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> In any case, it changed years later when a startup using Nodemailer was acquired for half a billion dollars. I was financially not in a good place back then,
by ergonaught 3y ago
> In any case, it changed years later when a startup using Nodemailer was acquired for half a billion dollars. I was financially not in a good place back then, and when I saw the news, I started to wonder – what did I get out of this?
This is the root of most things like the BSL. You create an open source project or product, and companies with billions in quarterly revenue build the core of their business on your software, and meanwhile won't contribute to your ongoing viability (nevermind actual success) even in amounts that are entirely trivial for them. Toss the cloud providers into it now and it's even uglier.
- graemep 3y agoI get that, but the author did not try something like the BSL, just went to a fairly typical proprietary license. Even the right open source license, such as the AGPL, would probably have worked well, with the proprietary license as an option (in the same way he tried LGPL + MIT).
- kijin 3y agoWell, one of OP's initial mistakes was that he thought LGPL was anywhere near "copyleft." It isn't. For SaaS companies who just want to use the software on their backend and are not interested in redistributing it in any way, there's no realistic difference between LGPL and more permissive licenses like MIT and BSD.
- le-mark 3y agoI’ve been sitting on some code for about 15 years because it’s the key to disrupting a couple of entrenched players and would enable cloud vendors to offer the functionality “as a service”. No way I want Amazon/google/MS to run away with it. Edit down voters might ask themselves what is much older than 15 years that some companies pay a lot of money for?
- wcedmisten 3y agoWhy not release it as AGPL?
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago> I’ve been sitting on some code for about 15 years because it’s the key to disrupting a couple of entrenched players I have a difficult time believing that any piece of code that can be "sat on for 15 years" would disrupt anything. 15 years, especially in tech, feels like a couple generations these days.
- goodpoint 3y agolol, no.
- abenga 3y agoYou're not running away with it either. You should just release it as a proprietary tool or SaaS if you think it will be useful for people.
- solumunus 3y agoPics or it didn’t happen.
- corentin88 3y agoWhich startup/company was bought that price?
- kerkeslager 3y agoThis is why copyleft is necessary, and also why large companies have spread a lot of anti-GPL propaganda. In a larger sense, we desperately need a societal shift in perspective from naively viewing companies as benevolent by default, to viewing companies as they actually are by default: they'll literally kill people if it's profitable.
- eleumik 3y agoThis they told me at first lesson of economics at university, 1989
- pydry 3y agoNot just anti GPL but anti BSL/Elastic license too.
- immibis 3y agoAGPL/proprietary dual licensed is a solution to this. Clients get two choices: give back as much as they take, or fuck you pay me. The former makes everyone happy, and the latter stops the developer making themselves homeless.
- rmbyrro 3y agoAuthor tried it and didn't work. He presumes small businesses don't care about the potential risks associated with LGPL, and those were the majority of his most promising market.
- sokoloff 3y agoThe risk profile to a SaaS company from LGPL and AGPL licensed code are night and day. Even GPL is pretty low risk for a hosting company, but LGPL's risk is strictly lower.
- tormeh 3y agoAnd those small businesses were right. All the Apache/MIT-licensed software baffles me when LGPL for libraries and AGPL for applications seem clearly superior for promoting collaboration.
- leedrake5 3y agoNot billions, but I was in a similar position. What saved me was the GPL license on the open source code and hiring a lawyer that kept my ownership of any software I wrote (though at a reduced hourly for them) and patenting new ideas connected to the project. When it came time for the company to scale up, I couldn’t have been in a better position.
- raffraffraff 3y agoMore galling than the company getting acquired for half a billion dollars is the fact that they never even said "thanks"... > I searched my mailbox for emails related to that company and found a single complaint about a feature. No pull requests, no donations, no nothing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]