Yeah open source monetization sucks in the corporate world. Maybe there could be a license that goes something along the lines of “you may use this for free as long as your company’s yearly revenue isn’t over X €”
I think a better enforcable solution would be taxing the shit out of these corporations, then give state grants to open source projects. I actually looked into licenses that would allow me to force corpos to donate, but they’re unenforcable.
Ultimately, the solution to many problems caused by corporations abusing their positions is through taxation
Called “Fair use” or “ethical software” but people hate it and lawyers tell you it is not enforceable for… some reason
Which is extra funny because that’s literally how the unity game engine license used to be and lawyers were fine with it.
Tying it to revenue wouldn’t work that well due to inflation. Metas AI has a license that basically says that, but with a user number. Both ideas however would mean that the project isn’t open source anymore
Open source doesn’t mean free for everyone for every purpose
Quote from the Open Source Initiative definition of Open Source:
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
I mean, the obvious solution is to use a strong copyleft license like AGPL and sell private licenses for closed-source projects.
I hope we eventually get a copyleft lisence that states: “by using this product in a comercial product you have commited to supporting it, either by monetary fee or doing development work for it behalf, otherwise this product is entirely free of cost and is provided as-is”.
Edit: and the developers can freely reproduce the GPL license exception for all their products:
// Under Section 7 of GPL version 3, you are granted additional // permissions described in the GCC Runtime Library Exception, version // 3.1, as published by the Free Software Foundation.Currently, and I don’t know why, this extremely useful license exception for (C++) headers, which is meant for compiled down to machine-code is not usable for anything else. If your library is not part of GCC, the GPL does not help you here. As such, if you publish a header only library under GPL, you cannot state that the code using your code is not under “API” boundary, ie. free of GPL, while keeping your precious header under GPL. And no, LGPL, does not save you here.
You only have non-copyleft lisences like MIT (disgusting), Apache (shitly less gross), BSL-1.0 (still non copyleft) or LGPL (not gross, but extremely limiting.)
And, if you still publish something, I plead it is at least under GPL, since this guarantees a life for the produce, non-negotioable, forever, which I think is still better than dying and giving up to pooh of public domain.
There is a “Commons Clause” that people can add but there is some controversy as to whether adding this clause is enforceable. It very much would violate the strict definition of “FOSS”.
That said, I very much am against corporations that make full use of FOSS without contributing anything meaningful in return. I personally believe companies that make over $1M in revenue should absolutely donate something to the FOSS products they use.
Not only that but developers need to stop using permissive licenses like MIT or CC0. Moving to something like GPL3 (and specifically version 3) would go a long way for companies to stop treating open source as a well they can exploit.
Discussion I’ve seen on the subject on Hacker News tends to veer towards MIT being the only license allowed for use in many orgs (with exceptions of course) because license compliance is hard to manage when you’re using a lot of open source and you’re a small org. So many developers release their code with MIT licenses so it gets used more and looks better on the portfolio.
While I can see their perspective I personally agree with your take and would love to see more GPLv3 adoption and fewer stupidly permissive licenses. There’s tooling out there to help with the license compliance challenges, if enough developers moved away from MIT licenses then companies will be forced to deal with it.
They use those licences because more than anything else they want their product used
has enabled us to support massive global traffic with a single primary Azure PostgreSQL flexible server instance(opens in a new window) and nearly 50 read replicas spread over multiple regions globally. This is the
I do wonder why they are using Azure PostgreSQL flexible instead of the Azure CosmosDB Postgres offering based on Citus
Cheaper maybe? I haven’t priced in citus myself
Their sponsors list is pretty out of date, I clocked crunchydata on there which is now snowflake, and that’s an old logo
The financial supporters page has a donor from December 2025, so they are listing new sponsors. And Crunchydata seems to still use that branding in https://www.crunchydata.com/
If I don’t want to spend money on tips at the restaurant, even less will I want to spend it on donations
The difference is that a tip is “you’re already getting paid to do your job, why would I pay you to do your job?”. Whereas this is “you gave me this for free, so maybe if I make a bunch of money I could show appreciation for that gift” or pay-it-forward so the next guy can also get a free start, etc.
And yes I know they’re are busted places on this Earth where basically servers don’t already get paid to do their job and are thus reliant on tips as income, but that’s a different problem…
I have third world money. Every penny I make goes into things I need to survive, not things I could get for free after a Google search
That’s cool man, we’re not talking about you. We’re talking about Open AI, who pays employees hundreds of thousands of American dollars a year.
You should be allowed to use it for free. And a donation from a company like them, could make it easier for a person like you to get an awesome cutting edge tool for free!
