How do we mitigate the risk of projects being defunded by organizations due to the increased risk of adopting a new or untested license?

[zspencer]

A common (and valid) critique is that businesses will withhold economic support from or refuse to use projects who choose to use a more restrictive license or terms of use. This is further compounded by the degree to which open source maintainers labor is extracted by corporations who rely on open source or other intellectual property that belongs to the commons without providing economic.

At this time, I believe it is best for project maintainers to make the call on a case-by-case basis whether the adoption of an ethical license would meet their projects' adoption goals or improve or reduce their ability to continue to maintain their projects in a sustainable manner.

However, I also believe there are mechanisms we can pursue to mitigate this risk, as well as to attempt to supplement lost income by providing direct economic support for projects who adopt ethical licenses in a similar manner to RubyTogether, TideLift, or similar.

I am curious to what degree the broader open-source community and the ethical source community would encourage the contributors and maintainers of the ethical source project to prioritize mitigating this risk; and failing that, backstopping it with meaningful economic support?

[decentral1se]

I guess a thing that can be done is raise this in the "concerns space" that you might need to consider before making the leap to this type of license. A space for awareness raising on this topic would be good on the site if it doesn't already exist?

[zspencer]

Perhaps this is a blog article: "How do I maintain personal socioeconomic security while encouaraging my company to fund software distributed under ethical licenses?"