Comment by nirvdrum

He didn’t ask for it, as far as I can tell. It looks like a Rovio customer asked how they treat downstream partners. I think that’s allowed under capitalism.

Be that as it may, plenty of engineers don’t understand the full ramifications of their open source license choice. Undoubtedly some, if not many, regret it afterwards. Companies change the terms or revoke licenses all the time. But, the dumb, naive engineer that gave their work away didn’t pay a lawyer to advise how to best give their work away, so screw ‘em.

If I made a boatload of money on the back of someone else’s work, I’d reward them. You wouldn’t. Neither one of us is legally required to. I’m not fond of taking advantage of people that don’t realize their worth. And I think the whole open source thing works best giving and taking, whether that’s code, money, or time.

But, this cutthroat approach to open source also hasn’t always been the societal norm. IBM and others made sizable donations to groups like the Apache Software Foundation back in the 90s and 00s and were more or less expected to do so. It seemed to me more a case of both sides agreeing a bunch of money could be spent on lawyers to iron out whatever terms or we could keep the licensing simple and have a gentlemen’s agreement on how to conduct ourselves. I’ve never heard of the Box2D guy so I hope that fame was worth something. It sounds a lot like being paid in exposure.

To your point, I don’t know how to codify a “leave a penny, take a penny” approach to open source and really don’t have the inclination to spend either the time or the money on a lawyer to figure that out. So, nowadays I just don’t release open source code anymore or, if I do, it’s AGPL just so I can protect my interests. I don’t think I’m alone in this. The camaraderie aspect of it has been supplanted by maximum value extraction and I don’t think that’s really sustainable. But between LLMs and an endless source of naive optimists, maybe this is fine.