Comment by xoac
2 years ago
Ok I make a really nice server and give it away for free. Some guy making 300k a year uses it to build something else and gets a promotion so now he makes 400k a year and his company is now making millions. They've exploited my freely available software to acheive this goal. Sure they could have invested to build it again (perhaps by paying me to build it? or by licensing my software from me?) but instead they get this at the cost of 0 and the result that they make is under no obligation to be free. This is a problem because when you assume that it's free you whole business model is based around exploiting the free to build the proprietary. This is the business model of almost every software company in operation and why the OS authors are broke and the software is devalued. A lot of the times if you're working at one of these companies that operate under this business model you are even discouraged from writing anything serious yourself or to do "overengineering". That's because the overengineering is being done by unpaid open source contributors.
> To my mind, open source software is returning to the basics of human society - helping each other where we can. If you only ever do things with the intention of getting paid to do them, then you live a sad life.
This honestly is horseshit because we wouldn't have this conversation if the profit of off open source was being distributed in any way fairly (or to put it patronisingly: used to help the contributors). By releasing your software under a license that permits this type of exploatation you are putting yourself in a precarious position of being at the mercy of whoever exploits it for commercial gain.
So as I am not misunderstood, I am not against open source in general or say GPL, but against using licenses like MIT/BSD by default.
I agree that commercialising open source software can be exploitative and obviously, that why the GPL was thought necessary to try to stop that kind of behaviour (or at least ensure that the resultant code was also open source).
But with non-commercial usage, I don't see it as exploiting the author as they wanted to write it for their own reasons and had no interest in commercialising it or believed it to be non-viable. If someone releases under MIT/BSD, then they're pretty much saying "here's the code, do whatever you want with it", so I don't see a problem with companies using it.
There isn't a problem with companies using software licensed under the MIT. There's a problem with the developer who made it: they're devaluing software as a whole. If companies get into the habit of receiving software for free, without any limitations, they value software as a whole less.
In contrast, a good, upstanding developer publishing under the GPL/LGPL/AGPL doesn't create the same negative externality: they establish that the cost of using open source software is contributing to open source software. Which should be the cost of open source software. Want functionality added to a project? Add it yourself, or hire somebody to add it, and then share the result openly. The original person who wrote the code is a pretty compelling candidate for that contract, but far from the only person available.
>nd why the OS authors are broke
OS authors aren't broke. In fact the guys from Microsoft are some of the richest dudes in the world. Maybe OS authors that give away their stuff for free are broke?