Wouldn't it be nice if there was a license/contract/blood oath that projects could start with that guaranteed that the owner couldn't commercialise a project late in the game?
Afaik what Organic Maps (and plenty of notable projects) have done is above board in terms of law and licensing, and reasonable people may differ on the ethics. I don't even think it should be impossible to do what they did. It just strikes me that we should all be on the same page from the start, especially so that volunteer labour doesn't end up being commercialised or locked down in a way the contributor reasonably didn't expect. This is important because burning volunteers hurts FOSS (not to mention the cost to users).
The issue is that Organic Maps never positioned itself as a corporate project, and in fact was always marketed as a community alternative to all of the corporate solutions
Nope, I'm only angry if I go telling all my friends that some app is the future of freedom and privacy, and printing flyers and driving them around town, and then that app turns and sells out their values to crypto scammers. I need reasonable assurance that my family can keep using an app I'm working on indefinitely without waking up one day to an auto-update that asks them to buy Bitcoin or something.
Some people are always going to find something to be angry about (look at this very thread) but I don't see why the contributors would be angry as long as they can keep their work in community-led forks.
Wouldn't it be nice if there was a license/contract/blood oath that projects could start with that guaranteed that the owner couldn't commercialise a project late in the game?
Afaik what Organic Maps (and plenty of notable projects) have done is above board in terms of law and licensing, and reasonable people may differ on the ethics. I don't even think it should be impossible to do what they did. It just strikes me that we should all be on the same page from the start, especially so that volunteer labour doesn't end up being commercialised or locked down in a way the contributor reasonably didn't expect. This is important because burning volunteers hurts FOSS (not to mention the cost to users).
The issue is that Organic Maps never positioned itself as a corporate project, and in fact was always marketed as a community alternative to all of the corporate solutions
So now they're forking it, what's the big deal?
They're still going to work for free, and they're still going to be angry about it.
Nope, I'm only angry if I go telling all my friends that some app is the future of freedom and privacy, and printing flyers and driving them around town, and then that app turns and sells out their values to crypto scammers. I need reasonable assurance that my family can keep using an app I'm working on indefinitely without waking up one day to an auto-update that asks them to buy Bitcoin or something.
Some people are always going to find something to be angry about (look at this very thread) but I don't see why the contributors would be angry as long as they can keep their work in community-led forks.
yes forking is the way to go.