[groby_b]

That's a nice slogan, but how does it work?

Say, I clone sudo. Clearly, a human applying freedom zero. I use it in my projects. Probably still freedom zero. I use it in my CI pipeline for the stuff that makes me money... corporation or human? If it's corporation, what if I sponsor a not-for-profit that provides that piece of CI infra?

The problem is that "corporation or not" has more shades than you can reasonably account for. And, worse, the cost of accounting for it is more than any volunteer wants to shoulder.

Even if this were a hard and legally enforceable rule, what individual maintainer wants to sue a company with a legal department?

What could work is a large collective that licenses free software with the explicit goal of extracting money from corporate users and distributing it to authors. Maybe.

[conception]

Not for commercial use without buying a license is a pretty standard licensing scheme. This has been worked out for decades.

[atq2119]

The challenge is that this doesn't really work for community-developed software.

Let's say somebody uses this scheme for software they wrote. Would anybody else ever contribute significantly if the original author would benefit financially but they wouldn't?

Mediating the financial benefits through a non-profit might help, but (1) there's still a trust problem: who controls the non-profit? and (2) that's a lot of overhead to set up when starting out for a piece of software that may or may not become relevant.

[groby_b]

And the shades in between account for the large number of new licensing schemes sprouting, with different restrictions on what is and isn't possible. (Not to mention the large number of "just used it anyways" instances). And it struggles for smaller utilities, or packages of many different things.

It's "worked out" in the sense that it still doesn't really work for a lot of maintainers.

[mulmen]

What happens when the code is abandoned? Can I make my own changes whenever I want?

The problem with commercial software is the lock in.