There’s been some discussions recently about how to fund open source, usually by abandoning it in some fashion. This is instead proposing that a “royalties” mechanism is established by existing repositories.
Then it wouldn’t be free as in FOSS. Also the incentives change and now we get enshittification.
Then it wouldn’t be free as in FOSS
I had the same perception as you before I read the article, so I presume we both made the same wrong assumption. Apologies if I misunderstood your comment.
It’s not suggesting anyone changes the licenses to enforce this. Instead, it suggests that the package repositories should charge companies for access. Companies that want to use a free mirror will, but many will pay for convenience of using the official repository. A cut of that money is then automatically shared to maintainers.
“Free” in FOSS doesn’t mean free from cost. It means free to do what you want with it.
It does overlap often, but there are licenses that let you sell open source software, like the widely-used MIT license.
All my free software is under MIT license. But charging money for using my software would entail license changes and would make the software less free and incentives change to do things that make money instead of sound software.
Neither of these directly apply to what I was clearly responding to, which was
Then it wouldn’t be free as in FOSS.
Which is factually incorrect and seems to imply a common misconception.
Since MIT an unrestrictive license, people can even sell your software. It’s even a short license and it’s easy to read.
The other software that might be referenced in your software is another story. But someone can sell your modifications with the MIT license. They don’t even have to ask.
Commercial use is not the issue. That’s already allowed but incentives. If you don’t enforce payment it won’t happen, because that’s whats happening now. Paying companies are called sponsors and that’s fine. They pay in money or developer hours to contribute. If you enforce payment, companies get preferential treatment, because why would you not prioritize payed for changes over those for regular free tier users. And even then, there exists freemium software already with extra repositories for paying customers. So even that model already exists. Im really not looking forward to using jailbroken cracked open source software because someone broke the licensing mechanism again that should enforce some users paying. Also with payment comes automatically a lack of anonymous usage, so now you need to register with your clear name to prove you are not a company and entitled to free use of the packages. And while we are at it, let’s add age and sex verification to any free software to be sure we know all about your porn fetish as well… Free software works because it is free as in freedom. No hurdles no bullshit TOS, just download and use and not even any requirement to contribute.
Making corporate pay for their freeloading is always good to consider.
If a company is going to pay for software, they’ll expect support as part of that license, and OSS doesn’t provide that in most cases. It’ll end up with people setting up companies that offer the OSS + support. This is what Chainguard is/does.
Maybe there’s a world where Chainguard pays the OSS devs for new versions, but the more likely outcome is that “registry gated” projects just get banned from use by devs, like most companies will do for ones with anti commercial licenses.
