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I can see your point. People will go where they can get the best deal and nobody likes having the rug pulled out from under them and suddenly having to solve li
by emodendroket 5y ago
I can see your point. People will go where they can get the best deal and nobody likes having the rug pulled out from under them and suddenly having to solve licensing problems. But I can see the article’s standpoint too. Building multi-million or -billion dollar edifices on top of the free labor of FOSS maintainers is arguably exploitative and unsustainable, and the idea of being unwilling to pay a small fee for something “critical to the business” is somewhat absurd on its face.
- jka 5y agoSure, and I hear the concern regarding exploitation of (potentially overworked, underpaid) developers and maintainers. But if a thousand people receive a free (perhaps sugar-addled) lunch from one of a few providers -- while collectively having the resources to feed each other free lunches (more sustainably, long-term) -- it doesn't seem fair to attack and blame those people for asking difficult questions about their food source. Even if they might seem entitled today, they're asking questions that will probably appear more than fair in retrospect. (I realize these analogies don't fit perfectly, and I'm aware I'm reframing the issue, perhaps awkwardly) With software, fortunately, it may be business critical, but it's rarely personal-health critical the way that nutrition is (unless, perhaps, we have already incorporated infrastructure too deeply into ourselves as humans).