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SugarCRM, CFEngine2/3, Chef, Heroku, grsec, Tripwire, ... there are countless examples in the dustbin of history who ceased giving back, rested on their laurels

SugarCRM, CFEngine2/3, Chef, Heroku, grsec, Tripwire, ... there are countless examples in the dustbin of history who ceased giving back, rested on their laurels, and became FOSS-washed commercial ventures who faded into the past. Docker maybe next given the way they're going. Provide value at a constant rate to things rather than bait to gain users and switch to exploiting them. The same could be said for too-good-to-be-true pricing. If a project needs to lock-up code and service to survive OR large companies use it widely without supporting it monetarily or with fixes, then maybe it shouldn't be open source to begin with? OTOH, if you don't want anyone to use your software and if you want to stay poor, use a radioactive license like AGPL.

jacooper 4y ago
> OTOH, if you don't want anyone to use your software and if you want to stay poor, use a radioactive license like AGPL Lol, business HN look on the AGPL is truly funny, Because its made to stop people from using the code without contributing, which is exactly what you want to do. Also the biggest on-prem cloud system Nextcloud is under the AGPL, which has its own commercial company Nextcloud GmbH. https://github.com/nextcloud/server https://github.com/nextcloud/server
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  I am always amused when people complain about the restriction not to be a d**k. Every time you see someone call something like AGPL something like radioactive, you just saw someone out themselves as a theif. Copyleft: "You can have this for free. You can use it for personal use, you can use it for making mony, you can even redistribute it, you can even sell copies of it itself! The only things you can't do are deny access to that which you were given for free from the next guy, or scrub the existing credits to pretend you wrote it." Theif: "Radioactive!" Me: More radioactive please!
  - Nomentatus 4y ago
    What you wrote matches the MIT license, not the AGPL, say. With AGPL, users have to immediately give away derivative works, and there are many business circumstances when that won't do. Hence dual licensing by the vendor - but alas dual licensing sets up the possibility of bait and switch, or can. I haven't even mentioned implied patent grants.
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
      Those are the terms. If you can't tolerate having to re-share that which you were given, then great news, you don't have to. You can write your own software or buy software that has some other license. Derivative works are just a form of giving the next guy that which you were given. It's not stealing anything from you even though the derivative is more than the origi al. It's only "radioactive" if what you wish to do is take and enjoy and profit from without paying back or forward in the same manner which you benefitted from, which implies more than merely the MIT style original still existing out there somewhere. It's only radioactive to someone who wants to steal. It's incompatible or unusable in a purely traditional commercial business model, but that isn't "radioactive" any more than a commercial library is "radioactive" if you don't want to pay it's fee. It just means the terms aren't a fit for what you want to do, but they are not in any way bad or unreasonable terms.
      - Nomentatus 4y ago
        Those are not the terms of the AGPL, etc - the terms you actually cited fit MIT, instead. In any case, you're happy about leaving most businesses out - but that limits how much open source there is out there, and the quality. It forces, again and again, billions of dollars and scarce programming resources to be spent recreating software under one license to be replicated under, say, MIT. Witness the Android libraries replacing GNU libraries, Chromium replacing Webkit, and on and on and on. Absurdly wasteful, and in the end you get at least as much freeloading, which is the theft you're worrying about. That's what you're being happy about. Copyleft is a genius idea, a wonderful idea (without the patent grab) but it can't fit all cases. A law that restricted code copyrights to four years (and forced code to be revealed or put into escrow) would perhaps be a better solution.

jacooper 4y ago

> OTOH, if you don't want anyone to use your software and if you want to stay poor, use a radioactive license like AGPL Lol, business HN look on the AGPL is truly funny, Because its made to stop people from using the code without contributing, which is exactly what you want to do. Also the biggest on-prem cloud system Nextcloud is under the AGPL, which has its own commercial company Nextcloud GmbH. https://github.com/nextcloud/server https://github.com/nextcloud/server

Brian_K_White 4y ago
I am always amused when people complain about the restriction not to be a d**k. Every time you see someone call something like AGPL something like radioactive, you just saw someone out themselves as a theif. Copyleft: "You can have this for free. You can use it for personal use, you can use it for making mony, you can even redistribute it, you can even sell copies of it itself! The only things you can't do are deny access to that which you were given for free from the next guy, or scrub the existing credits to pretend you wrote it." Theif: "Radioactive!" Me: More radioactive please!
- Nomentatus 4y ago
  What you wrote matches the MIT license, not the AGPL, say. With AGPL, users have to immediately give away derivative works, and there are many business circumstances when that won't do. Hence dual licensing by the vendor - but alas dual licensing sets up the possibility of bait and switch, or can. I haven't even mentioned implied patent grants.
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    Those are the terms. If you can't tolerate having to re-share that which you were given, then great news, you don't have to. You can write your own software or buy software that has some other license. Derivative works are just a form of giving the next guy that which you were given. It's not stealing anything from you even though the derivative is more than the origi al. It's only "radioactive" if what you wish to do is take and enjoy and profit from without paying back or forward in the same manner which you benefitted from, which implies more than merely the MIT style original still existing out there somewhere. It's only radioactive to someone who wants to steal. It's incompatible or unusable in a purely traditional commercial business model, but that isn't "radioactive" any more than a commercial library is "radioactive" if you don't want to pay it's fee. It just means the terms aren't a fit for what you want to do, but they are not in any way bad or unreasonable terms.
    - Nomentatus 4y ago
      Those are not the terms of the AGPL, etc - the terms you actually cited fit MIT, instead. In any case, you're happy about leaving most businesses out - but that limits how much open source there is out there, and the quality. It forces, again and again, billions of dollars and scarce programming resources to be spent recreating software under one license to be replicated under, say, MIT. Witness the Android libraries replacing GNU libraries, Chromium replacing Webkit, and on and on and on. Absurdly wasteful, and in the end you get at least as much freeloading, which is the theft you're worrying about. That's what you're being happy about. Copyleft is a genius idea, a wonderful idea (without the patent grab) but it can't fit all cases. A law that restricted code copyrights to four years (and forced code to be revealed or put into escrow) would perhaps be a better solution.