4 ms·
Companies will use whatever is at their disposal to grow faster and more efficiently, this is the free market working as intended (and isn't a bad thing by itse
by aeldidi 5y ago
Companies will use whatever is at their disposal to grow faster and more efficiently, this is the free market working as intended (and isn't a bad thing by itself: see free software companies like SourceHut benefiting as well).
I think the core of the problem lies in distribution. We've gotten so used to other people distributing our code for us (through the use of package managers and such) that we've made it hard to actually have a dialogue with our users. Many consumers of packages just know their dependencies by the npm package name, rather than actually seeing what the person has to say about the software, how they plan to maintain it and for how long, etc.
Even things like licenses are really just ignored at large, with there being a general mentality of "it's on Github therefore it's probably MIT". There was something I remember reading a bit ago about a Go project whose license was simply "you do not have permission to use for any reason ever" which was depended on by projects from big organizations such as AWS[0].
This is mostly just a rambling and I don't have any concrete way to solve this, but I think it should be taken into account when assessing whether the problem really lies in the individual license choices of developers, or whether this is some kind of effort by big market actors to keep open source solutions at a subpar level of quality in comparison to commercial offerings (for example: some of Microsoft's VsCode extensions only work on the proprietary version, not any open source forks[1]).
[0]: https://fossa.com/blog/bouk-monkey-importance-knowing-your-dependencies/ https://fossa.com/blog/bouk-monkey-importance-knowing-your-d...
[1]: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/240 https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/240