Comment by KingMob
1 year ago
> Corporations are simply a group of humans.
This is incorrect, and it's obvious with even a little bit of reflection.
Corporations are effectively unkillable, for starters. No corporate charter has been revoked since the 19th c. iirc.
Corporations cannot be jailed, for another, and extend their limited liability protection to the people under their umbrella. So corporations have way more latitude to commit crimes and escape punishment than a human.
Corporations lack human morality. In fact, if you believe in fiduciary duty, corporations can, and have been, sued for failing to pursue profit above all else. In a corporation, this is "good"; in a human, this is psychopathic. And the humans making these decisions enjoy diffusion of accountability.
In fact, this distinction between humans and corporations was well understood back in the day; it wasn't until court decisions like Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad, that the fiction of corporate "personhood" really took off.
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> Nobody is "providing megacorporations with unpaid labor".
That's literally what FOSS used by AWS is. Unless Amazon employs you, they didn't pay for it. You might not personally mind it, but it's still unpaid labor by definition.
> Not one person is harmed if Amazon takes my open source project and uses it to turn a profit, even if they make it into closed source.
Again, your personal opinions are not universally shared. Lots of people are trying to do FOSS, pay their bills at the same time, and don't want to work for a FAANG. They're most definitely harmed by free-riders who could be paying, like AWS.
Even worse, I suspect that all the free hobbyist FOSS labor artificially depresses dev salaries, hurting everyone else. Otherwise, the FAANGs would have to hire people to replicate what they currently get for free.
So while it's fun, and I certainly do my own fair share of FOSS, I'd prefer a completely different license environment. Honestly, I'd love to see a switch to noncommercial/commercial distinction. I'm not sure AGPL/commercial dual-licensing cuts it.
> I suspect that all the free hobbyist FOSS labor artificially depresses dev salaries, hurting everyone else. Otherwise, the FAANGs would have to hire people to replicate what they currently get for free.
The way I see it, FOSS enables a ton of smaller entities to launch products when they would not have the capital otherwise (see: anything built on Django). Those represent a lot of jobs too! This could be the software version of the Jevons Paradox.
Megacorp are a different problem. They do contribute back to the commons, but this seems like a drop from the bucket of the quintillion dollars they represent. Is it fair? That's a moral judgement, because software being FOSS means its legal in any case.
This is a good line of thinking, and you're right that smaller entities get the benefit of software they couldn't otherwise afford.
Of course, a more directly equitable arrangement would be a software co-operative. If prices are tied to usage, then everyone should be able to afford to fund a FOSS project's development at whatever level they can bear.
Eventually-open-source commercial licenses are already a bit like this, in that those who can pay, do so, and those who want it for free, can still get it, albeit delayed by a couple years. Ditto for projects that are funded by bounties, where only funders get access up to some dollar amount, after which it's FOSS to all.