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It is infuriating how the these companies have managed to appropriate open source for profit. I would be pissed if my unpaid hard work community contributions w

It is infuriating how the these companies have managed to appropriate open source for profit. I would be pissed if my unpaid hard work community contributions were being appropriated to make Bezos richer while harming the OSS ecosystem that I love. That said, I don't think that more restrictive licensing is the answer. I don't know the answer TBH.

Jtsummers 5y ago
Why would you be pissed if you gave away your work? Don't give it away under a license that permits commercial use if you don't want it to be used (freely) to make money by others.
- jacob019 5y ago
  Because the are selling your work for profit without giving anything back to the community.
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    TBH if it's not in tge contract I would not really blame them. Change your license then.
  - saimiam 5y ago
    I sense that you haven’t fully internalized the idea of some of the popular open source licenses. Such licenses are a bit like letting go of a balloon. Most times, the balloon will float away and pop on some tree with no benefit to anyone. In a few rare occasions, your obnoxious neighborhood kid will grab that balloon and play with it all afternoon. You might not like that the kid is enjoying your balloon but no right minded person would expect that the kid’s parents recompense you for the balloon you let go willingly. TBF, not long ago, someone posted on HN that AWS simply used their open source ware without even a thank you. It created quite a bit of noise on HN, so your opinion isn’t too far outside the norm.
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      It's more like setting up a little reading library. Have you seen those? People build little dollhouses and fill them with books with the idea that anyone can grab one and donate back when they can. It's mostly to encourage children to read. Now imagine Amazon comes by and lists the books in the reading library on it's website for sale. You offered them for free after all. Further they are knocking on your door obnoxiously asking you when you are going to get a particular book in stock, since they have a customer who wants it.
    - trelane 5y ago
      I won't comment on the other licenses, but the point of the GPL is _user empowerment._ The origin is that Stallmann had a broken printer but was not able to fix it due to it having a proprietary driver.[1] It's not at all about ensuring support (or preventing profit). It's all about ensuring the end user (even if that end user is 37 steps away from the original author!) has _all_ the rights to do anything with the software that they would like. Quite a lot of the time the user may not be able or want to use the rights granted them, but that doesn't make those rights useless. Indeed, they serve an important function, see the various offshoots of that early Linksys WRT code! It saddens me greatly that so many have lost sight of this. [1] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201d-redux-a-testimonial-about-the-injustice-of-proprietary-firmware https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201...
theamk 5y ago
Why not? Licensing is designed exactly for that purpose. When you choose an MIT/BSD license, you are giving an express permission for other to profit from your code and give you nothing back. It's not like it is new or something.. I remember reading the same discussions back in 2000's, when people discovered that Windows used parts of BSD's network stack.
- jacob019 5y ago
  Historically, when businesses adopted open source software they would contribute upstream. Cloud vendors changed that model. It's interesting that attitudes about this behavior have changed.
  - theamk 5y ago
    They did? Which fraction of bash users (for example) contributed anything upstream? I am betting significatly less than 1%. I am not sure why people suddenly get outraged about cloud. Most webhosting providers in the last 20 years had business criticaly dependent on Linux kernel and Apache. Almost none of them contibuted anything to those projects. And people were not complaining.
    - rmbyrro 5y ago
      I suspect there's an ideological influence to this weird outrageousness. But I'm probably wrong.
      - jabl 5y ago
        Back then OSS was more volunteer labor based, or red hat style business models based on support contracts etc. So there was maybe less expectation of monetizing OSS directly. These days the conflict seems to be about big cloud vendors productizing OSS code made by SaaS vendors, thus directly competing with them. It seems more like an economic argument (we want to get paid for the OSS we create) dressed up as an ideological one (OSS is about community, or whatever).
    - 5y ago

Jtsummers 5y ago

Why would you be pissed if you gave away your work? Don't give it away under a license that permits commercial use if you don't want it to be used (freely) to make money by others.

jacob019 5y ago
Because the are selling your work for profit without giving anything back to the community.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  TBH if it's not in tge contract I would not really blame them. Change your license then.
- saimiam 5y ago
  I sense that you haven’t fully internalized the idea of some of the popular open source licenses. Such licenses are a bit like letting go of a balloon. Most times, the balloon will float away and pop on some tree with no benefit to anyone. In a few rare occasions, your obnoxious neighborhood kid will grab that balloon and play with it all afternoon. You might not like that the kid is enjoying your balloon but no right minded person would expect that the kid’s parents recompense you for the balloon you let go willingly. TBF, not long ago, someone posted on HN that AWS simply used their open source ware without even a thank you. It created quite a bit of noise on HN, so your opinion isn’t too far outside the norm.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    It's more like setting up a little reading library. Have you seen those? People build little dollhouses and fill them with books with the idea that anyone can grab one and donate back when they can. It's mostly to encourage children to read. Now imagine Amazon comes by and lists the books in the reading library on it's website for sale. You offered them for free after all. Further they are knocking on your door obnoxiously asking you when you are going to get a particular book in stock, since they have a customer who wants it.
  - trelane 5y ago
    I won't comment on the other licenses, but the point of the GPL is _user empowerment._ The origin is that Stallmann had a broken printer but was not able to fix it due to it having a proprietary driver.[1] It's not at all about ensuring support (or preventing profit). It's all about ensuring the end user (even if that end user is 37 steps away from the original author!) has _all_ the rights to do anything with the software that they would like. Quite a lot of the time the user may not be able or want to use the rights granted them, but that doesn't make those rights useless. Indeed, they serve an important function, see the various offshoots of that early Linksys WRT code! It saddens me greatly that so many have lost sight of this. [1] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201d-redux-a-testimonial-about-the-injustice-of-proprietary-firmware https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201...

theamk 5y ago

Why not? Licensing is designed exactly for that purpose. When you choose an MIT/BSD license, you are giving an express permission for other to profit from your code and give you nothing back. It's not like it is new or something.. I remember reading the same discussions back in 2000's, when people discovered that Windows used parts of BSD's network stack.

jacob019 5y ago
Historically, when businesses adopted open source software they would contribute upstream. Cloud vendors changed that model. It's interesting that attitudes about this behavior have changed.
- theamk 5y ago
  They did? Which fraction of bash users (for example) contributed anything upstream? I am betting significatly less than 1%. I am not sure why people suddenly get outraged about cloud. Most webhosting providers in the last 20 years had business criticaly dependent on Linux kernel and Apache. Almost none of them contibuted anything to those projects. And people were not complaining.
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    I suspect there's an ideological influence to this weird outrageousness. But I'm probably wrong.
    - jabl 5y ago
      Back then OSS was more volunteer labor based, or red hat style business models based on support contracts etc. So there was maybe less expectation of monetizing OSS directly. These days the conflict seems to be about big cloud vendors productizing OSS code made by SaaS vendors, thus directly competing with them. It seems more like an economic argument (we want to get paid for the OSS we create) dressed up as an ideological one (OSS is about community, or whatever).
  - 5y ago