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A few years ago I worked for a few months with a machine learning team at Google that was using OpenCV. At least at the prototype phase. The entire $500k donat

A few years ago I worked for a few months with a machine learning team at Google that was using OpenCV. At least at the prototype phase. The entire $500k donation they're looking for here would have been basically 1 or 1.5 SWE salary. So yes, there's definitely something wrong with the compensation and financing model of open source infrastructure. And now that the market is contracting, and VC and BigCorp money isn't flowing as freely, people are finally starting to bitch about it, instead of just being happy that a) their projects are being used and b) that that is leading to job opportunities etc. "but if you make more than X amount of money or have X amount of employees then you have to pay X amount in licensing fees" -- sad to say, projects with licenses like this would be immediately blacklisted at places like Google. Not just for use, but for Googlers to contribute to. And because of the motivation economy in OSS right now, someone else would just fill the niche. Even the GPL is controversial to these companies (and to many people on this forum, in fact). We need to name and shame BigCorps that are using and exploiting the very generous and liberal nature of Apache-style licensed projects without (majorly) contributing back.

ReactiveJelly 3y ago
> We need to name and shame BigCorps that are using and exploiting the very generous and liberal nature of Apache-style licensed projects without (majorly) contributing back. The corporations are following the exact spirit of the license. If you want to shame them, put it in writing. Make a new license. But it would be proprietary, because you'd be saying some entities are too big to exercise Freedom 0 without paying money to a central organization that held the license. That's the licensing model for the two big game engines, Unity and Unreal - Gratis, to a point. It seems to work for them, but it ain't FOSS. And for your central benevolent organization to hold that power over the license, they'll also have the power to do worse things to the project. One of the appeals of FOSS was that it's de-centralized. You can always fork it, if you have the code you have the right. A license that required "BigCorps" (because every small company is inherently good?) to pay would have to deny the right to fork.

ReactiveJelly 3y ago

> We need to name and shame BigCorps that are using and exploiting the very generous and liberal nature of Apache-style licensed projects without (majorly) contributing back. The corporations are following the exact spirit of the license. If you want to shame them, put it in writing. Make a new license. But it would be proprietary, because you'd be saying some entities are too big to exercise Freedom 0 without paying money to a central organization that held the license. That's the licensing model for the two big game engines, Unity and Unreal - Gratis, to a point. It seems to work for them, but it ain't FOSS. And for your central benevolent organization to hold that power over the license, they'll also have the power to do worse things to the project. One of the appeals of FOSS was that it's de-centralized. You can always fork it, if you have the code you have the right. A license that required "BigCorps" (because every small company is inherently good?) to pay would have to deny the right to fork.