4 ms·
this quite reminds of the openssl saga, but on a smaller scale, with single developer more or less responsible for world's encryption for decade. it's a pity,
by larodi 7y ago
this quite reminds of the openssl saga, but on a smaller scale, with single developer more or less responsible for world's encryption for decade.
it's a pity, it's a shame that companies who use FOSS benefit, but do not understand (or do, but ignore) the idea of FOSS, which is to give back to community. this also includes other FOSS companies, etc as everyone uses openssl, zlib and sqlite.
to base a project on FOSS requires that you contribute back. or pay back if you can. and when your business makes 1000$ then 1$ out of every 1000$ for the FOSS guy that made it possible is money worth spending, isn't it?
if it's true that VeraCrypt, the G company and others based work on this developer's efforts and forgot, for decade, to give back anything, well - it's well deserved to leave them staring at the blank repo. well deserved indeed, as they had plenty of time and resource to compensate the author while reaping benefits off his work. well done to choose the BSD license in this case.
all other companies building big-software based on hundreds opensource projects should rethink their strategies.
there is no free lunch, someone pays for it. and its a shame, when this someone is left alone to pay for his lunch, while hundreds benefit from it. maybe there should be the FOSS Church and at least make these people revered as saints.
- solidasparagus 7y ago> to base a project on FOSS requires that you contribute back No, it absolutely does not. If that was a requirement, it should say so in the license. If you don't want your work to be publicly usable by people who don't contribute, don't open source it.
- aembleton 7y agoWhy should companies give back when the code was licenced in such a way as to not require it? If a developer works on a project and wants commercial companies to give back then they can choose a suitable licence such as GPLv3; if they just want to get their code out there and don't really mind how it's used then BSD is more suitable.
- hmottestad 7y agoSeems like the reason he changed it up!
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoMaybe they don't need to, but it would be good to have an ecosystem that incentiviszed sharing instead of relegating it to an altruistic few. That's on both the companies and the creators.
- bagacrap 7y agoIf a large software company had to pay 0.1% of its profit (revenue?) to each foss dependency they wouldn't have any left. And contributing back is not as easy as lobbing code over the wall, you have to spend a lot of time and energy coming to agreements on what makes sense to share and how to organize it. It would probably be a full time job for Mr Benjamin to vet external contributions even if everyone could agree that all were desirable.
- pjmlp 7y agoWhy? That is how everyone else does business, paying their suppliers and tooling.
- solidasparagus 7y agoAnd choosing their suppliers based on prices... This is like a supplier offering their services for free and then bitching that no one is paying.
- pjmlp 7y agoFrom the amount of people complaining here, it seems to me more like everyone is now pissed off that the supplier decided to go elsewhere and stop offering gratis services, as means to pay their bills.