Comment by sneak

18 hours ago

You should really consider why free software exists. Open source is open source, sure, but it is a disservice to your users to ever release proprietary software for any reason.

I personally would not start or run a business that didn’t release all software it builds under free software licenses. We don’t open source it because “developers expect it”, we open source it because it’s the right thing to do by your users.

Free software is an ideology, not just a license.

12 comments

sneak

Reply
Imustaskforhelp  18 hours ago

> Free software is an ideology, not just a license.

Yes and people shouldn't enforce ideology on top of each other. I am speaking this as an free software advocate too.

the fact of the matter is open source is still barely fundable and I am pretty sure that they evaluated multiple decisions to come up to this regarding how fundable it is and other factors.

If we have to indoctrinate someone into our ideology, it means that our ideology is unable to gain weight by its own merit. No, let open source do the work and welcome people for who are now open source. Have open arms to everyone who open sources their work & incentive them to do so with a happy heart.

Open source is about freedom. And being honest, If they wrote the code themselves, then its their freedom to have it in open source or not.

I for one, welcome another great open source! Thanks for going open source and Good luck to skip in future!

I know Open source has some issues regarding funding etc. so I hope that people donate to skip & make the project sustainable!

Have a nice day skip team!

elemdos  15 hours ago

Yeah but if that was the only reason to do open source that was encouraged then there’d almost certainly be a lot less open source software overall (and lower quality). Personally I’d prefer OSS win overall even if it costs some ideological purity.

wahnfrieden  17 hours ago

I don’t open source my iOS apps that provide my living because there are many examples already of others using this to release identical apps without credit or sharing their work back (even with AGPL), which would remove my source of income that enables me to work on it in the first place. I haven’t found a way to make a living off open source yet for the type of products I produce.

I’m not independently wealthy to be able to afford to work for free. If I release my work for free, then I will have to live on the streets or in a cell, or take a job and lose the time I have to produce my work in the first place.

  • marcprux  17 hours ago

    This is indeed a dilemma, but note that copyleft licenses like GPL or MPL do give you considerably more protection than a pushover license like MIT/BSD. I wrote about this last year at https://appfair.org/blog/gpl-and-the-app-stores.

    • wahnfrieden  15 hours ago

      It gives near zero practical protection as the devs that clone in the App Store do not respect licenses and Apple is slow to act (sometimes shutting your own dev account instead of the copycat’s, another high risk).

      Enabling copycats also encourages them to target my apps for fake negative review spam and bot activity that gets my dev account (and personal iCloud) flagged and banned without recourse.

      I also have no funds to sue someone. And the copycats are often anonymous and overseas in random countries, adding to the challenge of doing anything about it besides begging Apple to help without accidentally hurting me instead.

      3 replies →

  • elemdos  15 hours ago

    AGPL seems like a joke when it comes up against the indie hacker world. Has there ever been an example of an open-source maintainer successfully suing someone who ripped off their codebase without attribution? Doubtful.

  • Imustaskforhelp  17 hours ago

    Shame that the world has to be like this in the first place :<

    Perhaps I am way too altruist at times & the world is capitalist without any discrimination, stealing anyone's work and reselling it feels so scummy and I have heard it happen actually so you are not actually completely in the wrong and its your code and your lifestyle and so I respect it. (Even if I am an open source advocate, I will admit making money from Open source is super hard in many cases)

    Interestingly, what's your thoughts on Source available licenses. Like, honestly, like use a license which doesn't allow reusing components or providing another appstore release of that or similar

    If you use github actions with immutable and other instances, I feel like there is a real way of like verifying that the code written is safe & people can verify it & trust it.

    If people want to modify your product, they have to pay you and get in touch with you.

    I will take this with additional security context and being able to audit over having nothing in the first place! (Hopefully I hope this might not impact your living either in any way and honestly even if you do this! Some of us would deeply appreciate it)

    Something is better than nothing. If even much of the world goes to source available licenses, I feel like the transition to open source of softwares becomes much simpler as well if enough conditions (like people start donating/govts start investing in open source) etc. happen!

    Source availability still provides one to that direction & is still overall positive with atleast in this context, virtually zero downsides.

    What are your thoughts on it?