It’s just difficult to think about royalty based licenses that pay back to developers. I don’t think there will ever be a perfect system, but I do think it’s possible to create something that raises more income than what is available now.

That is a definition that has a lot of history and it’s very dynamic. (Also, definitions are very important in many legal systems.)

If you look at GNU GPL v3, “free” is free to use, copy and modify, not “free” as in price.

You could also be talking about open source that is free for non-commercial use.

There are tons of licenses for open source, so definitions for important words should be in those licenses.

I definitely will need to talk to a lawyer if I proceed. Asking here is more so about trying to determine if other developers would be flat out refuse to use a dependency with this license, or find it interesting, etc.

I took a moment to think about my response.

If I continue, I would like to do something like the following

The group that this targets, software developers, I don’t think we’re difficult to contact. There’s usually personal websites or email addresses associated with accounts. I think it could be possible to survey a large randomized sample, above 10,000 developers who have contributions to highly appreciated repositories.

There would have to be some cut off for who to select. I think I would like to focus on developers who are planning on licensing software, as in, they’re already demonstrated they’re writing licensed software. This is all to say, I don’t want to haphazardly screen the general public opinion.

In this post, I noticed that those responding seemed to slightly skim over or misunderstand parts of it. This is partially a communication failure for me, but also seriously hinted to me that asking with text about licensing details seems like it could be a bad idea. I think like a video that first covers topics followed by a survey might be better, but I’m worried something like that will bias those that I ask.

Before all of this, before I talk to a lawyer, I want to think about all possible restrictions or options available. This is where I think comitting to a git repository would be a very good idea. Just making an attempt to determine everything that is relevant, because there are clear differences in how a license should work.

After that, I can consult to determine what is and isn’t possible. And from there, I’m hopeful that it’s possible to carefully survey and understand opinions on what more developers and companies would like to see in a license.

I don’t want to accidentally create a license that becomes stuck and is extremely damaging. I want it to serve those that are using it in a way that makes them happy.

I’m still not 100% committed to this yet, but feel good about the responses here. I was worried the responses would be highly negative, as it’s something that takes very unrestrictive software and tries to convince the authors to charge for it. I’ll have to think about what I want to do some more.

I’m still just trying to determine developer interest. It’s not really worth talking to a lawyer if there’s not interest in it.

All of my projects are on Sourcehut. So all of my projects are automatically excluded from your narrow definition of “open source projects” worth supporting. So are all projects on gitlab, or… anything but github. Your license sounds more like a mechanism for promoting a monoculture and incentivizing developers to host on github.

I don’t disagree. I don’t really know how to fix the problem in what has been considered without an extra organization that does some form of identity verification and then collects votes on open source from anywhere on the internet.

The only reason GitHub was selected was because it’s easily recognized and the metric is understood

Say my library uses a library that uses your library. Is your license more infectius, like the GPL, or parasitic? Do all projects using your library have adopt your license, or include it?

Anything that depends on it would be including it in something else later. I was considering anything that used it that made income had to pay 5% royalty. A library that uses a library that uses a library with it would had to pay 5% on income made with the final library. Though, I don’t necessarily have an opinion on requirements of the license of the final library. I also wasn’t considering open source restrictions like the GPL.

I love this idea. I feel like a shakeup with licenses is needed. I wonder if you could consult a lawyer then ask some larger open source projects if they would be willing to adopt the license?

Contacting authors of repositories seems really smart. I imagine it could be possible to contact a large percentage of them. I just want to be confident that I have a good license that will be liked before I make an attempt.

edit: Though, looking for feedback from them might also be a really good idea

I was already pinged to a discussion of it.

There’s so much to read that I haven’t already. I think real democratic control of a license could be good. Though, I haven’t taken time to understand the governance structure of it.

However, they explicitly name and define machine learning model training as a prohibited use of the covered work.

This doesn’t immediately sound bad to me.

I’m not informed on software law. As an example, my understanding from Oracle v. Google is that Google received a ruling from the Supreme Court around 2020 that stated their copyrighted use of a public API, like the public side documentation side of method calls could not be considered a violation of copyrighted works. The idea that they could use machine learning on the internal code of methods and use it to write their own version from the the start of the method call doesn’t exactly seem like a good thing to allow.

Though, this is a really uninformed opinion. I haven’t read any of it in detail. The public opinion is usually on Google’s side. I’ll leave an excerpt.

Now let us consider the example that the District Court used to explain the precise technology here. Id., at 980– 981. A programmer wishes, as part of her program, to de- termine which of two integers is the larger. To do so in the Java language, she will first write java.lang. Those words (which we have put in bold type) refer to the “package” (or by analogy to the file cabinet). She will then write Math. That word refers to the “class” (or by analogy to the drawer). She will then write max. That word refers to the “method” (or by analogy to the recipe). She will then make two pa- rentheses ( ). And, in between the parentheses she will put two integers, say 4 and 6, that she wishes to compare. The whole expression—the method call—will look like this: “java.lang.Math.max(4, 6).” The use of this expression will, by means of the API, call up a task-implementing pro- gram that will determine the higher number.

In writing this program, the programmer will use the very symbols we have placed in bold in the precise order we have placed them. But the symbols by themselves do noth- ing. She must also use software that connects the symbols to the equivalent of file cabinets, drawers, and files. The API is that software. It includes both the declaring code that links each part of the method call to the particular task-implementing program, and the implementing code that actually carries it out. (For an illustration of this tech- nology, see Appendix B, infra.)

Now we can return to the copying at issue in this case. Google did not copy the task-implementing programs, or implementing code, from the Sun Java API. It wrote its own task-implementing programs, such as those that would determine which of two integers is the greater or carry out any other desired (normally far more complex) task.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/593/18-956/case.pdf

This isn’t all that relevant, and there’s lots of case law. It just seems slightly frustrating to me that the law might allow 1) a company to use copyright software for learning 2) take public methods, and their supporting documentation 3) and finally use them inconjunction with a prompt of the documentation to generate the internal code.

This all is a very unresearched or serious view of it. For whatever reason, I just was already thinking about it. It’s all to say, I think I understand the argument for disallowing machine learning use. I haven’t really decided where I align. I think it’s really valuable that we can automate anything, but I also feel negative to the idea of signing everything over to the tech companies and hoping for the best.

I’m not actually interested in charging money for myself though. The point of the license is more so to create a license that is compatible with others using it and causes downstream users of it to also have to pay. Like I’m more so imagining a best case scenario where lots of source available software is available for 5% (like use all of it together too) flat on $1m+ in income. (And free for everyone else)

No, just flat 5% for all compatible. The income is for project level. Downstream would pay the same 5%. They would pay at their discretion to anyone with 1000+ stars on GitHub. (or some variation of this)

I don’t expect legitimate companies earning over $1m/year to just flat out violate the license. I do think they might try to dodge amounts owed with accounting, but Epic seems to find this business model viable with Unreal Engine. I’m also not going to signficantly care if it’s violated, the fact that they’re legally obligated to pay seems better than just giving it to them for free with a more permissive license.

I don’t really care if they use it. I think overtime it could be possible to move a large chunk of software over to a royalty based license. It just has to seem like a good deal to developers, and they’ll move.