It’s like a catch-22 though. If I start a company using open source and must give away the software I then build on top of it as open source then I likely fail to capture revenues and my company fails.
What would be a nice option in GPL 4 is a mandatory commercial licensing fee structure to pay either to author of software or to EFF / FSF if the author doesn’t provide payment details. That would give a commercial incentive to startups to pursue using open source AND provide real revenues back to the community.
> It’s like a catch-22 though. If I start a company using open source and must give away the software I then build on top of it as open source then I likely fail to capture revenues and my company fails.
How is that the open source author's problem? Open source is meant to enable user freedom, not to save corporations money. If you want to use something, contact the author and get a commercial license.
I agree. I guess what's missing is some coordination mechanism for the "contact the author and get a commercial license" part. If it's one author it's easy, but if it's eighty, it's hard to contact each even if they would all be willing to provide such a license.
That's not a problem of open source itself, of course.
If you want to dual license, you probably should have a contributor license agreement. (It may be possible to relicense absent such an agreement, especially if it's permissively licensed, but a CLA certainly makes things clearer.)
It's a problem for the community that it still creates no long term motive for people to invest in the code. There needs to be sustainability (profits) that funnel back into the community somehow.
What would be a nice option in GPL 4 is a mandatory commercial licensing fee structure to pay either to author of software or to EFF / FSF if the author doesn’t provide payment details. That would give a commercial incentive to startups to pursue using open source AND provide real revenues back to the community.