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Licenses often are not respected by business. Businesses also tend to demand free support in perpetuity without ever once contributing anything be it money or c

Licenses often are not respected by business. Businesses also tend to demand free support in perpetuity without ever once contributing anything be it money or code. Viewed this way, businesses are just using open source as free labor.

jhickok 2y ago
I'm out over my skis a bit on this one, but out of curiosity (and having never experienced it), what sort of leverage does a business have demanding free support from contributors that are under no obligation to provide it? Those seem to be easy emails to ignore, personally.
- tcmart14 2y ago
  That is true. Maintainers don't owe them anything, most of the licenses say this and express no-warranty or guarantees. But its more about, people feel obligated to provide support for their open sourced projects even though that technically isn't required. More of a human nature/psychology thing.
  - cudgy 2y ago
    Furthermore, you are dealing with someone (maintainer) who is giving their time for free to further the project so corps can use it to build stuff. Who better for a corporation to make unrecompensed demands from? They already demonstrate willingness to work for free.
spacechild1 2y ago
The GPL seems to be respected well enough that businesses avoid it like the plague.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Not sure where you are trying to go with this, but pretty much everything with an embedded CPU runs some form of Linux, alongside nearly each and every cloud server in existence. Countless lines of code are compiled with GCC and linked to the GNU libc every second. The GPL is as inextricable from our modern information society as blood is from our bodies.
  - spacechild1 2y ago
    Sorry, I should have been more clear: I was thinking of GPL libraries.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      GPL libraries are for building GPL software. Where I work this is not really a concern since we won't sell the software. AGPL could be a deal breaker for some of our business cases. Neither is a concern for internal applications that are private to the organization.
      - spacechild1 2y ago
        Sigh. Obviously, you don't need to avoid it in cases where it doesn't apply in the first place... The point I was trying to make is that businesses do take the GPL seriously - where it applies - and don't just ignore it.

jhickok 2y ago

I'm out over my skis a bit on this one, but out of curiosity (and having never experienced it), what sort of leverage does a business have demanding free support from contributors that are under no obligation to provide it? Those seem to be easy emails to ignore, personally.

tcmart14 2y ago
That is true. Maintainers don't owe them anything, most of the licenses say this and express no-warranty or guarantees. But its more about, people feel obligated to provide support for their open sourced projects even though that technically isn't required. More of a human nature/psychology thing.
- cudgy 2y ago
  Furthermore, you are dealing with someone (maintainer) who is giving their time for free to further the project so corps can use it to build stuff. Who better for a corporation to make unrecompensed demands from? They already demonstrate willingness to work for free.

spacechild1 2y ago

The GPL seems to be respected well enough that businesses avoid it like the plague.

rbanffy 2y ago
Not sure where you are trying to go with this, but pretty much everything with an embedded CPU runs some form of Linux, alongside nearly each and every cloud server in existence. Countless lines of code are compiled with GCC and linked to the GNU libc every second. The GPL is as inextricable from our modern information society as blood is from our bodies.
- spacechild1 2y ago
  Sorry, I should have been more clear: I was thinking of GPL libraries.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    GPL libraries are for building GPL software. Where I work this is not really a concern since we won't sell the software. AGPL could be a deal breaker for some of our business cases. Neither is a concern for internal applications that are private to the organization.
    - spacechild1 2y ago
      Sigh. Obviously, you don't need to avoid it in cases where it doesn't apply in the first place... The point I was trying to make is that businesses do take the GPL seriously - where it applies - and don't just ignore it.