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Open-Source was always and forever will be an act of charity. Volunteering. Something born of good will for the common good. I feel there was a rush for gold an

Open-Source was always and forever will be an act of charity. Volunteering. Something born of good will for the common good. I feel there was a rush for gold and power with the rise of the iPhone appification and the Social Network rockstarification of the software world. Thank you for writing exactly as you did, it’s frustrating for the “old timers” coming from the hacker culture of yore to grapple with the money grubbers.

culi 4y ago
I don't think this really represents the full spectrum of beliefs for why people open-source their work. Some of us just fundamentally disagree with the copyright system in general and OS or public domain is more of a "non-participation" If someone wants to put their work in the public domain and only leave a note in their README that they don't want this to be used for profit and then complain when a company uses it a way they don't like then I 100% agree and support them. This is the problem with laws and rules. They tend to replace independent moral thought. Instead of asking whether it was right or wrong for that company to use it without the consent of the author, we all get stuck on "well, technically". There's a difference between legal rights and morals. tl;dr: Some people choose not to participate in the copyright system simply because they wanna push back against us offshoring our abilities to think critically about morals to regulatory bodies. Open source isn't "an act of charity". It's a lot of things to a lot of people
- toastal 4y ago
  > they don't want this to be used for profit This sounds like the Creative Commons NonCommercial licenses. Too bad they aren't recommended for code too. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpretation https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpre...
  - culi 4y ago
    Yeah but that's missing the point imo. The ideological battle is about what is the "default" here. Our legal system has overtaken the commons and now to do something that would have at one point been the assumed default of human cultural products is now something you have to explicitly state. And even then it's just giving you sort of a platform to fight off of within the very legal system that took this away in the first place
MaxBarraclough 4y ago
> Open-Source was always and forever will be an act of charity. Volunteering. Many high-profile Free and Open Source software projects are developed mainly by paid employees. Some examples: the Linux kernel, OpenJDK, Firefox, and Chromium.

culi 4y ago

I don't think this really represents the full spectrum of beliefs for why people open-source their work. Some of us just fundamentally disagree with the copyright system in general and OS or public domain is more of a "non-participation" If someone wants to put their work in the public domain and only leave a note in their README that they don't want this to be used for profit and then complain when a company uses it a way they don't like then I 100% agree and support them. This is the problem with laws and rules. They tend to replace independent moral thought. Instead of asking whether it was right or wrong for that company to use it without the consent of the author, we all get stuck on "well, technically". There's a difference between legal rights and morals. tl;dr: Some people choose not to participate in the copyright system simply because they wanna push back against us offshoring our abilities to think critically about morals to regulatory bodies. Open source isn't "an act of charity". It's a lot of things to a lot of people

toastal 4y ago
> they don't want this to be used for profit This sounds like the Creative Commons NonCommercial licenses. Too bad they aren't recommended for code too. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpretation https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpre...
- culi 4y ago
  Yeah but that's missing the point imo. The ideological battle is about what is the "default" here. Our legal system has overtaken the commons and now to do something that would have at one point been the assumed default of human cultural products is now something you have to explicitly state. And even then it's just giving you sort of a platform to fight off of within the very legal system that took this away in the first place

MaxBarraclough 4y ago

> Open-Source was always and forever will be an act of charity. Volunteering. Many high-profile Free and Open Source software projects are developed mainly by paid employees. Some examples: the Linux kernel, OpenJDK, Firefox, and Chromium.