Timothy Lochner

Open source developers -- If your work is used in a commercial product, you deserve to be paid for it. I strongly urge you to structure your licenses so that code you write is free only for noncommercial uses. Otherwise, you're encouraging exploitative practices. 1/2

Even if you don't want or need the money, charging for commercial use establishes norms that help other developers who really need the money to make a living off their work. You could always donate anything you get to other projects you deem worthy. 2/2

While I understand your sentiment here, this would prevent small developers from using it... I think existing OS model is good, just people who want to commercialize their open source, should be direct about it, not use open source as stealth marketing for their business model.

One could use licensing schemes where within a certain team size or revenue amount it is free to use, and after the chosen point it requires a license. For profit services already do this.

If your motive is not to make money, you would incur unnecessary cost in $ and time. Create legal entity like LLC, open bank accounts, do taxes for it separately, etc. for something that you don't want to commercialize.

Comparing not making any money vs making money isn't exactly what I was thinking. I'm curious how that compares with "donate to the author" schemes. I truly don't know. Do donation schemes incur the same overhead of bank accounts, taxes, etc?