Comment by moron4hire
9 years ago
If you're a lone developer or small team and you're releasing your code under anything other than a strong copyleft license, you're leaving yourself open to the Joyents of the world to abscond with what you've made and build their business with nothing more than an attaboy to you. I would much rather nobody made money off of my code than somebody else while I still struggle. At least the Mozillas and Googles of the world have the decent politeness to just completely ignore your open source project, no matter how long its been out and how new they are to that particular field, to boulder through and make their own thing.
Nobody can "abscond" with what you've made. It's always yours, it's always accessible to you, and you can always make it better.
Yes, if someone else comes and extends your work and eclipses your production, they're able to decide what to do with it as they want. That's the key point of being open: Letting people do what they want with it.
If anything, I'd contest the claim that copyleft can be considered open source any more than a license that lets you look at the source but doesn't let you modify it. Copyleft controls the source and forces your views on people who want to use it.
Perhaps you could form a community of like-minded developers. Everyone pools their resources together, contributing to the pool according to his ability, and each person shares those resources according to his need. That way, nobody will be able to make money while you struggle and go without.