Comment by trollbridge
8 months ago
AGPL3 gets somewhat near this; if someone wants to profit in the cloud from it, they have to share all changes they make (and in theory then anyone else could go run a for profit or free service in the cloud or locally with the same new code).
Sharing code back isn't enough. AGPLv3 falls short in ensuring the profits from the tools get shared with the creators and maintainers
Personally I care less about this, and more about someone else not ripping my code off outright and profiting.
I’m very much torn, because on the one hand, I can attribute my entire career to OSS. I learned from using and studying others’ work. OTOH, what I did not do is take someone’s work, and monetize it.
I have no issue with using a library; those are nearly always released with the explicit purpose of being included in a larger body of work. But if someone makes a full product, and releases it under essentially any OSI-approved license, absolutely nothing stops me from taking it as-is, throwing a splashy page in front of it, and making money (assuming it’s a marketable product, of course). This to me is the same as stumbling across an artisan making a product and selling it cheaply, only to turn around and immediately resell it for a profit, simply because they didn’t know any better. It’s legal, but it’s ethically gross.
That sounds like the early 90s when you had to pay for all dev tools and even pay royalties for how many copies of your product you sold with that library. Most people had to roll their own crappy half-assed homebrew data structures because otherwise you'd have to pay for expensive libraries.
Interesting reference as more and more people long for the a comeback of the old days in tech.
1 reply →
> they have to share all changes they make
Only with users who access the service.