Comment by MangoCoffee
17 hours ago
>Open Source was never the commercial product. It's the conduit to something else.
this is correct. If you open source your software, then why are you mad when companies like AWS, OpenAI, etc. make tons of money?
Open Source software is always a bridge that leads to something else to commercialize on. If you want to sell software, then pick Microsoft's model and sell your software as closed source. If you get mad and cry about making money to sustain your open source project, then pick the right license for your business.
> then pick the right license for your business
That's one of the issues with AI, though; strongly copylefted software suddenly finds itself unable to enforce its license because "AI" gets a free pass on copyright for some reason.
Dual-licensing open source with business-unfriendly licensing used to be a pretty good way to sell software, but thanks to the absurd legal position AI models have managed to squeeze themselves into, that stopped in an instant.
Open source software helped to dramatically reduce the cost of paid software, because there is a now a minimum bar of functionality you have to produce in order to sell software.
And, in many cases, you had to produce that value yourself. GPL licensing lawsuits ensured this.
AI extracting value from software in such a way that the creators no longer can take the small scraps they were willing to live on seems likely to change this dynamic.
I expect no-source-available software (including shareware) to proliferate again, to the detriment of open source.