[License-discuss] Ethical + Support license addition for Apache

[Ofer]

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 at WakkaWorks
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