3 ms·

It makes me sad that the way a developer is expected to react when they discover that the Valuable Thing that they gave away for free is being sold by a Big Com

It makes me sad that the way a developer is expected to react when they discover that the Valuable Thing that they gave away for free is being sold by a Big Company for Big Money is to try to ensure that the Valuable Things they give away in the future remain free. I'd much prefer to see the people who build Valuable Things show more interest in capturing some of that value. There's this overwhelming narrative revolving around Open Source that makes it seem shameful to profit from your work. It's maddening to watch. There's no reason we as developers need to be the low man on the totem pole getting tread on by business people. We just set ourselves up that way and socially punish anybody who doesn't.

rwmj 5y ago
If that's what you took from the article, then you got completely the wrong end of the stick. The problem was the removal of the author's attribution and illegal relicensing. He says himself he was glad when Apple later included his tools in macOS with correct attribution and licensing.
- jasonkester 5y ago
  Exactly. That was the problem that he saw. The problem he should have noticed was that the Sun was selling the code he wrote for hundreds of thousands of dollars and not passing any of that on to him. Step one shouldn't have been to worry about putting his header comment back in place and getting them the latest version of his code to sell to their customers. It should have been negotiating a redistribution license for his code if they wanted to continue selling it.
  - rwmj 5y ago
    No, the problem was the licensing change and removal of attribution. I would strongly suggest reading what Brendan says in the article. On this topic, I work for Red Hat where we made $3.4 billion in revenues in the last published year (before being acquired), making exclusively open source software which you can download yourself for no cost.
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    If you want to sell your code, just use a commercial license. He released his code as OSS.
BlueTemplar 5y ago
IMHO the problem is the term "free software" : https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
pjc50 5y ago
This works in the other direction: how many developers are willing to pay for their dependencies? Would things like npm even exist if you had to pay invoices for every bit of code loaded?

rwmj 5y ago

If that's what you took from the article, then you got completely the wrong end of the stick. The problem was the removal of the author's attribution and illegal relicensing. He says himself he was glad when Apple later included his tools in macOS with correct attribution and licensing.

jasonkester 5y ago
Exactly. That was the problem that he saw. The problem he should have noticed was that the Sun was selling the code he wrote for hundreds of thousands of dollars and not passing any of that on to him. Step one shouldn't have been to worry about putting his header comment back in place and getting them the latest version of his code to sell to their customers. It should have been negotiating a redistribution license for his code if they wanted to continue selling it.
- rwmj 5y ago
  No, the problem was the licensing change and removal of attribution. I would strongly suggest reading what Brendan says in the article. On this topic, I work for Red Hat where we made $3.4 billion in revenues in the last published year (before being acquired), making exclusively open source software which you can download yourself for no cost.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  If you want to sell your code, just use a commercial license. He released his code as OSS.

BlueTemplar 5y ago

IMHO the problem is the term "free software" : https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

pjc50 5y ago

This works in the other direction: how many developers are willing to pay for their dependencies? Would things like npm even exist if you had to pay invoices for every bit of code loaded?