3 ms·

You are entirely right about my word choice, good point! (it's a bit ironic in retrospect) However, let's not pretend that choosing a licence is a fully inform

You are entirely right about my word choice, good point! (it's a bit ironic in retrospect) However, let's not pretend that choosing a licence is a fully informed decision free of any kind of pressure. If you pick a non-OSI licence, that has social costs (as you said, less interest from other developers for example) The problem is two-sided: both those companies exploiting the FOSS landscape and the participants in the FOSS landscape more concerning themselves with uploading the status quo than to try to do something about the problem. P.S.: The OSI are not even sellouts - they mostly consist of exactly those corporations themselves. The FSF are much better but the FSF's philosophy was mostly informed by RMS not being able to fix his printer in the 80's.... times change, y'know? A philosophy/worldview which worked for the 80s and the 90s might not be appropriate for the 2020s.

lolinder 2y ago
> If you pick a non-OSI licence, that has social costs (as you said, less interest from other developers for example) Yes. People make a decision to choose from the FOSS licenses because being seen as FOSS is valuable to them. That comes with tradeoffs, and it's unethical to expect to receive the benefits but not the drawbacks of your chosen license. > P.S.: The OSI are not even sellouts - they mostly consist of exactly those corporations themselves. I know. I find the bellyaching about the "spirit of Open Source" to be pretty ironic given that Open Source exists to "dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape" [0]. > those companies exploiting the FOSS landscape Exploiting how? What harm does $MEGACORP using a FOSS project do to the FOSS project? Does it hurt that it gives them more credibility? For there to be exploitation there has to be a quantifiable harm to the exploited victim—it has to be win-lose, not win-neutral or win-win. So where's the loss to the FOSS maintainers as victims? [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource.org/history/ http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...

lolinder 2y ago

> If you pick a non-OSI licence, that has social costs (as you said, less interest from other developers for example) Yes. People make a decision to choose from the FOSS licenses because being seen as FOSS is valuable to them. That comes with tradeoffs, and it's unethical to expect to receive the benefits but not the drawbacks of your chosen license. > P.S.: The OSI are not even sellouts - they mostly consist of exactly those corporations themselves. I know. I find the bellyaching about the "spirit of Open Source" to be pretty ironic given that Open Source exists to "dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape" [0]. > those companies exploiting the FOSS landscape Exploiting how? What harm does $MEGACORP using a FOSS project do to the FOSS project? Does it hurt that it gives them more credibility? For there to be exploitation there has to be a quantifiable harm to the exploited victim—it has to be win-lose, not win-neutral or win-win. So where's the loss to the FOSS maintainers as victims? [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource.org/history/ http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...