Everywhere I worked getting a commercial license for software was only a matter of asking IT or filing an expense. OTOH from position of an employee getting the company to donate any amount of money was nearly impossible. There's no process for it. There's nobody responsible for doing it. Legal/Accounting will have a ton of questions about (why? is it taxable? where's the paper trail?). The quickest route may be through Marketing dept, but then it's viewed as an ad/sponsorship.
All seems like reasonable points, it's highly project-dependant but since switching to mold I've seen solid overall speedups. If I was to put a saved time value on that for me alone it would be huge. At $1200/month in donations for full time work, the value large companies get out of it is huge.<p>The actual meat of the title buried down in the tweets:<p>> Given this situation, I'm seriously considering changing the mold/macOS license (not mold/Unix license) from AGPL to a commercial, source-available one. Something like individuals would be able to use it for free but companies have to pay.
It‘s incredibly sad that companies worth literal trillions of dollars don‘t have a couple thousand dollars to spare for open source developers who create insanely valuable software for their employees. I remember that brew‘s (the defacto standard macos package management tool) maintainer had similar projects in the past.<p>Bad tools grind operations to a halt and feel incredibly dissatisfying to work with. Mold is insanely fast and pushing further in a problem space (linking) that can‘t be avoided and has in the past been dominated by slow tooling. Corporations save real dollars when their developer uses free software by open source maintainers, but due to their greed and their top heavy management which lacks insight on what speeds up development they give nothing back.<p>—-<p>One solution I would propose is that industry giants form a general OSS funding collective, which selects interesting / helpful oss projects and grants funding to their developers.
I think it's probably the right path for Rui (creator and maintainer of mold) to use specific licenses that forces big-tech companies to pay so Mold as a project can be self-sustained long term.<p>However, this problem showcases a bigger issue on the dev ecosystem. Right now, the sponsorship model force OSS devs have to implore/beg for money from big corps.
I think there should be better ways for OSS devs to monetize their projects
I prefer the model of making it properly free and opensource, but charging money for precompiled binaries and a support contract.<p>I'd add a simple startup banner saying "This program is UNSUPPORTED by @rui314. For a paid supported version, contact foo@bar.com".<p>The paid support would entitle one access to a forum of other paid support users, where bugs and feature requests can be posted and rui might prioritize them over regular bugs.
Does no one else have copyrights preventing a license change? That's one thing I like about contributing to projects (at least those without license assignment), is once you do that the main author(s) can't re-license the project at all without your consent. They could re-write all your code instead, but it at least makes it harder.
>> Given this situation, I'm seriously considering changing the mold/macOS license (not mold/Unix license) from AGPL to a commercial, source-available one. Something like individuals would be able to use it for free but companies have to pay.<p>That is assuming Apple would <i>need</i> to use mold in the first place.<p>It is probably easier to crowdfund $1-2M from companies and turn the source to MIT or BSD. But then the idea is generally not well received on HN and by its author.
> Part of a reason is because most companies don't have an internal process to start supporting an open-source project. If they need to buy a license, that's fine, that's part of a usual business. But giving money away to "free" software? There's no precedent and hard to justify.<p>The author already sells licenses, so I am not sure that is the case.