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Software developers often just give away FOSS for free, not even charging a nominal fee. As a result, proprietary software essentially has an unlimited money c

by kiba 2y ago

Software developers often just give away FOSS for free, not even charging a nominal fee. As a result, proprietary software essentially has an unlimited money cheat that they can use to plow into further development until greed starts seriously degrading the quality of software.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Qem 2y ago
Copyleft solves this. The problem is permissive licenses that lack copyleft, allowing privatization of codebases.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Kind of, try to get hold of all those GCC forks used by embedded companies before clang came into the picture.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  >>As a result, proprietary software essentially has an unlimited money cheat that they can use to plow into further development until greed starts seriously degrading the quality of software. >Copyleft solves this. The problem is permissive licenses that lack copyleft, allowing privatization of codebases. Copyleft only partially solves the problem. A company with enough resources can give you the code and you still can't effectively fork it unless you are also running a huge company, because making an incompatible product that lacks updates would be unacceptable. Other times, companies are so big that they essentially drive a whole open source ecosystem. Look at IBM's disproportionate influence on Linux. We certainly appreciate their contributions but many people disagree about the direction IBM has chosen, and their choices affect everyone because apps are usually built to cater to the lowest common denominator. Another good example is Chromium. That project is copyleft but nobody wants an old out of date web browser because of security concerns. Even Microsoft could not keep up with their feature development so they forked it. But how different is their fork really? If they are to take code from upstream, it can't be very different.

by kiba 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Qem 2y ago

Copyleft solves this. The problem is permissive licenses that lack copyleft, allowing privatization of codebases.

pjmlp 2y ago
Kind of, try to get hold of all those GCC forks used by embedded companies before clang came into the picture.
wakawaka28 2y ago
>>As a result, proprietary software essentially has an unlimited money cheat that they can use to plow into further development until greed starts seriously degrading the quality of software. >Copyleft solves this. The problem is permissive licenses that lack copyleft, allowing privatization of codebases. Copyleft only partially solves the problem. A company with enough resources can give you the code and you still can't effectively fork it unless you are also running a huge company, because making an incompatible product that lacks updates would be unacceptable. Other times, companies are so big that they essentially drive a whole open source ecosystem. Look at IBM's disproportionate influence on Linux. We certainly appreciate their contributions but many people disagree about the direction IBM has chosen, and their choices affect everyone because apps are usually built to cater to the lowest common denominator. Another good example is Chromium. That project is copyleft but nobody wants an old out of date web browser because of security concerns. Even Microsoft could not keep up with their feature development so they forked it. But how different is their fork really? If they are to take code from upstream, it can't be very different.