I’m not a lawyer, but this doesn’t seem to be compatible with (A)GPL licenses.
I would say this is going to harm small users more than big corporations. As a small user I might be unable to build from sources myself, so I would have to pay. But as a big corporation building from source would be something I can certainly do trivially, then I wouldn’t be subject to the restrictions imposed by this license.
Imho, if someone wants to force their users to pay, then they are not doing open source. Please let’s not try to pretend we are by adopting a OSI-approved license and slapping extra restrictions on top of it.
Just go AGPL for datacenter-oriented softwares, or GPL for drivers and embeddable code, or a proprietary license such as FUTO’s for end-user software.
Fair enough, but then it’s the same thing as open-sourcing the code but not providing support nor binaries.
I mean, personally I also prefer it to FUTO’s proprietary license, that’s for sure. But I’m one of the few privileged users who can build from source.
If this license doesn’t impose any extra restrictions on the code (and as you say, anyone can fork and provide prebuilt binaries), then this would just increase the risk of spreading malware, with no real benefits for the original developers.
In my opinion, if you want to monetize your software without going proprietary, all you have to do is provide the users a convenient way to get it. There are some paid FOSS apps on Google Play, as well as some paid FOSS games on Steam. You don’t want to distribute binaries? Fine, okay, that’s alright and I respect your choice. You don’t want to provide support to non-paying users? Fine, that’s very reasonable in my opinion. But…
…do you want to impose extra restrictions on your code? Fine to me, but then you are no longer doing open source, don’t try to pretend you are. And if you are not imposing any restrictions on the code then you are imho just going to hurt small users. We shouldn’t fight small users imho, we should fight the big corporations exploiting FOSS code for their proprietary businesses. But if there are no extra restrictions on the code, then big corporations wouldn’t care.
That’s my opinion.