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IMO, 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
by olingern 5y ago
IMO, 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