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>Why shouldn't big businesses use my code? The better opensource companies (Google, new Microsoft, Facebook, etc) contribute back to the community in all sorts
by dTal 4y ago
>Why shouldn't big businesses use my code? The better opensource companies (Google, new Microsoft, Facebook, etc) contribute back to the community in all sorts of ways; and I consider that a net positive on the world.
Because free software is in a constant battle for relevance, and they will use your code to make their proprietary offerings strictly superior to the free ones. What do you think would happen if Autodesk were permitted to fork Blender into a paid product, extend it in all sorts of proprietary ways, and push it heavily through advertising campaigns and educational subsidies? Blender would die, is what.
- josephg 4y ago> Blender would die, is what. You know, I don’t think it would? If autodesk depended on blender, and the core of autodesk was blender, I think autodesk would throw gobs of money at making sure blender flourished. They’d probably try and hire lots of blender devs too - just to get them to work on core blender features so they could make autodesk better. There’s plenty of examples of this happening in the wild. Is FreeBSD dead because macos is built on top of a lot of its code? Is redis dead because of redislabs’ proprietary offerings? No. Is SQLite hurt by all the projects built on top of it? No. The opposite - it’s strengthened by being used.