Comment by rfl890
6 months ago
That's the caveat, the contract you sign when you start an open source project. You have to have the mindset of simply not giving a fuck about who does what with your code and how much they make from it. Then you can be at peace. If you don't want to (or can't) adopt that mindset for a particular project or at all, that's completely fine and normal. OSS is not for you. As soon as you want compensation for your work, things start to go south. See the whole core-js situation and what went down for an example.
That’s exactly my point though, it’s exploitative. Companies will abuse the fact that you “don’t give a fuck” and make money from it without compensating you for your labor.
I am not trying to really convince anyone of anything, do whatever you want. I am just explaining why I have become disillusioned with FOSS.
Or use AGPL.
There's a reason some people call permissive licenses "cuck licenses".
I am arguing that even if the language of the license is perfect by any criteria we define, enforcing them is unrealistic, especially for smaller projects.
I know there's been cases of big projects successfully suing companies that break the license (e.g. BusyBox), but if I just make some small utility on Github, even if it's licensed with AGPL, I don't have a ton of recourse. I don't have the ability to audit every project that might be violating it, and even if I did I don't have the capital to pay an attorney to sue for every possible violation.
If you're working for a company and that company is paying you to work on a project that they decide to FOSS later, great, you're being compensated for your work and I have no objection to that. Hobby projects are generally not compensated and as such I think it's better to keep them closed source.