8 ms·

If a megacorp wants your help to explain ANYTHING to them, you better be paid handsomely per hour. Wtf are people doing charity for trillion dollar empires.

by vasco 2y ago

keepamovin 2y ago
Not just a megacorp. Anyone for a commercial purpose
- freeamz 2y ago
  Hmm, think we ought to judge on a case by case basis. However, for megacorp and especially banks that has almost 0 to 1% access to cost of capital, vs rest of us who at at 20 - 30 % ( for credit card, loan sharks), then there should be a different license for these people. There should be a GLP type license adjusted to the cost of the capital.
  - keepamovin 2y ago
    Why, if they are paying their employees and aim to earn from their enterprise, should so disrespect your time and IP as to attempt to not pay you? Tho pricing tailored to customers works, as long as it's efficient and non-zero.
  - chii 2y ago
    There should not be any difference between small or large entitise in how you deal with them as an opensource maintainer. Just because someone has more money (or less), should not automatically mean you treat them with more leniency or ethics. You set up your standard, and stick to it whomever comes.
    - formerly_proven 2y ago
      > You set up your standard, and stick to it whomever comes. Why? Most businesses don't entertain standard rates, either. It's case-by-case negotiations ("call us", "request quote"). Why should I, as a private person putting stuff out there for free, set up "my standard" and stick to it?
      - keepamovin 2y ago
        Because otherwise it's not a value, it's a whim. But I guess they don't mean set the same price for everyone - but rather stick to your values in what you do.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - keepamovin 2y ago
      This is The Way
    - vasco 2y ago
      Interacting with faceless entities with the power to buy multiple countries the same way you'd interact with some interested independent young person wanting to learn. Interesting moral proposition, I doubt you'd get many followers. I think it's perfectly reasonable to treat people differently from corporations, and random small and medium corporations differently than huge megacorps without losing any sleep. Specially in business, charging more to those that can pay more is a very common approach.
      - chii 2y ago
        > charging more to those that can pay more is a very common approach. and all consumers dislike price discrimination. Airlines is the classic example. It's just that those companies do this because they can. And i hate it. I much prefer a static, single price for a product.
        homebrewer 2y ago
        No, it's also because some consumers can't pay the "original" price. Steam in "developing" countries is a classic example — you as a game developer can ask a guy from my country $60 for a game (and some companies do try that), but he will simply go back to torrent trackers because $60 is a week's worth of living expenses. gaben figured that out and successfully expanded into many markets that were considered basket cases for software licensing.
      - jimbokun 2y ago
        > Interesting moral proposition, I doubt you'd get many followers. But the US Supreme Court would be one of them.
    - polotics 2y ago
      Clearly you have yet to experience some of the less savoury behaviours from Megacorps sharks. You're looking at people trying to make a name for themselves internally and if this means being economical with attributions, this is the least they would do for their place in the California sun.
    - LtWorf 2y ago
      So you're equally like to give your change to a poor beggar and to a guy begging from inside his rolls royce?
      - chii 2y ago
        If i ahead of time decided to give my next dollar to the next guy begging, why not?
        wizzwizz4 2y ago
        That's a really silly precommitment. If you were sensible, your actual commitment should be "help the next person who requires help, provided that help can be provided in the form of one dollar".
        chii 2y ago
        That's why the premise in the grandparent post is ridiculous. But the license of a piece of software is not ridiculous - if you chose a very permissive license, you cannot then go and choose who should or shouldnt be profiting off your software. The license was a pre-commitment. But lots of people make this pre-commitment, but then makes a moral/ethical judgement post-facto when someone rich seems to be able to extract more value out of the software than what "they deserve", and complain about it.
        wizzwizz4 2y ago
        "Permissive" licenses, in fields where abusive corporations are known to operate, are a really silly precommitment. Copyleft exists for a reason. But, even if you (foolishly) made that precommitment, that doesn't then mean you have to do free labour for the abusive corporations, out of some misguided ideological consistency. (Such consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.)
        taormina 2y ago
        I mean, the MIT license might be a “more permissive” license but it says very explicit things that Microsoft is explicitly ignoring. Your license choice doesn’t matter when they ignore the license anyway.
    - latexr 2y ago
      Companies are never just money. There is a monumental difference between: 1. A small company which is barely profitable but is building something which aligns with your values and you see as a positive to the world. 2. A massive mega corporation whose only purpose is profit, mistreats employees, and you view as highly unethical. You shouldn’t treat those the same way. It’s perfectly ethical to offer your work for free to the first one (helping them succeed in creating a better world) and charging up the wazoo (or better yet, refusing to engage in any way with) the second one.
      - b112 2y ago
        There is no such difference. A company is not a person, and can literally have its entire staff changed in short order. Or be bought. Companies have no morals. Sometimes people in companies do, but again, that person can vanish instantly. You should treat a company as a person which may receive a brain transplant at any time. Most especially, when writing contracts or having any expectation of what that company will do.
        thfuran 2y ago
        A sole proprietorship pretty much is a person.
        mindcrime 2y ago
        Or a single member LLC.
        Spooky23 2y ago
        The key is contract. Casual chat with a corporate representative who isn’t selling you something about something you own requires some sort of contractual relationship and consideration.
        potato3732842 2y ago
        This is an exceptionally ignorant viewpoint. A business that is privately owned, is run by its founders and which represents the lion's share of its officers income and net worth can be dealt with like any other small business. Some guy who makes bespoke firmware for industrial microcontrollers or very niche audio encoding software isn't Microsoft. You won't be able to do business with him in a useful way if you treat him like Microsoft.
    - PeeMcGee 2y ago
      > You set up your standard, and stick to it whomever comes. Well, the standard for software licensing is to sell cheaper licenses to smaller businesses and more expensive licenses to larger businesses.
buran77 2y ago
Because they're hoping not to antagonize the megacorp (too quickly). If a megacorp has you in their sights, especially in a country like the US where court battles are prohibitively expensive, pushing the envelope will just draw ire and aggression from that megacorp. A normal person has no negotiating leverage in front of MS especially when it comes to open source. It's like negotiating with the mafia, you might get something out of it but if you cross the line you'll end up face down in a ditch and authorities will look the other way. Megacorps have stolen, copied, reverse engineered, replicated, etc. things since forever and it always worked out for them. In this case MS didn't need any help. They could very well take everything and face no real repercussions (this is the reality when the majority is uneducated, and their elected representatives are greedy and spineless). So playing along gives some chance to get something positive out of it.
- latexr 2y ago
  > especially in a country like the US where ending up in court is prohibitively expensive What’s the scenario here where they could take you to court for refusing to (in GP’s words) doing charity for them? Scenario 1: Microsoft contacts you and says they want to talk about your open-source project. You never reply. Scenario 2: Microsoft contacts you (…). You reply “thank you, but I’m not interested. You are of course free to contribute or fork within the constraints of the license.” Scenario 3: Microsoft contacts (…). You reply “sure! I charge $X/hour or I could do a flat rate of $Y for the meeting. Is that acceptable to you?” What basis would they have for taking you to court in any situation? As soon as you got a legal letter for any of them, your first step should be to send it to as many news outlets you could think of.
  - MOARDONGZPLZ 2y ago
    “Ending up in court” vs “Microsoft suing you.” I think the implication is that if MS simply decided to unilaterally fork the project and change the license, the OS maintainer’s only real recourse is the court system (and the court of public opinion), and that would be expensive.
    - 2y ago
giancarlostoro 2y ago
It's also very possible they had been working on it already and wanted to compare notes, I certainly would if I were working on something internal and found a similar project, but I agree, ask them for a consultation fee. I don't see why they wouldn't pay it. Both projects also share in license, so I have less of an issue with it personally. They're both MIT licensed.
- Maxious 2y ago
  Very possible, from the in repo documentation (which credits Spegel yet again) https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/docs/design.md https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/docs/design.md it seems like there was a particular engineer at Microsoft who was working on Azure Container Registry who found it useful to integrate Azure Container Registry. If they contributed it upstream, would we be discussing a blog post "how dare evil megacorp submit a PR that only implements their API! embrace extend extinguish!"? Probably.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > If they contributed it upstream, would we be discussing a blog post "how dare evil megacorp submit a PR that only implements their API! embrace extend extinguish!"? Probably. Considering how often that happens VS how little times stories like that appear on the frontpage of HN, I'd wager a guess that we wouldn't be discussing it like we're discussing the current license violation.
- evantbyrne 2y ago
  You are supposed to keep the original license for a fork. > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Simply removing the copyright is a violation of the MIT license.
  - WD-42 2y ago
    It seems like a pretty minor violation, to be fair. They do reference the project in the repo. The real question is why did the author choose MIT if they didn’t want allow mega corps to benefit from their work without contributing back. That’s a feature of the license, not a bug.
dizhn 2y ago
Probably expectation of some monetary gain. At the very least getting hired to keep working on the same thing. I do not blame him at all for this. Though when things didn't work out, all he thought he could realistically do is start accepting donations.
delusional 2y ago
I think that worldview leads to a much poorer world. Normal people aren't constantly engaging in a fight for survival in every aspect of their lives, and I don't think it's a good thing to ask them to. We should expect the people we deal with to be acting in good faith. I think it would be bad actually if I had to consider if you're going to make money off of my idea when talking to you. Asking everybody to be constantly vigilant of possible exploitation by megacorps puts an undue burden on individuals. We should have strong and durable protections against those megacorps in other ways. What I'm saying is that this sort of copying should be criminal (not just illegal, but criminal) and Microsoft, the legal entity, should be held accountable and fined. I acknowledge that this isn't currently possible with our legal framework, but we should work to make it possible.
- luqtas 2y ago
  > We should have strong and durable protections against those megacorps in other ways like what? continue to use (pay) for their products and wait for regulations coming from lobbyist countries? /s
- diggan 2y ago
  > Normal people aren't constantly engaging in a fight for survival in every aspect of their lives, and I don't think it's a good thing to ask them to. We should expect the people we deal with to be acting in good faith. I think it would be bad actually if I had to consider if you're going to make money off of my idea when talking to you. I agree with you, if we're talking about people acting as individual humans collaborating together on FOSS. But this is really about a for-profit corporation acting in its own interests, using people to do its "deeds". Then I think it makes a lot of sense to treat any "Hey, could we chat to you about your project?" with a great deal of skepticism, because they have a goal with that conversation, it it's unlikely to align with your own goals, in most cases. Ultimately, people from that corporation is reaching out to you because there is a potential/perceived benefit coming out of that conversation that they want to have with you. If it isn't extremely clear to you what that exact benefit is, I'd say the smart thing to do is being cautious, to avoid situations like this which happen from time to time it seems.
matheusmoreira 2y ago
Won't you think of the poor trillionaire corporations? They are just poor developers with nothing to their names. https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ > No, this begging is particularly different because it capitalizes on the good will of open source developers. > Microsoft, Apple, and Google are standing on the internet in their trillion dollar business suits with a sign that reads "Starving and homeless. Any free labor will help." > They aren't holding people up at gun point. Rather they hold out their Rolex encrusted hand and beg, plead, and shame open source developers until they get free labor. > Once they get this free labor they rarely give credit. > They're ungrateful beggars that take their donated work hours, jump in their Teslas, and ride off to make more trillions proclaiming, "Haha! That open source idiot just gave me 10 hours of free labor. What a loser."
siva7 2y ago
Yes, charity. That's exactly what these trillion dollar empires think of those open source maintainers. Microsoft pulled this same stunt multiple times on os maintainers.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pknerd 2y ago
  What else can you expect from the company that was founded by Gates?(Ref, SCP,QDOS, IBM)
- echelon 2y ago
  Open source has been hijacked by trillion dollar hyperscalers. It's time we switch to "fair source" or "equitable source". Put MAU/DAU/ARR/market cap limits in your license. Open to everyone with a market cap under $1B or revenues under $100M. All others, please see our "business@" email. Place viral terms like the AGPL that requires that all other systems touched by your code to be open - especially the backend/server components that typically remain hidden. We're giving away power to these companies for free, and they use their scale and reach to turn our software into a larger moat that ensnares us and taxes us in everything else we do. Your contribution of open source in one area might bubble up as Microsoft or Google's ability to control what you see or how you distribute software to customers. It's intangible and hard to describe these insane advantages and network effects big players like this have to lay people, but I know we as software engineers understand this. Open source has been weaponized against us. They get free labor and use our work to tax us, pin us down, out compete us, and control us. We need to fight back.
  - ashoeafoot 2y ago
    Those companies can produce legal abstraction hacking solutions faster then you can develop shielding ones. You needs something poisonous ,costing money or work with each usage preventing mass adoption without a complete rewrite .
    - 2y ago
Matl 2y ago
> Wtf are people doing charity for trillion dollar empires. I agree with you 100% but I'm guessing getting approached by Microsoft can be pretty ego boosting, which is what these companies exploit.
shortrounddev2 2y ago
Seems more like a networking opportunity personally

If a megacorp wants your help to explain ANYTHING to them, you better be paid handsomely per hour. Wtf are people doing charity for trillion dollar empires.

by vasco 2y ago

If a megacorp wants your help to explain ANYTHING to them, you better be paid handsomely per hour. Wtf are people doing charity for trillion dollar empires.

keepamovin 2y ago

Not just a megacorp. Anyone for a commercial purpose

freeamz 2y ago
Hmm, think we ought to judge on a case by case basis. However, for megacorp and especially banks that has almost 0 to 1% access to cost of capital, vs rest of us who at at 20 - 30 % ( for credit card, loan sharks), then there should be a different license for these people. There should be a GLP type license adjusted to the cost of the capital.
- keepamovin 2y ago
  Why, if they are paying their employees and aim to earn from their enterprise, should so disrespect your time and IP as to attempt to not pay you? Tho pricing tailored to customers works, as long as it's efficient and non-zero.
- chii 2y ago
  There should not be any difference between small or large entitise in how you deal with them as an opensource maintainer. Just because someone has more money (or less), should not automatically mean you treat them with more leniency or ethics. You set up your standard, and stick to it whomever comes.
  - formerly_proven 2y ago
    > You set up your standard, and stick to it whomever comes. Why? Most businesses don't entertain standard rates, either. It's case-by-case negotiations ("call us", "request quote"). Why should I, as a private person putting stuff out there for free, set up "my standard" and stick to it?
    - keepamovin 2y ago
      Because otherwise it's not a value, it's a whim. But I guess they don't mean set the same price for everyone - but rather stick to your values in what you do.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - keepamovin 2y ago
    This is The Way
  - vasco 2y ago
    Interacting with faceless entities with the power to buy multiple countries the same way you'd interact with some interested independent young person wanting to learn. Interesting moral proposition, I doubt you'd get many followers. I think it's perfectly reasonable to treat people differently from corporations, and random small and medium corporations differently than huge megacorps without losing any sleep. Specially in business, charging more to those that can pay more is a very common approach.
    - chii 2y ago
      > charging more to those that can pay more is a very common approach. and all consumers dislike price discrimination. Airlines is the classic example. It's just that those companies do this because they can. And i hate it. I much prefer a static, single price for a product.
      - homebrewer 2y ago
        No, it's also because some consumers can't pay the "original" price. Steam in "developing" countries is a classic example — you as a game developer can ask a guy from my country $60 for a game (and some companies do try that), but he will simply go back to torrent trackers because $60 is a week's worth of living expenses. gaben figured that out and successfully expanded into many markets that were considered basket cases for software licensing.
    - jimbokun 2y ago
      > Interesting moral proposition, I doubt you'd get many followers. But the US Supreme Court would be one of them.
  - polotics 2y ago
    Clearly you have yet to experience some of the less savoury behaviours from Megacorps sharks. You're looking at people trying to make a name for themselves internally and if this means being economical with attributions, this is the least they would do for their place in the California sun.
  - LtWorf 2y ago
    So you're equally like to give your change to a poor beggar and to a guy begging from inside his rolls royce?
    - chii 2y ago
      If i ahead of time decided to give my next dollar to the next guy begging, why not?
      - wizzwizz4 2y ago
        That's a really silly precommitment. If you were sensible, your actual commitment should be "help the next person who requires help, provided that help can be provided in the form of one dollar".
        chii 2y ago
        That's why the premise in the grandparent post is ridiculous. But the license of a piece of software is not ridiculous - if you chose a very permissive license, you cannot then go and choose who should or shouldnt be profiting off your software. The license was a pre-commitment. But lots of people make this pre-commitment, but then makes a moral/ethical judgement post-facto when someone rich seems to be able to extract more value out of the software than what "they deserve", and complain about it.
        wizzwizz4 2y ago
        "Permissive" licenses, in fields where abusive corporations are known to operate, are a really silly precommitment. Copyleft exists for a reason. But, even if you (foolishly) made that precommitment, that doesn't then mean you have to do free labour for the abusive corporations, out of some misguided ideological consistency. (Such consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.)
        taormina 2y ago
        I mean, the MIT license might be a “more permissive” license but it says very explicit things that Microsoft is explicitly ignoring. Your license choice doesn’t matter when they ignore the license anyway.
  - latexr 2y ago
    Companies are never just money. There is a monumental difference between: 1. A small company which is barely profitable but is building something which aligns with your values and you see as a positive to the world. 2. A massive mega corporation whose only purpose is profit, mistreats employees, and you view as highly unethical. You shouldn’t treat those the same way. It’s perfectly ethical to offer your work for free to the first one (helping them succeed in creating a better world) and charging up the wazoo (or better yet, refusing to engage in any way with) the second one.
    - b112 2y ago
      There is no such difference. A company is not a person, and can literally have its entire staff changed in short order. Or be bought. Companies have no morals. Sometimes people in companies do, but again, that person can vanish instantly. You should treat a company as a person which may receive a brain transplant at any time. Most especially, when writing contracts or having any expectation of what that company will do.
      - thfuran 2y ago
        A sole proprietorship pretty much is a person.
        mindcrime 2y ago
        Or a single member LLC.
      - Spooky23 2y ago
        The key is contract. Casual chat with a corporate representative who isn’t selling you something about something you own requires some sort of contractual relationship and consideration.
      - potato3732842 2y ago
        This is an exceptionally ignorant viewpoint. A business that is privately owned, is run by its founders and which represents the lion's share of its officers income and net worth can be dealt with like any other small business. Some guy who makes bespoke firmware for industrial microcontrollers or very niche audio encoding software isn't Microsoft. You won't be able to do business with him in a useful way if you treat him like Microsoft.
  - PeeMcGee 2y ago
    > You set up your standard, and stick to it whomever comes. Well, the standard for software licensing is to sell cheaper licenses to smaller businesses and more expensive licenses to larger businesses.

buran77 2y ago

Because they're hoping not to antagonize the megacorp (too quickly). If a megacorp has you in their sights, especially in a country like the US where court battles are prohibitively expensive, pushing the envelope will just draw ire and aggression from that megacorp. A normal person has no negotiating leverage in front of MS especially when it comes to open source. It's like negotiating with the mafia, you might get something out of it but if you cross the line you'll end up face down in a ditch and authorities will look the other way. Megacorps have stolen, copied, reverse engineered, replicated, etc. things since forever and it always worked out for them. In this case MS didn't need any help. They could very well take everything and face no real repercussions (this is the reality when the majority is uneducated, and their elected representatives are greedy and spineless). So playing along gives some chance to get something positive out of it.

latexr 2y ago
> especially in a country like the US where ending up in court is prohibitively expensive What’s the scenario here where they could take you to court for refusing to (in GP’s words) doing charity for them? Scenario 1: Microsoft contacts you and says they want to talk about your open-source project. You never reply. Scenario 2: Microsoft contacts you (…). You reply “thank you, but I’m not interested. You are of course free to contribute or fork within the constraints of the license.” Scenario 3: Microsoft contacts (…). You reply “sure! I charge $X/hour or I could do a flat rate of $Y for the meeting. Is that acceptable to you?” What basis would they have for taking you to court in any situation? As soon as you got a legal letter for any of them, your first step should be to send it to as many news outlets you could think of.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 2y ago
  “Ending up in court” vs “Microsoft suing you.” I think the implication is that if MS simply decided to unilaterally fork the project and change the license, the OS maintainer’s only real recourse is the court system (and the court of public opinion), and that would be expensive.
  - 2y ago

giancarlostoro 2y ago

It's also very possible they had been working on it already and wanted to compare notes, I certainly would if I were working on something internal and found a similar project, but I agree, ask them for a consultation fee. I don't see why they wouldn't pay it. Both projects also share in license, so I have less of an issue with it personally. They're both MIT licensed.

Maxious 2y ago
Very possible, from the in repo documentation (which credits Spegel yet again) https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/docs/design.md https://github.com/Azure/peerd/blob/main/docs/design.md it seems like there was a particular engineer at Microsoft who was working on Azure Container Registry who found it useful to integrate Azure Container Registry. If they contributed it upstream, would we be discussing a blog post "how dare evil megacorp submit a PR that only implements their API! embrace extend extinguish!"? Probably.
- diggan 2y ago
  > If they contributed it upstream, would we be discussing a blog post "how dare evil megacorp submit a PR that only implements their API! embrace extend extinguish!"? Probably. Considering how often that happens VS how little times stories like that appear on the frontpage of HN, I'd wager a guess that we wouldn't be discussing it like we're discussing the current license violation.
evantbyrne 2y ago
You are supposed to keep the original license for a fork. > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Simply removing the copyright is a violation of the MIT license.
- WD-42 2y ago
  It seems like a pretty minor violation, to be fair. They do reference the project in the repo. The real question is why did the author choose MIT if they didn’t want allow mega corps to benefit from their work without contributing back. That’s a feature of the license, not a bug.

dizhn 2y ago

Probably expectation of some monetary gain. At the very least getting hired to keep working on the same thing. I do not blame him at all for this. Though when things didn't work out, all he thought he could realistically do is start accepting donations.

delusional 2y ago

I think that worldview leads to a much poorer world. Normal people aren't constantly engaging in a fight for survival in every aspect of their lives, and I don't think it's a good thing to ask them to. We should expect the people we deal with to be acting in good faith. I think it would be bad actually if I had to consider if you're going to make money off of my idea when talking to you. Asking everybody to be constantly vigilant of possible exploitation by megacorps puts an undue burden on individuals. We should have strong and durable protections against those megacorps in other ways. What I'm saying is that this sort of copying should be criminal (not just illegal, but criminal) and Microsoft, the legal entity, should be held accountable and fined. I acknowledge that this isn't currently possible with our legal framework, but we should work to make it possible.

luqtas 2y ago
> We should have strong and durable protections against those megacorps in other ways like what? continue to use (pay) for their products and wait for regulations coming from lobbyist countries? /s
diggan 2y ago
> Normal people aren't constantly engaging in a fight for survival in every aspect of their lives, and I don't think it's a good thing to ask them to. We should expect the people we deal with to be acting in good faith. I think it would be bad actually if I had to consider if you're going to make money off of my idea when talking to you. I agree with you, if we're talking about people acting as individual humans collaborating together on FOSS. But this is really about a for-profit corporation acting in its own interests, using people to do its "deeds". Then I think it makes a lot of sense to treat any "Hey, could we chat to you about your project?" with a great deal of skepticism, because they have a goal with that conversation, it it's unlikely to align with your own goals, in most cases. Ultimately, people from that corporation is reaching out to you because there is a potential/perceived benefit coming out of that conversation that they want to have with you. If it isn't extremely clear to you what that exact benefit is, I'd say the smart thing to do is being cautious, to avoid situations like this which happen from time to time it seems.

matheusmoreira 2y ago

Won't you think of the poor trillionaire corporations? They are just poor developers with nothing to their names. https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ > No, this begging is particularly different because it capitalizes on the good will of open source developers. > Microsoft, Apple, and Google are standing on the internet in their trillion dollar business suits with a sign that reads "Starving and homeless. Any free labor will help." > They aren't holding people up at gun point. Rather they hold out their Rolex encrusted hand and beg, plead, and shame open source developers until they get free labor. > Once they get this free labor they rarely give credit. > They're ungrateful beggars that take their donated work hours, jump in their Teslas, and ride off to make more trillions proclaiming, "Haha! That open source idiot just gave me 10 hours of free labor. What a loser."

siva7 2y ago

Yes, charity. That's exactly what these trillion dollar empires think of those open source maintainers. Microsoft pulled this same stunt multiple times on os maintainers.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pknerd 2y ago
What else can you expect from the company that was founded by Gates?(Ref, SCP,QDOS, IBM)
echelon 2y ago
Open source has been hijacked by trillion dollar hyperscalers. It's time we switch to "fair source" or "equitable source". Put MAU/DAU/ARR/market cap limits in your license. Open to everyone with a market cap under $1B or revenues under $100M. All others, please see our "business@" email. Place viral terms like the AGPL that requires that all other systems touched by your code to be open - especially the backend/server components that typically remain hidden. We're giving away power to these companies for free, and they use their scale and reach to turn our software into a larger moat that ensnares us and taxes us in everything else we do. Your contribution of open source in one area might bubble up as Microsoft or Google's ability to control what you see or how you distribute software to customers. It's intangible and hard to describe these insane advantages and network effects big players like this have to lay people, but I know we as software engineers understand this. Open source has been weaponized against us. They get free labor and use our work to tax us, pin us down, out compete us, and control us. We need to fight back.
- ashoeafoot 2y ago
  Those companies can produce legal abstraction hacking solutions faster then you can develop shielding ones. You needs something poisonous ,costing money or work with each usage preventing mass adoption without a complete rewrite .
  - 2y ago

Matl 2y ago

> Wtf are people doing charity for trillion dollar empires. I agree with you 100% but I'm guessing getting approached by Microsoft can be pretty ego boosting, which is what these companies exploit.

shortrounddev2 2y ago

Seems more like a networking opportunity personally