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Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

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  • You can technically charge for FOSS, but that sort-of collides with the freedom to redistribute the software. You may have heard about that when the whole RHEL/Rocky Linux dispute happened.

    Equal shares can also be kind-of unfair if your backend is using sqlx for the entire database communication and then you also use some small image-conversion library to convert the favicon from .png to .ico.

    My last point may be a bit confusing, let’s try to make it a bit easier to understand: In this case, you are a company, that is directly using a piece of code that is licensed under the license you’ve been thinking about, and you’re also using a piece of proprietary software, e.g. some ERP-Software. The proprietary software is using a FOSS library that permits it to be used in a proprietary binary, let’s say because it’s BSD-Licensed. How do you know that the ERP-Software is using that library, and how would you determine how much you’d have to donate to them. You kind-of have to donate to them, because your ERP-Software wouldn’t run without that library


  • I know what FOSS means, but it seems like you think a license only needs to comply with one of the rules set up by OSI to be a FOSS license. If you charge your users (corps are also users) licensing fees, then you’re discriminating against specific fields of endeavor (users making money using your software). I’d argue you’re also interfering with other software projects, as some projects are strictly refusing donations (uBlock Origin as a popular example). As a last point: how would a business know which software it’s using and how do you define what project should get how much of their 1% of revenue? If a business is using proprietary ERP-Software, and that is using any random FOSS-Library, then how would that business know that the library is being used and, assuming they found out, how would they determine how much to donate?