoption of a forked version of Linux Kernel, a corporation can fork our much smaller project however and introduce such legal bypass to the copyleft restrictions. This bypass can be justified by them under the guise of extending the software’s capabilities with a plugin interface or an interprocess communication protocol layer, similar to how PostgreSQL allows User Defined Functions. However, I must caution that I’m not well-versed in the legal intricacies.”

When bringing up on non-commercial clause for licensing

Open-Source Advocates: “Disallowing commercial use of your project contradicts the principles of open-source.”

Developers like me: “Well, then perhaps we need a new term, something like ‘Open Code Project’. We can create projects that encourage collaboration and openness while also restricting commercial exploitation.”

So I created this post, because we do need to discuss on a path forward for Open Source in general knowing that corporation can shirk around this restriction and discourage developers like me from participating in open source or open code projects.

Edited to add:

I really want to thank you all for discussing a rather contentious topic and adding your own thoughts to this. I really appreciate everyone’s thoughts into this. I clearly have a lot to do on researches.

  • Boris Mann@news.cosocial.ca
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    1 year ago

    There are a number of licenses that do this. And yes, many of them are not OSI approved and people will say mean things about not using the word open source. Which you should ignore and instead perhaps say fair source instead if you care.

    A couple to look at:

    Big Time License

    a public LICENSE that makes software free for noncommercial and small-business use, with a guarantee that fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory paid-license terms will be available for everyone else

    Prosperity License

    Prosperity is a public LICENSE for software that makes work free for noncommercial use, with a built-in free trial for commercial users.

    I also recommend going through the back log of posts by Kyle Mitchell, an engineer - lawyer who has authored a number of great software licenses, including the two I listed.