I’m a huge FOSS advocate but I understand where this developer is coming from. It sucks to have huge orgs take your work and monetize it heavily without contributing back. The number of maintainers I know suffering from huge volumes of bug reports from corporations using AI tools yet not financially supporting the project is pretty heartbreaking.
I wonder if it’s time FOSS projects started taking the view that liberty is for individuals and not corporate use, and license accordingly.
I wonder if it’s time FOSS projects started taking the view that liberty is for individuals and not corporate use, and license accordingly.
I think so, I think it should have been like that from the beginning tbh. Corporations have plenty of money to support projects that support them, there’s really no excuse
They have incentive not to under capitalism and mandate to generate shareholder value. I’m not excusing the bevahiour, but it’s built-in into the whole economic system by design.
The real solution is public money - public code. It removes capitalistic incentives while generating public good.
FOSS is flawed, but I don’t think that the solution is limiting corporate use. Imagine a world where Linux kernel wasn’t released under open source license. We would have Microsoft owning entire server infrastructure market right now.
I agree with you as I’m an old FOSS beard - we wouldn’t have gotten here without GPL/MIT/BSD etc.
But things aren’t working for a huge number of projects. And is it right that so many critical dependencies are maintained by so few with so little resources, if any? Just look at the xz fiasco we narrowly avoided catastrophe over.
The Linux Foundation is a good model for core infrastructure and projects that underpin the ecosystem like the kernel - LF are turning over $300M or something a year.
But for smaller projects that aren’t critical or aren’t looking to be a core dependency like xz, dual licensing seems the only obvious way forward.
As I mentioned under another comment, public money - public code should be the solution we move forward to. It negates all the bad incentives created under capitalism and strengthens the public good aspect of open source.
The other day I found myself looking for a free word and spreadsheet editor for my phone when the old one stopped working. It took hours to find one that worked which wasn’t filled with ads. It is absurd how something so basic and fundamental spawns thousands of versions just because people are looking to cash in. I think of how much human energy and thought is wasted recreating the same stuff over and over when we could all just have a free, open source version and spend that time on more important things.
I think if they succeeded to write a licence that made sense and were legally enforceable, they’d be worth using. But I also wish the EU put up some lawyers to formulate a licence with the goal of sustainable opensource development.
I wonder if it’s time FOSS projects started taking the view that liberty is for individuals and not corporate use, and license accordingly.
I have held this view forever, but it really pisses off liberals that want to continue to parasitically abuse and exploit other people’s work.
Prohibiting for-profit use isn’t the solution, forcing for-profit use to make everything they do available as open source could be. AGPL and the like don’t go far enough. Use should be viral for the company and developers, not just the software project it is used by.
I’m a huge FOSS advocate but I understand where this developer is coming from. It sucks to have huge orgs take your work and monetize it heavily without contributing back. The number of maintainers I know suffering from huge volumes of bug reports from corporations using AI tools yet not financially supporting the project is pretty heartbreaking.
I wonder if it’s time FOSS projects started taking the view that liberty is for individuals and not corporate use, and license accordingly.
I think so, I think it should have been like that from the beginning tbh. Corporations have plenty of money to support projects that support them, there’s really no excuse
They have incentive not to under capitalism and mandate to generate shareholder value. I’m not excusing the bevahiour, but it’s built-in into the whole economic system by design.
The real solution is public money - public code. It removes capitalistic incentives while generating public good.
FOSS is flawed, but I don’t think that the solution is limiting corporate use. Imagine a world where Linux kernel wasn’t released under open source license. We would have Microsoft owning entire server infrastructure market right now.
I agree with you as I’m an old FOSS beard - we wouldn’t have gotten here without GPL/MIT/BSD etc.
But things aren’t working for a huge number of projects. And is it right that so many critical dependencies are maintained by so few with so little resources, if any? Just look at the xz fiasco we narrowly avoided catastrophe over.
The Linux Foundation is a good model for core infrastructure and projects that underpin the ecosystem like the kernel - LF are turning over $300M or something a year.
But for smaller projects that aren’t critical or aren’t looking to be a core dependency like xz, dual licensing seems the only obvious way forward.
As I mentioned under another comment, public money - public code should be the solution we move forward to. It negates all the bad incentives created under capitalism and strengthens the public good aspect of open source.
The other day I found myself looking for a free word and spreadsheet editor for my phone when the old one stopped working. It took hours to find one that worked which wasn’t filled with ads. It is absurd how something so basic and fundamental spawns thousands of versions just because people are looking to cash in. I think of how much human energy and thought is wasted recreating the same stuff over and over when we could all just have a free, open source version and spend that time on more important things.
https://postopen.org/about-post-open
I think if they succeeded to write a licence that made sense and were legally enforceable, they’d be worth using. But I also wish the EU put up some lawyers to formulate a licence with the goal of sustainable opensource development.
EU has EUPL: https://commission.europa.eu/about/departments-and-executive-agencies/digital-services/open-source-strategy-history/european-union-public-licence_en
That doesn’t solve funding as there doesn’t seem to be any provisions for that.
I have held this view forever, but it really pisses off liberals that want to continue to parasitically abuse and exploit other people’s work.
Prohibiting for-profit use isn’t the solution, forcing for-profit use to make everything they do available as open source could be. AGPL and the like don’t go far enough. Use should be viral for the company and developers, not just the software project it is used by.