Hi everyone, I'm a developer, now turned startup founder, so not much legal background except my own curiosity.
I'd like to open source my company's code, but, I'm worried my code will be misused. The way I see it, code can bring value to a company. By open sourcing the code, I can help share this value with other companies, which is great. BUT - If my company open sources code, and then another company uses it to decrease my company's value (e.g by direct competition), that's a bad outcome. Recent example <https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/aws-gives-open-source-the-middle-finger/>. The other company could balance the fact that they're using my code and decreasing my company's value, by paying my company. So it could still be an overall win-win. The value my code brings to other companies also really varies on their use, so it's hard for me to even determine it. So, I thought of adding these 2 clauses to Apache: 1. Self-ethics: Make sure your use of the software complies with your own ethical standards. [I think this clause is just a good thing to have anyway, but also helps with the second, which is based on good-faith]. 2. Support: Give back a proportion of the value this software adds to your business. For example, consider supporting with 10% of the added value you get from this software vs an alternative option. Open source is a form of public project, so this support is a form of daana (For more on daana, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C4%81na). I thought about requiring a symbolic support of 1$ per company per month (or year?) as a minimum and also requiring them to list themselves as users of the code with a description of their usage and support amount. You can see a sort of a draft I wrote for the above 2 sections in the Apache license: https://github.com/wakkaworks/wakka/blob/master/LICENSE#L180-L191 I'd love to know what you think of the whole thing. Thanks, Ofer Bartal CEO@WakkaWorks
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