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What this article misses is the presence of bad faith actors who make billions from open source but studiously work to prevent even a small amount of that flowi
by seoaeu 6y ago
What this article misses is the presence of bad faith actors who make billions from open source but studiously work to prevent even a small amount of that flowing back to the companies that wrote the software. Kind of like the difference between a restaurant failing because they can't get enough customers vs. failing because people keep robbing them.
- tybit 6y agoThis is a bad faith analogy, others profiting from OSS they didn’t write themselves is a feature not a bug. Stealing from a restaurant is not.
- seoaeu 6y agoOthers profiting at the expense of the authors is not a desired feature. A necessary consequence of the current OSS regime perhaps, but not desired. The definitions written down decades ago don't have to be the final say. I chose the example of stealing from a restaurant precisely because if that were happening, people would call for legal changes to prevent it. Which proves it is sometimes worthwhile to make legal changes to protect value creating enterprises. The only question is whether or how the same should be done for OSS.