Open-Source Protection Amendment Article (OSPAA)
1.0 Introduction
Open-source software is a good thing and so popular licenses such as the simple MIT and BSD licenses are.
Making money with open-source software which was written by others – either directly or indirectly – is not wrong, because one of the goals of free and open-source software is that financial aspects shall not make a difference. However, we nowadays see that both sway and money is concentrated within huge tech companies. The Big Five, Alphabet/Google (1.85T), Amazon (1.64T), Apple (2.83T), Meta/Facebook (0.923T) and Microsoft (2.33T) together reached a market capitalization of 9.57 trillion US-Dollar as per January 2022.
While this is not necessarily true for all open-source projects, it can be appropriate to require big companies to pay proper fees for the use of your software. Without loosing at all the philosophy behind open-source software, you can hereby protect your software against abuse of market power; which comes true if a company not invests in the open-source community, either – but especially – by creating good open-source software itself or by paying the authors for their often hard work. It is normal to expect a bounty by big tech companies for security vulnerabilities, so it should be normal for them to show contribution for good open-source software.
The reason behind a so-called Protective Open-Source License is not to make money. For this purpose other or even custom licenses may be more suitable. Its goal is to require a fair contribution back to the open-source authors in cases where a huge imbalance is evident while not touching the license in all other cases.
2.0 Philosophy
The philosophy behind open-source and the license itself shall not be touched.
Therefore, this is not a license, it is an license amendment article; the original text of the license shall not be touched. People or companies which are not considered as big company must be sure that nothing changes for them.
3.0 Amendment Article
Standard OSPAA 1.0
You can use this amendment article for any license you feel it would fit for.
Restriction (Standard OSPAA 1.0): Only for legal entities with a yearly revenue exceeding fifty (50) million US-Dollar (or an equivalent of) the license text below is valid with the exception, that in modification of the license, for any right granted there (especially the use, modification and distribution) the author has the right of fair compensation which must be individually agreed. Is the legal entity part of a multinational company, the total revenue of all corporations counts. This restriction does not apply to non-profit organizations. This text must be included in all copies or substantial portions of the source code.
In case you want to modify any part of this text (e.g. the 50 million dollar limit), please change Standard OSPAA 1.0 to Modified OSPAA.
4.0 Example License
As an example, this is the full text of the popular MIT license including the Standard OSPAA 1.0 article. In order to highlight that the original text was extended, the first line was changed from MIT License to MIT License (Protective):
MIT License (Protective)
Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
Restriction (Standard OSPAA 1.0): Only for legal entities with a yearly revenue exceeding fifty (50) million US-Dollar (or an equivalent of) the license text below is valid with the exception, that in modification of the license, for any right granted there (especially the use, modification and distribution) the author has the right of fair compensation which must be individually agreed. Is the legal entity part of a multinational company, the total revenue of all corporations counts. This restriction does not apply to non-profit organizations. This text must be included in all copies or substantial portions of the source code.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
5.0 License
This text and the Standard OSPAA itself is licensed under CC0 1.0 (Public Domain Dedication).