The fee could be really small but scale depending on factors like business size. Or there could be no fee outright for businesses smaller than a certain size.

Well the question is, how would such a license look like? Or would it be a contract and not a license?

I guess I should ask a lawyer these questions, but I wanted to see what others here thought about the idea.

Let’s not be nihilist here. It’s better to come up with solutions than to give up.

they only use Linux because it’s free. Companies create hardware on Linux because it’s free

Companies use open source software because it’s the cheapest option. It’s all about margins.

Nearly all of FOSS is funded by corporations whether you like it or not

Yes, and FOSS can get a lot more funding if they charged companies even a little bit.

So as long as it’s cheaper to pay a fee to continue to use an open-source software than it is to hire a group of developers to produce and maintain the same thing, the idea is viable.

In my opinion, the issue is that a cell phone is such a free-software-hostile environment that arguably GPL software shouldn’t “be allowed to” come into contact with it in any capacity if the spirit of the GPL were being upheld.

How are phones free-software-hostile? I know IOS is, but Android not really. There’s a list of open source Android distributions. Although not very good, they are viable.

Actually, maybe making it a realistic possibility to drop in a recompiled replacement should be a part of the GPL. I remember people were talking about this decades ago

It does feel out of place how that isn’t in the GPL.

If current licenses have the problem that big companies just ignore the terms set out in the license, I wouldn’t imagine making a new sort of license with different terms like “big companies have to pay to get the benefit of using Pots-Open Source software” is really going to work.

It’s more that they avoid the spirit of the licensing, not the terms (except Red Hat of course).

I suppose you can split this into two separate arguments:

• Swap from licenses to more enforceable contracts

• Have companies pay open source devs

Yeah pretty much

If you had also read the article BTW you would have realized that spoilers: it’s not about source code availability.

You saw the first few paragraphs about the Red Hat drama and didn’t read further.

Reading the whole thing you’d realize it’s a list of reasons why open source software hasn’t become popular with the wider public, and his proposed solution to this.

I just included the idea he is proposing, others can read the article to see his reasoning.