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I need to develop free software for a company. The company will reward me with 8% of the profits. I have to give the source code to the company so that they can modify it if necessary. Is there a license that protects me in case they reuse my source code to build a new application and I no longer get 8%? Thanks

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    I am not sure your concern can be covered by a copyright license. There certainly isn't an open-source license that covers monetary compensation. I would advise you to settle this in a contract between you and the company and to have that looked over by a lawyer if you wish.
    – Bart van Ingen Schenau
    Feb 18, 2020 at 11:34
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    I think that open source does not mean free software... maybe there exists a license that can help me softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/21907/…
    – dbusc
    Feb 18, 2020 at 12:21
  • Open source does indeed not preclude getting money in return for providing the software. But your concern for receiving a percentage of profits goes beyond what you can arrange with a copyright license, open-source or not.
    – Bart van Ingen Schenau
    Feb 18, 2020 at 14:17
  • The question is problematic because you fail to clearly distinguish the 4 relevant parties: A, yourself. B, the company which pays you (A) 8%. C, end users and D, users which use their free software rights to redistribute the source. You know see that the problem is that you get 8% of the money that B makes of user groups C and D, but users in groups C and D can also get the software for free from other users in D instead of getting it from B. The director of B can in fact sell the software to himself and then give it away from free. Microsoft pulled this trick with Mosaic, now known as IE.
    – MSalters
    Feb 18, 2020 at 16:20
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    @dbusc Open Source software is almost always Free Software and vica versa. It is hard to find a licence that is one and not the other (according to definition). However the free-software-foundation, and the open-source-institute do not always agree.
    – ctrl-alt-delor
    Feb 18, 2020 at 18:40

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Is there a license that protects me in case they reuse my source code to build a new application and I no longer get 8%?

By accepted definition on https://opensource.org/licenses such a license won't be open source (or free software, e.g. GPLv3+ software).

I am not a lawyer. You need to pay one.

Read a paper on Simple Economics of open source (one of the authors had a Nobel prize in economics)

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You are writing the software under contract with the company, so the rights aren't yours to begin with...

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    Wrong. It depends on the terms, and on the local laws.
    – o0'.
    Jun 7, 2020 at 7:54
  • I am paid to write GPLv3+ software. Indirectly by the European taxpayer (thru H2020 projects) and directly by my employer CEA. Copyright belongs to CEA (or to the FSF for contributions to GCC...), moral rights to me.
    – Basile Starynkevitch
    Jun 7, 2020 at 11:16

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