Comment by Zigurd
17 hours ago
RMS addressed the business model from the very beginning: it's services and consulting. He practiced what he preached.
You might think that's got a very low ceiling. But, even though it's a bad example in many ways, OpenAI showed that the ceiling is very high. And if you're morally flexible even higher.
RMS promotes GPL, not MIT licensed software.
When a bigger entity (e.g. AWS) decides to undercut the original creator/vendor (e.g. redis,elastic search), MIT code des not help.
RMS would probably agree with you and think that I'm apostate. But there's an open source license for the full spectrum of software authors' preferences. Depending on the circumstances some could turn out to be a poor choice.
I know some lawyers who specialize in these choices. Everyone thinks their choice doesn't smell, but there are the resources to make informed choices.
Actually dual license, those that want industry friendly license can get as much as they are willing to give upstream.
With MIT there isn't much to goan with business comptiable licensing.
There the question turns to "you may sue me, if it breaks" as reasoning. In reality sueing will rarely work, but having a business contract satisfies the company's board and insurance about using the software over an "AS IS"-license alone.
It helps just fine. The original software is still there, available for anyone to use for free. AWS et al can't take that away from us, no matter what they choose to do with their fork.
When they say "doesn't help", they're talking about the developers of the original software you want to use for free getting to eat food and have a roof over their head.
It has an extremely low ceiling. You literally cannot make consumer-targeted software if you want to survive while writing open-source code. Services and consulting is strictly B2B, and services and consulting for open-source software is capable of supporting a population of like 1% of existing software developers. Advocating for this dogmatic ideal that would cull the field by 99% is ridiculous.
I don't know how you came to OpenAI as an example given that they famously succeeded while going closed-source with the release of ChatGPT.