Comment by noosphr
10 hours ago
Whenever people say that MIT or GPL licenses are a good idea I point out projects like this.
Only humans should have freedom zero. Corporations and robots must pay.
10 hours ago
Whenever people say that MIT or GPL licenses are a good idea I point out projects like this.
Only humans should have freedom zero. Corporations and robots must pay.
I am not sure sudo is licensed under MIT or GPL, looks it's like a mix of licenses[1]. The end of the first license says it's sponsored in part by DARPA.
From 2010 to February 2024, it was sponsored by Quest Software according to the history page[2].
[1] https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/main/LICENSE.md
[2] https://www.sudo.ws/about/history/
> Corporations and robots must pay.
Greenpeace is a (non-profit) corporation. Unions are corporations. Municipalities. Colleges and universities.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person
Should they have to pay?
Yes. Non-profits are more than capable of abusing the commons, the purpose of even small monetary requirements is to put a bound on that.
I used to volunteer for a local non-profit a few years ago.
From time to time, I would reflect on the fact that Microsoft and other commercial suppliers were getting paid for providing services to us, but I was expected to work for free.
Yes.
Yes. Not for profit does not mean they don’t have money.
With that logic why should non profits have to pay for anything at all?
The behavior of corporations is shameful.
After all, people in these companies don't work for free and are able to spend a lot of money for other services.
Haven't you just hit the nail on the head? Corporations do not feel shame even if people within them do; hence actions . . .
You can demand payment but it doesn't mean you'll get paid. These days companies will clone your work instead of paying.
As covered literally just a few days ago (IIRC), you absolutely can demand payment: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi actively works to detect MDM, and if found, demand payment.
Not open source, but an interesting counterpoint, I think.
Relevant articles are here
- https://lgug2z.com/articles/normalize-identifying-corporate-...
- https://lgug2z.com/articles/i-started-identifying-corporate-...
The post-open source space is indeed a very exciting space in 2026
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That's a nice slogan, but how does it work?
Say, I clone sudo. Clearly, a human applying freedom zero. I use it in my projects. Probably still freedom zero. I use it in my CI pipeline for the stuff that makes me money... corporation or human? If it's corporation, what if I sponsor a not-for-profit that provides that piece of CI infra?
The problem is that "corporation or not" has more shades than you can reasonably account for. And, worse, the cost of accounting for it is more than any volunteer wants to shoulder.
Even if this were a hard and legally enforceable rule, what individual maintainer wants to sue a company with a legal department?
What could work is a large collective that licenses free software with the explicit goal of extracting money from corporate users and distributing it to authors. Maybe.
Not for commercial use without buying a license is a pretty standard licensing scheme. This has been worked out for decades.
And the shades in between account for the large number of new licensing schemes sprouting, with different restrictions on what is and isn't possible. (Not to mention the large number of "just used it anyways" instances). And it struggles for smaller utilities, or packages of many different things.
It's "worked out" in the sense that it still doesn't really work for a lot of maintainers.
What happens when the code is abandoned? Can I make my own changes whenever I want?
The problem with commercial software is the lock in.
The GPL is a good idea. It's our socieconomic system that isn't.
GPL is a response to the copyright law, which was created for the big corporations to extract rent from ordinary people.
It's copyright law which should go away.
> It's copyright law which should go away.
This precisely. What started out as a way of rewarding authorship (of text, software, or other things) has mainly become a way of extracting rent -- see the music, movie, and software industries. In the digital age, when the cost of making copies of such works is approximately zero, copyright law ceases to make sense.
Note that this does not mean you cannot make money selling software or software-related services. For example, game developers could still sell keys for online play on their servers even if they couldn't copyright the binaries.
Copyright law is hundreds of years old and originally was intended to prevent owner-operators of mechanical printing presses from printing and selling copies of some author's books without paying them or getting permission.
1 reply →
Including the hangups people have about AI training as well.
GPLv3 is a bit overreaching , especially in patent clauses. The GPL as idea is great but the license needs a little more refining
The constant fear of lawyers that using some GPL lib will infest entire codebase of their project with GPL is a real problem that stops many corporations from contributing in the first place.
Everything is a good idea if you assume a world in which it works.
Communism has entered the chat.
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