License Discussion

Idea is to motivate big corps above a certain size of revenue and profits to participate and support the project.

Thank you!

Yes, months ago we thought about changing the license for JogAmp.
It might be about time to finally do so.

The idea is to keep everything the same - open source,
but to cut off companies of a certain revenue/profit size like Fortune 500 and who are not collaborative.
A statement to make clear that they need to ask for a license explicitly.

Probably more a statement as-is, but I know their legal department doesn't like it.
Hence they would need to drop using the work or do the 'ugly thing' and start communicating ;-)

Background and elaboration.

All big & medium sized firms – as well other hybrid commercial projects,
are strongly invited to contact me to discuss the next steps forward (if any).
I would suggest to setup meetings with their stakeholders and discuss a plan forward.

A one person full time compensation might be enough, two person support would be awesome.
See How to pay professional maintainers.

^^ this is not directed to any hobby or small-biz entity using the project,
but more so directed at whats left in the ethics department of the bigger corps & orgs :-/
Interestingly enough, it always were the small biz corps supporting this project the most!
THANK YOU!

It became clear again over last months and years, that mostly relative small companies
are helping the project and even dare to contract work.

Whether it be so called big non-profit organizations like NASA or commercial entities like
Siemens, Dassault, Thales, ... only to name a few from my head - even pro-active attempts to 'get along' are fruitless.
This would also impact their so called 'non-profit' co-operations.

A license change shall not impact work and usage for all non 'big corps' at all.
However the terms must be well defined, I am aware of that.

All addressed 'big corps' would be required to request a license and hence start communication.
It goes without saying that they would either be required to contract one of us or 'chip in' otherwise.
It may just result that they drop using related work, which is also OK for me personally.

This thought is now in the open and your input is valuable.
Yes .. this is not really the way it should be - and probably also a waste of time.

.. another little detail.

I recently had a discussion about this topic with my wife & boss,
as well as with two other persons.

Then asked why I don't make all contributions 'pay only' and 'software as a service' (SAAS),
sort of a 'Paid JogAmp Club' .. I could only chuckle.

Such a path forward (let's call it Unity Light) would disrupt the whole spirit
and modus operandi, as we also actually don't really want to have anything to do
with real biz operations - but focus on the work as is, we are too small.

Another late discussion was in a similar direction, i.e. becoming part of a non-gov entity
with a board and so on. Issue at hand is, we are not big enough as it seems.
Reaching out to such groups and foundations (Eclipse etc) were fruitless besides the usual
'recommendations' - but no actual material path forward.

Personally our little family office/company will just do contracted work to financially survive
and that seems to work OK. However, whether we can continue with the project as-is and
if we can continue working on our goals is the question here.
Last years when we gladly worked on Direct-BT in the medical device field we were OK
and big parts of the project itself were released under an open source license.
Sure .. it didn't really help the JoigAmp project.

So whoever reads about all this may get a better picture of things - if of interest at all.
Cheers

Bottom line (for now), goals:

Find a company support group, able to ..

- Fund 1, 2, .. 'workers' of us to maintain & push the project forward,
  see https://jogamp.org/wiki/index.php?title=SW_Tracking_Report_Feature_Objectives_Overview

- Give input an coordinate objectives with us ..

That is all, actually not really much.