Reading recent discussion on devtools poor economics it seemed that devs have hard time paying for dev tools except for some crucially important sometimes, companies have little reason to pay, they do not care about productivity and they think in terms of legal obligations and ROI. As someone who is thinking to release some dev tool I came up with a fresh (silly?) idea I want your opinion on: make a dev tool free for individual devs, i.e. MIT or similar permissive license, but oblige non-tiny companies i.e. 10+ total employees, to donate annually an arbitrary sum of money. Even 1 cent or dollar will do, the idea is that if they go through a hassle of asking their accounting to do a money transfer they will probably pay a little more especially if their devs praised the tool. One question I cannot answer is how to put it in words and especially in legal words. Other is will it really work or am I just day dreaming. If they stick to minimal pay of 1 cent/year it still is sort of great because I have an official customer and can list it on the "used by" page for extra advertising bit.