Comment by pocksuppet
12 hours ago
In particular, if you license it MIT, and it's useful, expect Amazon to make a fork, not give you the source code, and each tens of millions of dollars from it while you don't get a cent.
There's writing code for charity, and then there's this. Charity wasn't meant to include hyper-corporations.
If you want evil megacorps to give you money when they use your thing, maybe say "if you're an evil megacorp you have to give me money when you use my thing" in the license?
If your license reads "hey, you can use this however you want, no matter who you are, and don't have to give me money", people will use it however they want, no matter who they are, and won't give you money.
Unfortunately, for decades, free software fanatics have bullied inexperienced and eager programmers, who don't know any better into believing that an actual sustainable development model that respects their work is evil and that we should all work for free and beg for donations.
> free software fanatics have bullied and eager programmers
We must travel in different circles. I've been around a while, and I've never seen _any individual_ bullied for keeping their code closed source.
That said, I have an extreme bias toward only using open source code, for practical reasons, and I'm open about that.
What if they simply use the code and don't give you the $$$? Are you going to sue them?
> Unfortunately, for decades, free software fanatics have bullied inexperienced and eager programmers, who don't know any better into believing that an actual sustainable development model that respects their work is evil and that we should all work for free and beg for donations.
Silicon Valley hype monsters have done this, sure. And so have too many open source software advocates. But all the free software advocates I've read and listened to over the years have criticized MIT- and BSD-style permissive licenses for permitting exactly the freeloading you describe.
The idea that software that is free NEEDS to be open source because "I don't want something running on my computer" but then will go and download the precompiled binary hurts my head alot
I agree that MIT may not be the best licence here in such a use case scenario. The question is why corporations think they can be leeches though - and the bigger, the more of a leech they are on the ecosystem. That's just not right.
> The question is why corporations think they can be leeches though
Because they can, they don't just think they do. Everything about the framework they operate in allows or even encourages them to do it.
> That's just not right.
As a matter of morality, you're right. This is something very few people or corporations concern themselves with just as soon as there's real money to be made by not concerning themselves with this.
> The question is why corporations think they can be leeches though
because they can be. They do not think they can be leeches, they know they can be leeches.
> That's just not right
I somewhat agree with you, but they do actually have permission to do it.
IMHO, this is the wrong way of looking at it. You can choose any license you like. Choose the right license, and that should be the end of the discussion.
With the cloud, GPL won’t protect you either
AGPLv3 largely does, if you can and do enforce it in some way when breaches happen.
AGPLv3 attempts to solve this problem, by forcing SaaS providers to open-source their modifications.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
Depends on the needs of the licensor. AGPLv3 solves the problem of other players taking the code, improving it privately, and not sharing those improvements. But AGPLv3 is not a silver bullet for people who write Open Source code and pretend to make a living from it. "Open Source is not a business plan".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095581
And whatever license you use, expect it to be crawled by AI, and have AI provider make millions on it.
> if you license it MIT, and it's useful, expect Amazon to make a fork, not give you the source code,
thats why the gpl family of license exist.
MIT/BSD family licenses are do whatever you want with this,
if you want to make money off of you pet opensource project I recommend multi-license it with a copyleft with copyright assignment required for contributions and offer other licenses with a fee.
Maybe Stallman had something of a point...
Nope. Stallman helped create this mess.
Free software underpins all the infrastructure of surveillance capitalism.
It underpins all software, and has wormed its way into Windows. I'm not sure this is as good a point as you think.
Stallman is always right, and HN always downvotes it.
He's a terrible communicator, and sort of repellent in person. Contrast someone like Cory Doctorow who manages to be right about stuff and actually communicate effectively.
3 replies →
Publicly defending pedophilia arguably isn't “right”, but if you restrict Stallman's positions to software licensing, then I'd agree with you.
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I don't understand your point? If you write code with an MIT license, this is what you would expect.
Totally agreed.
I find it strange that people use the MIT licence and then complain "big greedy corporation did not contribute back anything". Though I also agree that this leeching approach by corporations is a problem to the ecosystem. MIT just is not the right licence to fight that.
So? I am not about to create AWS. I'm glad people can use my free software on their own machines, on rented servers, or hosted by an expert.
AWS can profit more from it than smaller organizations or individuals, making it even more untouchable by potential competition.
A market with little competition costs you too in the long term.
Are you still glad when AWS starts selling you software as a service and make hundreds of millions and you get nothing?