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Open source software doesn't make money because it isn't designed to make money [1]. Others are able to use faker for profit without owing anything to faker bec
by VoodooJuJu 5y ago
Open source software doesn't make money because it isn't designed to make money [1]. Others are able to use faker for profit without owing anything to faker because faker gives them license to do so [2].
You use a hammer to set a nail in wood, you don't use a feather. If you try and fail to set a nail in wood with a feather, then the problem isn't failure to set the nail, the problem is you chose a feather for the job.
If you want to make money with software, then offer/license it in a way that requires payment - problem solved.
[1] Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money | Hacker News, 2019. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19431444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19431444
[2] https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
- sascha_sl 5y agoThe problem here is that there will always be someone who fills problems that aren't extremely specialized or hard to solve with a permissive license. If you use a less permissive license, you simply wouldn't see your code used. There needs to be some way to balance these interests that do not end up with someone working their ass off for absolutely nothing. Particularly enterprise users of FOSS can afford to pay up. In my experience, developers in those companies want that to happen too, but it simply can't be justified to business. This will keep going for a few years until every single person willing to put in the work is either burned out or has changed to a more copyleft license. We're starting to see that with less trivial projects already (Databases going BSL, Grafana Labs switching to AGPL)