4 ms·

If money is not important, what's the harm in making it available as open source, but with a non-commercial clause?

sangnoir 2y ago
Because 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 2y ago
  Exactly. 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 2y ago
  That'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 2y ago
    FWIW, 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 2y ago
Because software that has a non-commercial clause is not open source. It strips an important freedom from its users.
prepend 2y ago
There’s nothing wrong with it other than being confusing because the software isn’t open source.

Because 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 2y ago
Exactly. 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 2y ago
That'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 2y ago
  FWIW, 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 2y ago

Because software that has a non-commercial clause is not open source. It strips an important freedom from its users.

prepend 2y ago

There’s nothing wrong with it other than being confusing because the software isn’t open source.