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> Depends on what your philosophy is. You believe in the software commons and the free sharing of software? You would want software to remain as a public good s
by sangnoir 3y ago
> Depends on what your philosophy is. You believe in the software commons and the free sharing of software? You would want software to remain as a public good so no one can profit from it exclusively.
> Are you a business who made some software? You don't want others to resell it because it's your work, you made it and you don't want others to freeload.
I cant help but notice that you assume everyone uses money as a measure of desirable/undesirable outcomes. Whenever I publish a library/project with a GPL license (my preferred license), it's so that others can use it. I have a well paying job that's enabled in part by others sharing their work[1], so I let the "freeloaders" have at it - I too am one, after all.
At the time I release the software, my problem is adequately solved: I already did the work , maybe someone else may benefit. Creating/sharing value with others is the point - I don't mind if someone else sells it : if they abide by the license, that means I can sell something identical for half of whatever they sold it for if I suddenly felt competitive.
1. I'm amazed that I can use Linux, git, hypervisors, orchestrators, various computers and interpreter, libraries, ops tools and more all for free,and with the ability to pry them open and make any changes I want! How frigging cool is that?! I'm compelled to pay it forward in any way I can.
- Pannoniae 3y agoIf money is not important, what's the harm in making it available as open source, but with a non-commercial clause?
- sangnoir 3y agoBecause I don't mind people using my software commercially if they are respecting the license. I wouldn't want to be charged for all my commercial usage of Linux, Git, Postgres, zsh, the rust toolchain, etc. I believe if everyone in our industry tried to capture all/most of of the economic value of their work, we'd all be poorer for it, metaphorically and literally since a huge part of high SDE salaries is due to high productivity enabled by the open source ecosystem. We are all freeloaders, to varying degrees. Without FL/OSS, most of these source-available companies would never have gotten off the ground.
- jratkevic 3y agoExactly. I don't understand the drama on this at all. "Corporate Open Source is dead"?? I don't even know what that means! Having launched at least 20 open source companies, several that went public -- this is not news that this faction of companies were NEVER going to make it (AND WE SAID SO). And that is ok.
- Pannoniae 3y agoThat's entirely fair, but you can tailor the licences to target the biggest freeloaders (prohibit hosting it as a cloud service, allow everything else) while letting everyone else use it without worrying about licensing. That's the beautiful part - you can choose vastly different approaches with differing levels of freedom/openness, depending on your and your users' needs. A game is licenced quite differently than a library which is also licenced differently than a website. And they can all coexist:)
- sangnoir 3y agoFWIW, I avoid using and contributing to projects with revenue-based licenses on principle - I hate bait-and-switches and folk who pull up ladders behind themselves. They will have to coexist with the forks with standard licenses.
- eadmund 3y agoBecause software that has a non-commercial clause is not open source. It strips an important freedom from its users.
- prepend 3y agoThere’s nothing wrong with it other than being confusing because the software isn’t open source.