I suspect the key problem with this isn't the one most people will think of. We had a commercial JS library that we sold for 10 years and I'd estimate the % of companies that properly read the evaluation and commercial use license was under 10%.
We open sourced the product last year and found out how many silent users there were only afterwards. When I asked why they were using the software within a company long after the 3 months evaluation period had expired, the response was always "We never sold the resulting software that we built with your software".
By "commercial use" the majority of software engineers take that to mean selling. Of course, commercial use means use within a company. Some companies just hadn't got to point of starting to sell the resulting software, but others only used it internally and didn't count that as commercial use since they didn't get money for it.
Since software engineers are likely to be the only ones who see the license in a lot of cases, and the majority of software engineers I've met are not good at licensing legalese, I think this license will simply be treated as an open source license most of the time and simply not work as intended.
From experience, the problem is not than SWE don't understand the license but that they don't like to negotiate.
When seeing the license on a project they need to use, most SWE will go tell their boss "Hey we need to pay for this" and the boss will find some convoluted way to tell him "Pay? No don't wanna".
The SWE will most likely stop negotiation at that step and has two choices: Either stop using the project and find a way to do without or continue using it.
Since they actually have a enormous pill of stuff to do by yesterday and this project will save them some time they will most probably continue to use it. And tell themselves that they are personally not doing anything wrong and that's the problem of someone else at the company.
If they feel guilty enough and you are sympathetic to them, they might throw a few bucks from their own purse but I wouldn't count on it.
If they sell a product based on your project, the SWE has some leverage since someone outside the company can take a look at it, but even then that's not a guarantee.
Source: Multiple try to convince my precious boss to pay for our fucking highcharts license
L0 isn't interested in DRM, or surveillance, or any other invasive method of rooting out unlicensed users. That's an indirect way of saying that L0's approach will accept a certain amount of unlicensed use. The same way that book publishers or music distributors who offer DRM-free files accept some unlicensed use of those products.
L0 shares the approach of the more enlightened ebook and music stores: Make it as easy as possible to do the right thing.
> That's an indirect way of saying that L0's approach will accept a certain amount of unlicensed use.
Not sure it's very wise to say this on a public forum, if any L0 user decides one day to enforce L0 in court, the people infringing on the L0 license could point to this comment by the creator of L0 that L0 "will accept a certain amount of unlicensed use". I also don't see much difference between that and a donate button.
I really, really hate doing "well, actually" on people, especially when it involves legal background. I know that feels unfair.
Courts will ask what licensors meant, and perhaps what licensees should have understood, by license terms. My comment didn't go to what the L0 licenses mean---their language is in flux, in any event---but to the practical business considerations around choosing to use their approach.
BandCamp sells DRM-free music files. I'd say bands selling through them "accept a certain amount of unlicensed use", too. That's not to say they can't sue when they find someone with unlicensed copies.
> By "commercial use" the majority of software engineers take that to mean selling.
well there aren't many open source licenses that restrict commercial use. Especially since it would violate https://opensource.org/definition part 6, well basically such definitions should be taken with a grain of salt.
however even agpl3 can be used for projects where you do not need to share the code with the outside world. if you only share the code with the users using the project you are already doing everything correct. basically internal software.
We open sourced the product last year and found out how many silent users there were only afterwards. When I asked why they were using the software within a company long after the 3 months evaluation period had expired, the response was always "We never sold the resulting software that we built with your software".
By "commercial use" the majority of software engineers take that to mean selling. Of course, commercial use means use within a company. Some companies just hadn't got to point of starting to sell the resulting software, but others only used it internally and didn't count that as commercial use since they didn't get money for it.
Since software engineers are likely to be the only ones who see the license in a lot of cases, and the majority of software engineers I've met are not good at licensing legalese, I think this license will simply be treated as an open source license most of the time and simply not work as intended.