There has been a lot of talk about companies and individuals adopting licenses that aren’t OSI opensource to protect themselves from mega-corp leechers. Developers have also been condemned who put donation notices in the command-line or during package installation. Projects with opensource cores and paid extensions have also been targets of vitriol.
So, let’s say we wanted to make it possible for the majority of developers to work on software that strictly follows the definition of opensource, which models would be acceptable to make enough money to work on those projects full-time?
One recent example I can give you is XnView. It’s a program that is free for personal use as an alternative to some specific Photoshop suite as well as some other paid photo viewers like ACDSee. But if you’re going to use this for any sort of commercial use, you need to pay for licenses for all computers you use this on. Such was the case for us since we needed it where I work.
Admittedly it’s integrity based for most of these programs. They are hoping that you are going to be honest about your usage and pay when you use it for commercial use. There doesn’t appear to be telemetry that reports back your usage as this is usually just some guy releasing his personal project. In the case of XnView, I feel it was a guy who was fed up with more recent updates to ACDSee and made his own that mirrors the older versions and just works.
We bought the licenses but I never really felt they were necessary to activate. But we had the proof if we were ever audited that we paid for commercial usage.
I pirate some stuff in my personal life, but these little guys who do this are seriously awesome and I try my hardest to follow their rules since it’s so convenient and helpful in my search and their approach is not ever privacy intrusive.
Another example would be WinRAR, if I remember correctly. They expect businesses to pay to use it but the general public of users just using it at home get the free, infinite “trial”.
Both of those aren’t opensource (at least I can’t find their repos on their webpages), but I see the model your proposing. Maybe just providing an option to pay at all, and not make it a donation, could work. The only problem I see is a competitor swooping in with a bigger team (or a team in the first place), and building upon the existing project to kill it in order to end up selling its own product. With non-restrictive opensource licenses like MIT and Apache, I assume it would be trivial. GPLv3 would make that a little harder.
Anti Commercial-AI license