← Back to context

Comment by 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.

8 comments

wahnfrieden

Reply
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.

    • Imustaskforhelp  14 hours ago

      hey, came from the other comment you messaged me but this feels like such an apple issue which is so fixable that I am not understanding why Apple won't do it.

      I understand what you are feeling but I feel like what you are saying is genuine and although sad right now, it provides a course of action for Apple to work upon to meaningfully improve it so that we can get atleast either custom license source available (as I mentioned in my other comment) or GPL/restrictive Copyleft as this mentions.

      If someone from Apple's reading this. This feels such a large issue even more than the license issues in general, is Apple working on this or not?

      This would honestly show the real loyalty towards developers if Apple can do this so I am waiting and perhaps a movement can be created to establish some formally written demands/ perhaps a change.org petition?

      2 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?