Comment by shimman
1 day ago
Yes, these people need to know their actions are routinely hated in the community. They should be boo'd at conferences too.
1 day ago
Yes, these people need to know their actions are routinely hated in the community. They should be boo'd at conferences too.
I agree with you, BUT, we have licensing right? Ie couldn't the author have chosen a license that would have prevented this - if they had cared?
I'm unsure if we should lose sleep over something the author likely chose. Its their right to not care how the code is used, maybe we should abide their wishes?
Is there perhaps there's an issue with licensing? Eg there's no easy license akin to MIT for small time devs, but less open for $50M VC babies? Ie is there a scenario where an author like this wants something akin to MIT for small groups, but still doesn't want to be taken advantage of by massively backed corporations?
The biggest scam that was ever pulled was convincing software developers that the GPL was somehow bad and out of vogue and that open source should prefer BSD, MIT, Apache, etc instead.
And now we have entire threads like this of people crying because some company used someone's software exactly as the license allows.
It's a shame, but there really is no sympathy for projects that choose the wrong license. Stallman knew this decades ago and somehow even now we're still learning it.
It’s not that complicated. Most of us program for work, and can’t use GPL stuff at work.
People were optimizing for being the most useful and therefore getting the most use.
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The GPL would not have prevented the scenario that the top-level comment complained about. Nothing in the GPL requires rich downstream projects to send money to poor upstream projects. That's by design. The four freedoms that Stallman preaches intentionally permit distributing the software to free riders.
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The biggest scam is GPL convincing people that the license will keep things open source. Every try contributing to Chrome's web engine? It started as GPL khtml, but good luck doing anything as google controls it. Meanwhile FreeBSD manages to get plenty of contributors.
Don't get me wrong, license is important. However it doesn't have nearly the effect many people claim.
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