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> No apologies, no compensation for building a commercial product on something I had spent a decent amount of time on. I think the important question here is d

by sah2ed 7y ago

> No apologies, no compensation for building a commercial product on something I had spent a decent amount of time on. I think the important question here is did they do this in violation of the open source license you had adopted as at the time the alleged infraction took place?

kevingadd 7y ago
Something can be legal and still be incredibly tasteless. If you keep lifting major open source tooling as the basis of your product without contributing, you're eventually going to exhaust the patience and free time of the people working on it. Think about it this way: When Linus started working on Linux and decided to release it under the GPL, was it because he wanted companies to use it as the basis of billion-dollar revenues without sponsoring development or compensating him for his work? Lots of people start contributing to open source at a smaller scale, where it's just individuals and small businesses and non-profit orgs sharing with each other, but it becomes kind of a different matter when a company has dozens or hundreds of millions to throw around and doesn't share back. At least in the case of Linux it is well-funded now but there are other cases where core infra has still suffered - you can find recent stories about how the maintainer of NTP struggled to pay rent even though massive companies rely on it.
- sah2ed 7y ago
  If you think doing so is tasteless, you are clearly approaching this with a social lens and I don’t necessarily disagree with your conclusions. I chose to approach this with an economic lens, hence the question of whether the original license was permissive, which is the green-light that allows all commercial exploitations to not appear illegal in the eyes of the law. Open source is one of those activities where developers, who are no less human than non-developers, interleave social norms with market norms. As far as humans go, social & market/economic norms don’t mix very well [0], so an unfortunate side effect of a lot of open source projects is that our expectations as humans get routinely violated due to the unnatural mix, as your example of the open source NTP developer in near penury clearly illustrates. [0] https://www.aglobalreach.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Social-Norms-vs-Market-Norms.png https://www.aglobalreach.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Soci...
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    I think a fundamental root of this problem is that many foundational parts of the open source/free software model are social and not economic in nature. People are encouraged to view this as a commons, where everyone is helping each other and lifting each other up. In practice, if you put something on github, you're funding some tech company's products, you just don't know it yet. In my case I built and maintained my software for 3 years and when I chose my license I knew the license meant that someone could repackage it and sell it. That was a decision I made, and maybe my decision was wrong, but in the end the economic factors meant I could no longer pay rent by doing it anymore, so I stopped. Those actors lost the foundation of their product as a result, so the economic factors didn't end up working out in their favor either. I could perhaps have prevented their actions by using the GPL, but it wouldn't have suddenly made them pay me - they would have just lifted someone else's inferior permissively-licensed solution, because there were multiple options and mine was just the best. I did previously have corporate sponsorship, but that never lasts forever.
- manigandham 7y ago
  Taste has nothing to do with it. You can't give people an explicit ability to use your code and then be upset that they did. If you want money then ask for it. Offer a product or service. There are dozens of licenses to choose from.
- acollins1331 7y ago
  Woah the tech tips guy wrote Linux

by sah2ed 7y ago

kevingadd 7y ago

Something can be legal and still be incredibly tasteless. If you keep lifting major open source tooling as the basis of your product without contributing, you're eventually going to exhaust the patience and free time of the people working on it. Think about it this way: When Linus started working on Linux and decided to release it under the GPL, was it because he wanted companies to use it as the basis of billion-dollar revenues without sponsoring development or compensating him for his work? Lots of people start contributing to open source at a smaller scale, where it's just individuals and small businesses and non-profit orgs sharing with each other, but it becomes kind of a different matter when a company has dozens or hundreds of millions to throw around and doesn't share back. At least in the case of Linux it is well-funded now but there are other cases where core infra has still suffered - you can find recent stories about how the maintainer of NTP struggled to pay rent even though massive companies rely on it.

sah2ed 7y ago
If you think doing so is tasteless, you are clearly approaching this with a social lens and I don’t necessarily disagree with your conclusions. I chose to approach this with an economic lens, hence the question of whether the original license was permissive, which is the green-light that allows all commercial exploitations to not appear illegal in the eyes of the law. Open source is one of those activities where developers, who are no less human than non-developers, interleave social norms with market norms. As far as humans go, social & market/economic norms don’t mix very well [0], so an unfortunate side effect of a lot of open source projects is that our expectations as humans get routinely violated due to the unnatural mix, as your example of the open source NTP developer in near penury clearly illustrates. [0] https://www.aglobalreach.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Social-Norms-vs-Market-Norms.png https://www.aglobalreach.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Soci...
- kevingadd 7y ago
  I think a fundamental root of this problem is that many foundational parts of the open source/free software model are social and not economic in nature. People are encouraged to view this as a commons, where everyone is helping each other and lifting each other up. In practice, if you put something on github, you're funding some tech company's products, you just don't know it yet. In my case I built and maintained my software for 3 years and when I chose my license I knew the license meant that someone could repackage it and sell it. That was a decision I made, and maybe my decision was wrong, but in the end the economic factors meant I could no longer pay rent by doing it anymore, so I stopped. Those actors lost the foundation of their product as a result, so the economic factors didn't end up working out in their favor either. I could perhaps have prevented their actions by using the GPL, but it wouldn't have suddenly made them pay me - they would have just lifted someone else's inferior permissively-licensed solution, because there were multiple options and mine was just the best. I did previously have corporate sponsorship, but that never lasts forever.
manigandham 7y ago
Taste has nothing to do with it. You can't give people an explicit ability to use your code and then be upset that they did. If you want money then ask for it. Offer a product or service. There are dozens of licenses to choose from.
acollins1331 7y ago
Woah the tech tips guy wrote Linux