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Obviously a personal subject, as you have to figure out what you value in your life. But for me the answer is, and I think always will be: absolutely yes! I fl

Obviously a personal subject, as you have to figure out what you value in your life. But for me the answer is, and I think always will be: absolutely yes! I flunked at school early, never paid any attention and was only drawn to computer stuff, even though that was before it was mainstream. I found programming, and learned programming thanks to public knowledge posted on the internet, people sharing information via IRC channels and reading through open source code. I don't think I would ever become a real programmer unless it was for open source code and general openness of the internet at the time. Now I live a comfy life beyond what I imagined at the time, when I was just programming for fun. So now I can give back and give others the opportunity I had, by doing the same activities and helping others to learn more on their journey. I couldn't ignore the shoulders I stand on and not offer my own shoulders to others. A life without contributing back patches to libraries I depend on is not a life worth living. For me. > Since companies steal Open Source software without a care in the world, what’s to stop companies from stealing Rig and embedding it into their proprietary software? I don't understand this viewpoint. How can a company "steal" open source software? The license you have given the project is to allow anyone to access/modify/use the software in any way they want, so it can't be stealing at that point. That sounds like you want to write software that is not open source, which is fine as well, but has nothing to do with open source software really.

Teknoman117 5y ago
Yeah. It's not stealing if they use it under the terms of the license you placed your project under. I personally prefer licenses like MPL or LGPL, because it aligns with my own views of open source. If you're going to change and/or improve my project, I want those changes available to the community. If you just use my project as-in, I don't really care. I mean, if you turn my shower-thought open source project into the next multi-million dollar service, ya know, a kickback would be nice, but I'm not expecting that in any way. And either way, if a company were to put money into one of my projects, I would personally consider myself to have an obligation to listen to them. That turns the project from a thing I did to relax into a potential chore, and I may not really want that.
- pabs3 5y ago
  MPL and LGPL don't make the changes available to the community, only to downstream users. Those users won't necessarily share the changes back upstream. There aren't any open source licenses with this feature, and it is arguable that such a feature wouldn't be open source, because someone on a desert island (or a dissident) can't reasonably comply with them.
  - Teknoman117 5y ago
    Right, but nothing prevents you from closing the loop. If I (project developer) purchase a copy of their application or convince another customer to help, I can then request their changes and either merge it or cherry-pick parts of it into upstream if I wanted to. None of the licenses require work on the part of downstream to collaborate with upstream, only that a user of downstream can get the changes made to components the license applies to.
    - pabs3 5y ago
      Correct, but it isn't always possible to do that; it might be too expensive, the company might be picky about its customers, existing customers might be unwilling to share the competitive advantage they paid for, the company might have a grsec style "we don't give updates if you share the code" setup, etc.

Teknoman117 5y ago

Yeah. It's not stealing if they use it under the terms of the license you placed your project under. I personally prefer licenses like MPL or LGPL, because it aligns with my own views of open source. If you're going to change and/or improve my project, I want those changes available to the community. If you just use my project as-in, I don't really care. I mean, if you turn my shower-thought open source project into the next multi-million dollar service, ya know, a kickback would be nice, but I'm not expecting that in any way. And either way, if a company were to put money into one of my projects, I would personally consider myself to have an obligation to listen to them. That turns the project from a thing I did to relax into a potential chore, and I may not really want that.

pabs3 5y ago
MPL and LGPL don't make the changes available to the community, only to downstream users. Those users won't necessarily share the changes back upstream. There aren't any open source licenses with this feature, and it is arguable that such a feature wouldn't be open source, because someone on a desert island (or a dissident) can't reasonably comply with them.
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  Right, but nothing prevents you from closing the loop. If I (project developer) purchase a copy of their application or convince another customer to help, I can then request their changes and either merge it or cherry-pick parts of it into upstream if I wanted to. None of the licenses require work on the part of downstream to collaborate with upstream, only that a user of downstream can get the changes made to components the license applies to.
  - pabs3 5y ago
    Correct, but it isn't always possible to do that; it might be too expensive, the company might be picky about its customers, existing customers might be unwilling to share the competitive advantage they paid for, the company might have a grsec style "we don't give updates if you share the code" setup, etc.