2 ms·

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 appr

by 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.

by sah2ed 7y ago

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.