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> We’re heading towards a handful of giant companies that can afford to pay large teams to build and maintain FOSS, and hence own developer mindshare, for their

> We’re heading towards a handful of giant companies that can afford to pay large teams to build and maintain FOSS, and hence own developer mindshare, for their own selfish reasons. "heading towards"? I'd say we're there. And it's been a while coming. I wrongly discounted Stallman. Like many, I found the GPL onerous and annoying to deal with as a developer. But we've paid a high price.

Rochus 6y ago
> But we've paid a high price. What price?
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Everyone using BSD and Apache licenses - so any changes or improvements they make aren't contributed back to the source repo.
  - Rochus 6y ago
    Well, there are also many who want to contribute code back to GPL and LGPL projects, but can't because the companies that control these projects want them to sign contributor agreements with unacceptable terms.
    - nine_k 6y ago
      According to GPL, you do not need to contribute back to the original authors, you only need to make your changes available under GPL. But maintaining a fork is not everyone's cup of tea.
      - Rochus 6y ago
        > But maintaining a fork is not everyone's cup of tea. It is not in the interest or benefit of the community if everyone makes or is forced to make his/her own fork. Forces should be joined, not scattered.
    - jabl 6y ago
      Probably a big reason why Linux is successful in attracting contributions; the distributed copyright means that there's nobody more equal among equals that has the sole right to monetize it however they see fit. Everybody gets the same deal.
  - yarcob 6y ago
    Have a look at PostgreSQL, SQLite, LLVM, Clang ... all these are projects that get a lot of support from proprietary software vendors. I'm pretty sure that the companies contribute to these projects because of the liberal license, not in spite of it. I think a big fallacy with regard to the GPL is that companies don't contribute to open source because the license forces them to. Companies contribute to open source because it makes more sense to collaborate on some projects rather than each work on their own. Licenses like GPL etc. are great for ensuring their user's freedom; but they don't really incentivise companies to contribute to them at all. Instead, they prevent some companies from using them. So counter-intuitively project with liberal licenses end up with much more contributions than projects with strong licenses...
    - ithrow 6y ago
      Counter argument: the Linux kernel. (Since we are mentioning open source projects with the highest profile on earth, I don't think neither of the examples are fair)
      - yarcob 6y ago
        I agree, the Linux kernel is one of the examples where the GPL really works, because a lot of companies really need it for their products, and they need to distribute it, and there are very few alternatives.
        DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
        > there are very few alternatives QNX, WxWorks, Windows Embedded, Windows CE (RIP), NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OS/2 Warp, Plan 9, Inferno, RiscOS, ReactOS... It's a shame what happened to BeOS - I wonder what would have happened if BeOS was open-sourced when the expected Apple buyout fizzled and the company went-under instead of it simply disappearing - that would have put a huge damper on, say, Ubuntu and other Linux desktop projects because the whole selling-point of them being "the only usable desktop alternative to Windows on non-Apple hardware!" wouldn't be true.
- monoideism 6y ago
  See my other comment in this thread for my answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25896907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25896907
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I don't think it's really a price - including corporate projects was always the point of "open source" as opposed to "free software". The split is generally understood to have started when part of the community embraced Netscape's open source browser.
- monoideism 6y ago
  To be clear, I don't typically have any issue with corporate use of my code. That's why I chose MIT and other permissive licenses. That said, what I had in mind when I licensed my code were start-ups and small+medium businesses. It didn't occur to me that behemoths like Amazon might stripmine open source and fail to contribute back. Even though the permissive licenses permit this kind of behavior, it seems exploitative. Additionally, as the GP mentions, we're at the point where it's primarily massive tech companies who can afford to develop ambitious open source projects. Far more importantly, it also failed to occur to me that tech companies would become the new railroads -- massive monopolies that dominate society, the economy, culture, politics, etc. When I started in open source, Microsoft had recently been slapped down by antitrust regulators, there was no social media, and the tech ecosystem - particularly the open source ecosystem - was much, much different. It was more democratic, egalitarian, and balanced. Granted, as far as I know, it has been small and medium sized companies that have used my own open source code. I'm not aware of any of the Big 5 using it (my most popular libaries have been superceded by newer/better projects anyway). Nonetheless, I would have been more wary of philosophically supporting permissive licenses had I fully realized the implications.
  - jabl 6y ago
    > Far more importantly, it also failed to occur to me that tech companies would become the new railroads -- massive monopolies that dominate society, the economy, culture, politics, etc. These are social and political problems, you can't fix them by sitting in your basement writing copyleft code anymore than you fix them by writing permissively licensed code. It's not like the FAANG's of the world would go, oh no we really want to use this copyleft library, oh well, let's release all our code under a copyleft license as well. They'd just use some other code with a more permissive license, or then they would reimplement the needed functionality themselves.

Rochus 6y ago

> But we've paid a high price. What price?

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
Everyone using BSD and Apache licenses - so any changes or improvements they make aren't contributed back to the source repo.
- Rochus 6y ago
  Well, there are also many who want to contribute code back to GPL and LGPL projects, but can't because the companies that control these projects want them to sign contributor agreements with unacceptable terms.
  - nine_k 6y ago
    According to GPL, you do not need to contribute back to the original authors, you only need to make your changes available under GPL. But maintaining a fork is not everyone's cup of tea.
    - Rochus 6y ago
      > But maintaining a fork is not everyone's cup of tea. It is not in the interest or benefit of the community if everyone makes or is forced to make his/her own fork. Forces should be joined, not scattered.
  - jabl 6y ago
    Probably a big reason why Linux is successful in attracting contributions; the distributed copyright means that there's nobody more equal among equals that has the sole right to monetize it however they see fit. Everybody gets the same deal.
- yarcob 6y ago
  Have a look at PostgreSQL, SQLite, LLVM, Clang ... all these are projects that get a lot of support from proprietary software vendors. I'm pretty sure that the companies contribute to these projects because of the liberal license, not in spite of it. I think a big fallacy with regard to the GPL is that companies don't contribute to open source because the license forces them to. Companies contribute to open source because it makes more sense to collaborate on some projects rather than each work on their own. Licenses like GPL etc. are great for ensuring their user's freedom; but they don't really incentivise companies to contribute to them at all. Instead, they prevent some companies from using them. So counter-intuitively project with liberal licenses end up with much more contributions than projects with strong licenses...
  - ithrow 6y ago
    Counter argument: the Linux kernel. (Since we are mentioning open source projects with the highest profile on earth, I don't think neither of the examples are fair)
    - yarcob 6y ago
      I agree, the Linux kernel is one of the examples where the GPL really works, because a lot of companies really need it for their products, and they need to distribute it, and there are very few alternatives.
      - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
        > there are very few alternatives QNX, WxWorks, Windows Embedded, Windows CE (RIP), NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OS/2 Warp, Plan 9, Inferno, RiscOS, ReactOS... It's a shame what happened to BeOS - I wonder what would have happened if BeOS was open-sourced when the expected Apple buyout fizzled and the company went-under instead of it simply disappearing - that would have put a huge damper on, say, Ubuntu and other Linux desktop projects because the whole selling-point of them being "the only usable desktop alternative to Windows on non-Apple hardware!" wouldn't be true.
monoideism 6y ago
See my other comment in this thread for my answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25896907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25896907

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

I don't think it's really a price - including corporate projects was always the point of "open source" as opposed to "free software". The split is generally understood to have started when part of the community embraced Netscape's open source browser.

monoideism 6y ago
To be clear, I don't typically have any issue with corporate use of my code. That's why I chose MIT and other permissive licenses. That said, what I had in mind when I licensed my code were start-ups and small+medium businesses. It didn't occur to me that behemoths like Amazon might stripmine open source and fail to contribute back. Even though the permissive licenses permit this kind of behavior, it seems exploitative. Additionally, as the GP mentions, we're at the point where it's primarily massive tech companies who can afford to develop ambitious open source projects. Far more importantly, it also failed to occur to me that tech companies would become the new railroads -- massive monopolies that dominate society, the economy, culture, politics, etc. When I started in open source, Microsoft had recently been slapped down by antitrust regulators, there was no social media, and the tech ecosystem - particularly the open source ecosystem - was much, much different. It was more democratic, egalitarian, and balanced. Granted, as far as I know, it has been small and medium sized companies that have used my own open source code. I'm not aware of any of the Big 5 using it (my most popular libaries have been superceded by newer/better projects anyway). Nonetheless, I would have been more wary of philosophically supporting permissive licenses had I fully realized the implications.
- jabl 6y ago
  > Far more importantly, it also failed to occur to me that tech companies would become the new railroads -- massive monopolies that dominate society, the economy, culture, politics, etc. These are social and political problems, you can't fix them by sitting in your basement writing copyleft code anymore than you fix them by writing permissively licensed code. It's not like the FAANG's of the world would go, oh no we really want to use this copyleft library, oh well, let's release all our code under a copyleft license as well. They'd just use some other code with a more permissive license, or then they would reimplement the needed functionality themselves.