2026-04-27 18:04 UTC
Replies (4)
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@simon@en.osm.town 2026-04-27 18:13
@owiecc@en.osm.town the problems start with what is "a for-profit company" / "non-profit use" and end with that not being FLOSS. And I'm saying that as someone that has run a commercial SAAS company and as a OSS developer and as somebody with a non negligible knowledge of open licensing. It isn't as if that hasn't been tried btw, but in practical terms freemium business models seem to work better (and naturally have their own specific downsides).
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@wickedsmoke@fosstodon.org 2026-04-27 22:04
@owiecc@en.osm.town That can work just fine as demonstrated by the Qt and MySQL projects. Qt has been doing that for 25 years. Here's a few links for more details: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/licensing.html https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions
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@jlou@mastodon.social 2026-04-29 00:07
@owiecc@en.osm.town this idea is similar to #copyfarleft. The idea there is to extend software freedom to organization that respect workers’ freedom like worker cooperatives and charge non-cooperatives for use of the software.
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@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org 2026-04-29 01:11
@owiecc@en.osm.town I assume by "sustainable" you don't mean environmental sustainability, but financial stability & viability. I have seen that model tried at least 100 times since 1993, and it never created long-term revenue streams in any of the cases I noticed. IMO these usually fail b/c users are too confused to bother. It wouldn't be a #copyleft license regardless because a key tenant of copyleft is absolute equal rights for all (including commercial actors) under the license. Cc: @trashheap@tech.lgbt @jlou@mastodon.social