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I'm really curious, what do you want the FOSS community exactly to accept and what would the outcome be? There are some FOSS business models. Sometimes they wo
by hannob 7y ago
I'm really curious, what do you want the FOSS community exactly to accept and what would the outcome be?
There are some FOSS business models. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. Overall there's more FOSS than ever before, it's an amazingly successful concept. It doesn't always work, some projects and companies fail or decide to stop being FOSS. That doesn't change the fact that it's an amazingly successful concept.
- fauigerzigerk 7y agoI think the concept hasn't been as successful as some had hoped for when it comes to moving power and control over software away from big corporations towards users. As an anti-capitalist movement/dream, open source has utterly failed. As a concept that has provided lots of opportunities for developers and startups it has been a great success.
- baq 7y agoAgreed. The GPL has been a great success, so much so it's been banned by capitalists in their organizations with the result of dying pretty much everywhere except the kernel, GNU userland and an occasional dual licensed fully enterprise-copyrighted software. BSD with its take it and run with it approach enables people to make a living by modifying (or selling unmodified) software. The situation is dire especially in the internet non-core-router infrastructure.
- jeltz 7y agoPersonally I mostly associate GPL with capitalism, due to almost all projects controlled by a single for profit company using GPL while community and hobbyist projects more often tend to use BSD/MIT/Apache.
- saagarjha 7y ago> almost all projects controlled by a single for profit company using GPL Which ones? The two flagship ones I can think of for GPL, Linux and GCC, don’t really have one company in control of them. And on the flip side LLVM and the browser engines, which are arguably under reasonably strong control of one or two companies, are usually Apache or similar.
- intsunny 7y agoYou mostly associate GPL with capitalism? The GNU created the GPL and licensed most of their software under it. I can't think of an organization less interested in capitalism. Rather the opposite because the viral nature of the license. Linus picked the GPL to be less commercial/restrictive than the Minix source code.
- arminiusreturns 7y agoUgg. So tired of this misunderstanding of GPL... You can sell GPL software! All BSD/MIT does is allow it to end up tivoized and remove power from the user. GPL is freedom for the user. BSD is freedom for the dev. Not all users are devs, but all devs are users. Users should take precedence.
- ajconway 7y agoUltimately, BSD is less restrictive than GPL. Users won't have any power if they don't have software to use. It just happens that BSD (or similar) licenses are easier to deal with when developing things.
- arminiusreturns 7y agoI am open to and find some merit in the argument that users could just fork, etc. Using GPL does seem to favor certain profit models more than others inherently, but non are exclusive, and there have been quite a few GPL success stories money wise out there. I really like RedHat for this reason. It shows that it is the service and support, and the act of maintaining software, that makes it's money, and their books are open so you can see exactly how it works. A comparable startup/project probably won't get VC'd into a unicorn, but there is plenty of room for growth in the GPL software for sale along with service and support category.