Some of these open source licenses are somewhat flawed when it comes to building a business on things that are "free".
Wouldn't it be possible to add a clause to some of these licenses that if you are using open source software and generate a certain amount of revenue from it, something has to be given back to the project.
I totally understand that the software is meant to be free but isn't there a balance here, where at some point it must be enforced that some the money it generates in a business, must flow back to its contributors/project ?
I have worked plenty of places where Redis was a thing that served at least some backbone for success for a business. Those places could pay a fee for generating revenue based on free software ?
IMO for that to make sense the license would have to be infectious and even then you run into the anything but trivial and gameable issue of splitting royalties among the tree of dependencies. Redis itself uses other open source libraries and so on. It's a tricky problem but it shouldn't stop us from trying, any amount of no strings attached funding for open source is better than what we have today. Personally I'd like to see it solved by diverting some amount of tax payer money to open source project maintainers, via some hopefully non conflicted government agency that ascertains what projects are more funding worthy than others.
Wouldn't it be possible to add a clause to some of these licenses that if you are using open source software and generate a certain amount of revenue from it, something has to be given back to the project.
I totally understand that the software is meant to be free but isn't there a balance here, where at some point it must be enforced that some the money it generates in a business, must flow back to its contributors/project ?
I have worked plenty of places where Redis was a thing that served at least some backbone for success for a business. Those places could pay a fee for generating revenue based on free software ?
Does it make sense ?