4 ms·
Open source developers, who work for free, are discovering they have power
- jqpabc123 5y agoThis article should be subtitled, "What's fundamentally wrong with Open Source?". It never quite addresses the follow on question, "... and who's fault is it?".
- olingern 5y agoIMO, asking payment for open source defeats the purpose of open source software. It’s like an artist gifting a work of art and then expecting compensation after it becomes a extremely popular. I think the real issue is licensing. We need a separate license for companies that use OSS. A license that expects companies to fund bugs/security fixes if they are interested in the outcome. I think we need something that builds upon GPL and MIT that makes it clear that if a company is making $xx,xxx’s of dollars from an implementation — they must contribute to the project’s funding. Even better, a monthly subscription that GitHub/Gitlab/etc implement that charge companies who use a project and then automatically allocate a % to each project used from the fee. This would lead to new and different problems, but less “companies are taking advantage of my code” problems. I think it would also incentivize more OSS similar to how YouTube’s ad model made it possible for people to create more content