Creative Commons remains the single most brilliant contribution to the licensing conversation surrounding open source code, but it is not good enough. Anything that requires direct reach-back from a user to a coder will not scale, and is also out of touch with how code is compiled, with hundreds of bits from hundreds of coders comprising the whole.
Fair Source is one of many attempts to devise sliding scale and adaptable revenue and profit solutions for open source code. It begins to charge when users have fifteen or more employees and this sensible accommodation has tripled their downloads. But even this is not good enough.
I see the need for bits of code to have embedded within them both a PayPal-like address able to handle micro-payments (fractions of a cent), and a CISCO-like Application Oriented Network (AON) rules and rate sheet that can be updated globally with financial-level latency (which is to say, instantly) and full transparency. Some standards should be set for payment scales, e.g. 10 employees, 100, 1000 and up; such that a package of code with X number of coders will automatically begin to generate PayPal payments to the individual coders when the package hits N use cases within Z organizational or network structures.
