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Comment by duskdozer

9 hours ago

>As an example, he put up a slide listing the 47 car brands that use curl in their products; he followed it with a slide listing the brands that contribute to curl. The second slide, needless to say, was empty.

>He emphasized that he has released curl under a free license, so there is no legal problem with what these companies are doing. But, he suggested, these companies might want to think a bit more about the future of the software they depend on.

There is little reason for minimal-restriction licenses to exist other than to allow corporate use without compensation or contribution. I would think by now that any hope that they would voluntarily be any less exploitative than they can would have been dashed.

If you aren't getting paid or working purely for your own benefit, use a protective license. Though, if thinly veiled license violation via LLM is allowed to stand, this won't be enough.

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duskdozer

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marcus_holmes  9 hours ago

There is a lot of opposition in the FOSS community for restrictive/protective licenses. And to be fair, this comes from a consistent and entirely logical worldview.

There's a bunch of problems with getting companies to pay for this, too - that sense of entitlement (or even contractual obligation), the ability to control the project with cash, etc.

I don't have any answers or solutions. But I don't think we can hand-wave the problem away.

  • uecker  8 hours ago

    The problem is that they get away too easily with bugs in their products they ship to customers. If this would come with some penalties, there would be some incentive to invest in security and this would probably often flow back to upstream projects.