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> it's a dick move and against the spirit of FOSS I disagree with this. Most people use FOSS and do not give anything back, individuals included. The spirit of

by ok_dad 2y ago

> it's a dick move and against the spirit of FOSS I disagree with this. Most people use FOSS and do not give anything back, individuals included. The spirit of FOSS is creating things that others will use without compensation. If I release anything open source, it's because I'm donating it as a whole to humanity, including big corps and individuals. I understand that, because I've thought long and hard about what it means to release something with, say, an MIT license. It means you lose having full control of your creation. If I wanted to limit who can use my software, I'll sell it or license it accordingly. Complaining later that your FOSS software was "stolen" or "exploited" or whatever is just sour grapes.

CuriousCosmic 2y ago
I think it's a difference of scale. If rando small business or rando dude is just using FOSS software without giving back, whatever people have priorities. If megacorp is re-boxing it in a closed source manner and making mass profits off of it without dedicating at least some level of engineering hours or money to the project, that's a dick move. Being unhappy with that situation is totally fine and it's understandable to change the licensing to a more copyleft license to reflect your intents. That's what elastic did. They essentially went Apache-2.0 -> ... -> AGPLv3 but it took a while for them to figure it out. And my complaint isn't that people make money off FOSS software or don't give back enough. It's that they make money off FOSS software and don't give back essentially at all while depriving their users of the same rights/licensing terms that the upstream gave them.
- ok_dad 2y ago
  In any case, Amazon did give back to Elastic via code commits before the fork, so they didn't just steal the code, they also made it better. I can't believe I am defending Amazon, but this is a hill that I will die on: FOSS means free, as in beer.

by ok_dad 2y ago

CuriousCosmic 2y ago

I think it's a difference of scale. If rando small business or rando dude is just using FOSS software without giving back, whatever people have priorities. If megacorp is re-boxing it in a closed source manner and making mass profits off of it without dedicating at least some level of engineering hours or money to the project, that's a dick move. Being unhappy with that situation is totally fine and it's understandable to change the licensing to a more copyleft license to reflect your intents. That's what elastic did. They essentially went Apache-2.0 -> ... -> AGPLv3 but it took a while for them to figure it out. And my complaint isn't that people make money off FOSS software or don't give back enough. It's that they make money off FOSS software and don't give back essentially at all while depriving their users of the same rights/licensing terms that the upstream gave them.

ok_dad 2y ago
In any case, Amazon did give back to Elastic via code commits before the fork, so they didn't just steal the code, they also made it better. I can't believe I am defending Amazon, but this is a hill that I will die on: FOSS means free, as in beer.