You set up your standard, and stick to it whomever comes.
1. A small company which is barely profitable but is building something which aligns with your values and you see as a positive to the world.
2. A massive mega corporation whose only purpose is profit, mistreats employees, and you view as highly unethical.
You shouldn’t treat those the same way. It’s perfectly ethical to offer your work for free to the first one (helping them succeed in creating a better world) and charging up the wazoo (or better yet, refusing to engage in any way with) the second one.
A company is not a person, and can literally have its entire staff changed in short order. Or be bought.
Companies have no morals. Sometimes people in companies do, but again, that person can vanish instantly.
You should treat a company as a person which may receive a brain transplant at any time. Most especially, when writing contracts or having any expectation of what that company will do.
A business that is privately owned, is run by its founders and which represents the lion's share of its officers income and net worth can be dealt with like any other small business.
Some guy who makes bespoke firmware for industrial microcontrollers or very niche audio encoding software isn't Microsoft. You won't be able to do business with him in a useful way if you treat him like Microsoft.
If you want to be extreme don't distribute it to them in the first place. Licenses do not come into effect until after distribution. So you could have a pay-to-download model that comes with a %100 discount if you're a lone developer or an organization with under X amount of revenue. You wouldn't be able to stop someone redistributing it after the fact, but you're not engaging.
Interesting moral proposition, I doubt you'd get many followers. I think it's perfectly reasonable to treat people differently from corporations, and random small and medium corporations differently than huge megacorps without losing any sleep.
Specially in business, charging more to those that can pay more is a very common approach.
and all consumers dislike price discrimination. Airlines is the classic example.
It's just that those companies do this because they can. And i hate it. I much prefer a static, single price for a product.
gaben figured that out and successfully expanded into many markets that were considered basket cases for software licensing.
But the US Supreme Court would be one of them.
Well, the standard for software licensing is to sell cheaper licenses to smaller businesses and more expensive licenses to larger businesses.
Why? Most businesses don't entertain standard rates, either. It's case-by-case negotiations ("call us", "request quote"). Why should I, as a private person putting stuff out there for free, set up "my standard" and stick to it?
But I guess they don't mean set the same price for everyone - but rather stick to your values in what you do.
