Despite the submission title, I don't think I would call this proposal a way to force companies to pay for free software. They could choose not to pay if they don't want to use the software. If they've already downloaded the software, then they wouldn't need to pay unless they want to download it again, but they are free to make as many copies as they want so re-downloading is mostly going to be a matter of convenience I think.
I believe free software is better than proprietary software, so I think it's good to better incentivize the production and maintenance of free software.
Using nicer language doesn't change the argument. You're still suggesting that corporations be required to pay for the software, which is a reversal of the terms of the license.
Let's ignore for the moment that this is manipulative behavior (switching from free to paid after the fact, the same thing users complain about corporations doing). This is likely also illegal. The software license is a contract. Permissive FOSS licenses grant the use of the software in current and future forms without payment. To withhold the source code until receiving payment would be a violation of the contract terms. All of the copyright holders would have to agree to change the license to no longer be Open Source, and even then a judge may well find it illegal.
It's also a bad idea because it would split the community. I find this action so unethical that I would no longer contribute to or use any FOSS that required payment. I didn't get into this community to shake companies down for cash. If you want to make money off software, go do that somewhere else, or do it with services and support.
You don't need to change the license at all in order to do this. Withholding source code while providing an executable would violate some free licenses, but all free licenses allow withholding both an executable and corresponding source code simultaneously.
An action like this could split the community, but I don't think it would be very visible to people contributing to the software, since I imagine the source code would still be available on a public git repository with the same license, for the purpose of development. Do people complain about Krita being on Steam [1]? It's not exactly the same situation, since Krita never was on Steam before, but do you think the situation would be so different if Krita had been free-to-download on Steam and then they changed it?
FOSS licenses don't allow requiring payment for source code. Even if they did, they would have to do it for all users and not just corporate users, or they'd be violating their own terms against discrimination on fields of endeavor. What they can do is charge for binaries of the software, which is completely different. And they can't stop anyone else from redistributing it for free. So the first person who pays for it can just give it to corporations for free, and the copyright holder can't do squat about it. These are all features of the licenses, to prevent nasty developers from putting up roadblocks and gates to prevent the collaboration and sharing of the source code.
A corporation is a user too. Imagine if instead of corporate users, we were talking about rich users. Or imagine if 99% of the public used the code, and none of them paid, so people started talking about forcing the public to pay for the code.
Nobody asked the developers to make this code. Nobody asked them to put a FOSS license on it. Nobody ever promised payment. But now that they see dollar signs, the developers want theirs. It's greed, pure and simple.
FOSS was not created to give volunteer developers a living. It was created to give people freedom. No more, no less.
Free licenses all allow requiring payment. A license that disallows charging for the software as a whole would be a nonfree license. An example of a license condition that does this is the "Commons Clause" [1]. See the FAQ question on that page which says "Is this “Open Source”?" (short answer: "No.").
If someone decides to charge businesses more than individuals, that is arguably discrimination based on fields of endeavor, but if the discrimination isn't written into the license, the software could still be free. Corporations are still free to use free software however they wish, but they can't force software repositories to choose to distribute software to them directly.
It's true that someone could set up a different software repository that offers largely the same software to corporations at no charge, so the proposal only works if companies would prefer to pay the fee rather than set up a different repository. It sounds like companies already pay to use an intermediary repository, if I'm correctly understanding what Artifactory is, so maybe the proposal wouldn't actually work.
If 99% of the public used a piece of software, there's a good chance people really would be forced to pay for it through taxes. This apparently already happens with some proprietary software (though I didn't look into it); see "Public Money, Public Code" [2]. Taxes are a different situation though.
Software freedom can't exist without free software. The better funded free software is, the more free software will be able to compete with proprietary software, and the more free the world will be, with regards to software freedom. The proposed system of charging corporations could conceivably be better even from the perspective of the corporations, if it leads to free software becoming more reliable.
I know you don't mean "nobody" literally, but I actually have asked people to write free software and to license existing nonfree code with a free license. It might be true that you didn't ask for people to make free software, but would you prefer a world in which they didn't?
My family bought a big Vizio TV around a year ago (IIRC), and I'm pretty sure we didn't have to sign in to anything for it to work. We didn't connect it to the internet. It often prompts for an update to the remote but the prompt goes away on its own if you don't do anything.
The model is V4K75X-0810 on firmware 86.710.52.1-4. The "Last Update" field says "Dec 31, 1969 04:00 PM" :D
The remote firmware is 6.02.1. I wonder if the reason it prompts for an update is because the TV has a newer remote firmware built-in or if it is just guessing that a newer update is available online.
I don't remember if we had to do anything weird to get the TV to set up without internet.
I wish Haketilo [1] would have caught on more. There's so many free JavaScript apps but we're mostly just missing a way to actually control which version or derivative of the JavaScript is run.
There's also the problem of most free apps not doing a good job of providing license info and a link to source code, but this could be sidestepped by a trusted repository which provides license info itself.
I tell people I don't have a cell phone, but when pressed I say I technically do have many smartphones, because I keep buying them at garage sales for super cheap and not actually using them. And technically, I also have the iPhone 6s in my car in case of emergency, but its been powered off for multiple years. Other than that phone, I think it's been over a year since I took one out of my house. Oh wait, I forgot, I also have a smartphone that I keep offline and use only as a camera, but I don't even think of that as a phone and I only take it out of my house once every couple of months or so.
When I explain all of this, some people say the first thing I said (that I don't have a smartphone) is a lie, but I see it more as a simplification because whatever someone asked me to do that led to my statement obviously can't be done with the phones that I have but not on my person. On the other hand, I do have a phone number that I use through JMP [1], so if someone asks me to text or call them, then I actually can do that from a laptop. So, practically, for many purposes I do have a smartphone. I can make and receive calls and text messages, and I can install apps (just not iOS or Android apps).
It's an interesting (to me) question of whether I am lying by saying I don't have a cell phone. In other contexts, I might say that my phone is in my backpack (referring to my laptop), or I might give someone my phone number and then when they ask if I got their message I might say that I can't access my phone right now but I'll reply later. It kind of seems like one of those things has to be a lie, but all seem kind of true.
(I considered making this a reply to simu1acrum's comment, and it is inspired by it (specifically by "I don't pretend to have things I don't have, and I don't pretend that I don't have things I do have."), but it's not really a reply so I made it a top-level comment instead.)
> in case of emergency, but its[sic] been powered off
I can't speak for Apple iPhone in particular, but I would never expect any computing device to immediately come to life and be functional if I've left it shut off and disconnected for more than two months in any case.
Most of us may be familiar with powering-up a Windows or Linux machine, and then waiting through 4 hours of updates before the system becomes available again. You would do well to power up your old hardware and let it update and connect. If only to test it for fitness of purpose. Otherwise, you shouldn't pretend that it'll be available to you in emergencies.
It's been on my mental to-do list to do a 911 test call (with pre-authorization from my 911 center) from the device at some point, but I've been procrastinating. I decided to try this today.
I didn't expect updates to get in the way because they are usually not required immediately. For example, Windows will force an update eventually but it has to download it first and you can use the computer while it is doing that. I've never had a problem with being unable to use a device due to missing updates, except for an Xbox One which I think was new out of the box.
I did expect charging the device to take some time, like 5 to 10 minutes. I know this isn't good for some kinds of emergencies, but for others it might be okay, so I think it would still be better to have than not have; however, I severely underestimated the time it takes to charge the device though. It took between 60 and 80 minutes to power on. After that, it said the temperature was too hot to operate, which I think was because my car was off and it was hot outside. I took the phone inside at this point and let it cool off while charging connected to my laptop. Then I tried to call the non-emergency number (the one listed here: [1]) from my JMP VoIP phone, and I got no response. I'm not sure if it was because they didn't answer or because of an error in the software I'm using [2], as I've made other calls to Vanilla (the gift card company)'s automated systems today and some of the calls seemed to get no response. I don't want to spam them by calling over and over again until it works though, so I'm going to wait until a different day to try this.
I found a YouTube video [3] that suggested buying a pre-paid feature phone for $20 at Walmart [4], with the caveat that this will not send GPS location data. Maybe I'll end up buying one of these. Ideally I would get a cellular-enabled device that is designed to hold a charge for years if unused, but I'm not aware of any device like that. Or maybe I could get a USB modem like this $20 one I found on Amazon [5], and then I could connect it to my laptop, but I'm not sure if those can make 911 calls.
Good catch on the typo. I saw your message right before I went to sleep and considered editing it, but I thought it would be weird to edit but not reply so I decided to wait until today to do both, and now I'm out of time to edit the post.
This is not the case with current systems, but could future systems be designed to be tamper-evident in a way that makes it impractical to sign fake images or extract the signing key without leaving evidence on the device?
If that were the case, I can imagine a subscription service in which you get a camera for some specified period of time, and then return it to the company that sold it for them to verify the camera hasn't been tampered with. Then the company could publish a list of which keys (unique per camera) have been verified to not be tampered with. Maybe this wouldn't stop everyone, but now the person trying to fake images has to re-do the process every so often and I imagine it's more expensive to avoid leaving evidence.
This might be too impractical to work, and it would be bad for privacy, but maybe for some people the tradeoffs actually would be worth it, someday. For now, I assume there are much cheaper and easier ways to detect faked images, at least for expert humans.
If you just want to get away from Google, there are other operating systems that don't use as many Google services: see [1] and [2]
I didn't realized when I started writing this, but apparently even so-called "degoogled"* operating systems use some Google services. For example, LineageOS still talks to Google in order to check DNS connectivity and for Widevine DRM, among other things listed in the table.
GrapheneOS seems to be the only Android-based operating system that really doesn't communicate with Google at all by default, but if your main goal is to avoid Google Play Services, then there are other options.
*"degoogled" seems to be a term people use to describe operating systems even if the operating system page does not describe the OS that way.
This is a minor nitpick, but I don't think postmarketOS is GNU/Linux.
I am not sure what the correct term would be to refer to the group of operating systems including those you mentioned but excluding Android, since all of them include Linux, but it does seem like there's something different about Android that puts it in a different category compared to other Linux-based operating systems.
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