zlacker

I think any license that requires a percentage of revenue is DOA.

First because involving all the chicanery of accounting to figure out my fee is asking for lots of resources just to calculate and audit fees.

Second, unpredictable costs are bad. If my company’s revenue doubles in a year, that doesn’t mean that my department’s budget doubles. Or that I even have enough earnings to cover licenses.

Finally, this is hard enough with a single product. My org uses thousands of products. If they all charge 1%, where does that leave me.

PS- morally this just seems dumb. If my grocery store charged me more or less depending on my income or the value I derive from a tomato, I won’t shop there. Just publish a price and let people decide to buy or not.

>>prepen+(OP)
That's not correct. It's a flat 1% of revenue regardless of the number of Post-Open software packages used. (From the slide at 13:30 "The same fee whether you use 1 Post Open program or 1000.") The organization that receives the payment is supposed to handle splitting up the revenue among software package authors, so it does require auditing of all usage.

>>prepen+(OP)
Yeah, I don't know what corporation would be happy with a license where the cost is nebulous like this.

I would suspect lots of Hollywood Accounting is likely; putting all the PostOpen software in a subsidiary that has no revenue, or developing your own software under PostOpen but not distributing it outside, so that the majority of the usage is apportioned to affiliated companies.

Plus, apportioning by usage is a negative incentive for optimization. If your DB reduces query runtime by 10% in the next version, it reduces its revenue, assuming other PostOpen software is in use and doesn't optimize.

>>prepen+(OP)
Maybe. That depends if OSS devs switch to this or not. This only hurts those making money off OSS which is fair. Think of it as contributing to improving the OSS.

>>prepen+(OP)
You make a compelling argument except for ignoring the fact that many licences (in particular patent licences) work on percentages of sales or revenue. So it seems not to be a problem in those cases, why is it for software?

>>Throwa+C2
That helps with my final point but #1 and #2 are deal killers as well.

This also places an undue burden on the payment receiver as they have to get into the business of running enterprise audits to find out who is using what.

>>cycoma+yk
I’m sure there’s some software that works on percent of sales or something. But it’s not common. I’ve worked on some fixed cost, percent value contracts and they had very distinct parameters unique to the contract and they weren’t very good for generalization (eg, “your foo process costs $50M today, I’m going to deliver changes that reduce that cost, I want 50% of the cost reduction” with tons of pages of caveats and details and stuff).

I’m not saying that PostOpen is impossible or can never be used anywhere. Just that it sucks and is not feasible for broad use.

>>mrtwee+Le
I think the more software the better so if people like using this then good for them. More software in the world.

But it doesn’t replace OSS and I think will produce different software. I can’t imagine many developers switching to this. I wouldn’t contribute to a project with this license because I don’t want to bother with some incremental level of income. I’d rather just donate time.

>>prepen+(OP)
What if only companies above some revenue threshold were charged? Would you feel differently if licenses had a progressive fee of some kind?

>>prepen+(OP)
Having spent 20 years in the film industry (see https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0673302/), I am well aware of your concern. The demand is for 1% of end-user revenue collected, through all entities. This is to use all Post Open software, not just one program. Obviously this is not going to gain immediate acceptance by many companies. But if the collection gets large enough, there may be a tipping point.

>>throwa+ue1
I don’t sell software so this is just theoretical. But I wouldn’t want to know my customers’ revenue. That’s too much work and not my business.

I also wouldn’t buy software that had a cost contingent because I wouldn’t want that kind of relationship with my software vendor. Of course, this happens now with enterprise software where a big company will get a quote for $5 and a little company will get a quote for $1. But having something explicit is illogical since software is a near zero marginal cost product.

But even for real world stuff, I’d never hire a gardener who charged differently based on customers income.