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Ask HN: Is there a software license which acts open, but keeps out mega corps?

2 points by seph-reed ↗ HN
I'd like to license my software to maximize availability for average users and small businesses, but I don't want to do free labor for massive $200+ million dollar corporations.

Are there any software licenses out there that achieve something like this? I know there's some legal precedents which make sliding scale approaches difficult, but perhaps someone with strong legal knowledge has found a loophole.

Thanks

6 comments

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seph-reed
Keeping a list of things I've found:

Anti-Capitalist (https://anticapitalist.software/) - Only usable by non-profits, individuals, etc. Too extreme.

AGPL ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License) - Requires all other code in a project to be GPL. Basically just GPL with one less loophole for SASS.

A bunch of other licenses (https://choosealicense.com/licenses/)

Asked about it on legal stack-exchange (https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/57914/is-it-possible...)

Spite license (https://github.com/voynix/spite-license) - Humorous and potentially could work. But it's mostly just a joke.

fsflover
This one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
seph-reed
This is an interesting license, but I'm not trying to force small businesses or hobbyists to only use GPL for their project.
fsflover
But why not? If you are a hobbyist you want to contribute to the community and keep this community growing. This is exactly what this license was created for. Only if you want to hide the code you will suffer from such license.
seph-reed
I don't mind small businesses having closed source code while using my tool. I just don't want to do free labor for companies that can easily afford to pay me for the benefits.
lowcodetv
Elastic Search developed a custom license to prevent strip-mining by AWS. Other companies soon followed, including Timescale, which produced different licenses in 2018, then 2020, for different purposes to address needs at appropriate stages. Their write-up on the process addresses other licenses that might be of interest to you:

https://blog.timescale.com/blog/how-we-are-building-an-open-...