The opinion that those who consume should contribute back is not wrong, and as an open source contributor I fully agree, but it should be understood that anything free is going to be taken. We are an imperfect people in an imperfect world, after all.
I don’t put old furniture on the curb with a FREE sign expecting someone to knock on my door and offer $100 for it. I expect it to be gone without a trace. If I want something, even if it’s 1% of the value, then I’ll have a yard sale. It’s no different here.
Licensing is a form of conveying expectations. Putting an MIT license in my repo conveys that I expect absolutely nothing in return, just like the free sign on the stuff I tossed out.
> We're made to feel like we should open source things and not retain exclusive rights to commercialization.
Who is telling you that you have to write open source software? Millions of programmers around the world make a living writing software with much more restrictive licenses (including simply All Rights Reserved). I write proprietary code, and I don't feel any pressure to stop doing that. Somebody on the internet telling me that I should write open source software instead is not an issue. They can't stop me from making money writing code.
Edited to add: I don't own the rights to my code but I am fairly compensated for it. If I were to write code that I have direct ownership of, the above principles would still apply.
> CC-BY-SA-NC isn't OSI approved and you get told you're "not open source" if you try to use it or licenses like it.
CC-BY-SA-NC is indeed not open source, but that doesn't mean you can't use it.
> We're made to feel like we should open source things and not retain exclusive rights to commercialization, because that's not open.
The overwhelming majority of software is not opensource. Somehow the people writing and presumably making a living from them get by just fine.
> And I'm sick of the "but actually his license enabled that" excuses. It's victim blaming.
Publishing code under an opensource licence and then going hysterical about people using that code as allowed by the licence is suggestive of a mental disorder.
Well, then we've found the problem. You ideologically disagree with the framing of free software. That's fine!
Millions of people use Linux every day, run iPhones with BSD code and run software made with open source libraries. They download Javascript resources and freely-licensed Unsplash JPEGs to populate a webpage interpreted with a KHTML fork. If you think they're stealing, that's an extremist ideology that is not reflected in the spirit of any open source project I'm aware of.
> Embrace extend extinguish. Now Manifest v2 is gone.
You keep on hammering on this point and I don't think it makes sense the way you think it does. Manifest v2 (and extensions in general!) are a feature which Google created and added to Chrome entirely themselves. I'm not a fan of what they did in Mv3 either, but it's their feature, and it's their prerogative to change it. If you're arguing that something (the license?) should prevent them from making changes to their software which you don't like, whatever you're imagining has drifted rather far away from open source.
> Don't be too kind to the trillion dollar company.
They got to be worth a trillion dollars somehow. I hate Apple with the passion of a million suns; guess what? They sell something people want. They make money, they survived. Their copyright is preserved equally as well as the AS-IS terms of the BSD license. And despite being whipped like a dog, there are still multiple BSD OSes with modern software packaged for them.
> We let these giant companies use open source to make the internet and technology more centralized and less free.
Do "we"? I'm running Firefox right now, maybe you're on an iPad or some other platform that locked you down. But that's your problem, if it concerned you then you should have returned it to the Apple store.
People still have a free choice to run whatever software they want. Wordpress is not being made "less free" because hosting companies won't get out of bed to pay Matt's bills. If the project has to die to prove it, it will die as a free program. It will still be forkable and maintainable by the community because that was the intention and spirit of the project.
> Google is very good at this game.
No, the fed is just particularly bad at it.
Google's big problem is that they monopolize online advertising and the DOJ refuses to neuter them. If your free access to the internet gets tragically cut off by Apple's indignant software policies... not my problem, is it?
The opinion that those who consume should contribute back is not wrong, and as an open source contributor I fully agree, but it should be understood that anything free is going to be taken. We are an imperfect people in an imperfect world, after all.
I don’t put old furniture on the curb with a FREE sign expecting someone to knock on my door and offer $100 for it. I expect it to be gone without a trace. If I want something, even if it’s 1% of the value, then I’ll have a yard sale. It’s no different here.
Licensing is a form of conveying expectations. Putting an MIT license in my repo conveys that I expect absolutely nothing in return, just like the free sign on the stuff I tossed out.
> We're made to feel like we should open source things and not retain exclusive rights to commercialization.
Who is telling you that you have to write open source software? Millions of programmers around the world make a living writing software with much more restrictive licenses (including simply All Rights Reserved). I write proprietary code, and I don't feel any pressure to stop doing that. Somebody on the internet telling me that I should write open source software instead is not an issue. They can't stop me from making money writing code.
Edited to add: I don't own the rights to my code but I am fairly compensated for it. If I were to write code that I have direct ownership of, the above principles would still apply.
> CC-BY-SA-NC isn't OSI approved and you get told you're "not open source" if you try to use it or licenses like it.
CC-BY-SA-NC is indeed not open source, but that doesn't mean you can't use it.
> We're made to feel like we should open source things and not retain exclusive rights to commercialization, because that's not open.
The overwhelming majority of software is not opensource. Somehow the people writing and presumably making a living from them get by just fine.
> And I'm sick of the "but actually his license enabled that" excuses. It's victim blaming.
Publishing code under an opensource licence and then going hysterical about people using that code as allowed by the licence is suggestive of a mental disorder.
> You won't call them "thief", but I will.
Well, then we've found the problem. You ideologically disagree with the framing of free software. That's fine!
Millions of people use Linux every day, run iPhones with BSD code and run software made with open source libraries. They download Javascript resources and freely-licensed Unsplash JPEGs to populate a webpage interpreted with a KHTML fork. If you think they're stealing, that's an extremist ideology that is not reflected in the spirit of any open source project I'm aware of.
[flagged]
>> KHTML fork.
> Embrace extend extinguish. Now Manifest v2 is gone.
You keep on hammering on this point and I don't think it makes sense the way you think it does. Manifest v2 (and extensions in general!) are a feature which Google created and added to Chrome entirely themselves. I'm not a fan of what they did in Mv3 either, but it's their feature, and it's their prerogative to change it. If you're arguing that something (the license?) should prevent them from making changes to their software which you don't like, whatever you're imagining has drifted rather far away from open source.
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> Don't be too kind to the trillion dollar company.
They got to be worth a trillion dollars somehow. I hate Apple with the passion of a million suns; guess what? They sell something people want. They make money, they survived. Their copyright is preserved equally as well as the AS-IS terms of the BSD license. And despite being whipped like a dog, there are still multiple BSD OSes with modern software packaged for them.
> We let these giant companies use open source to make the internet and technology more centralized and less free.
Do "we"? I'm running Firefox right now, maybe you're on an iPad or some other platform that locked you down. But that's your problem, if it concerned you then you should have returned it to the Apple store.
People still have a free choice to run whatever software they want. Wordpress is not being made "less free" because hosting companies won't get out of bed to pay Matt's bills. If the project has to die to prove it, it will die as a free program. It will still be forkable and maintainable by the community because that was the intention and spirit of the project.
> Google is very good at this game.
No, the fed is just particularly bad at it.
Google's big problem is that they monopolize online advertising and the DOJ refuses to neuter them. If your free access to the internet gets tragically cut off by Apple's indignant software policies... not my problem, is it?
2 replies →