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If you want people to pay you for your software, stop writing it for free. Conversely, if you write it for free, don't expect people to pay you for it. Otherwis

If you want people to pay you for your software, stop writing it for free. Conversely, if you write it for free, don't expect people to pay you for it. Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it. The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed. (Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")

singpolyma3 6d ago
In what world was Netscape a failure? Made some people an awful lot of money and then gave us Firefox... Pretty far from failure
- nnutter 6d ago
  Netscape basically died and was replaced by Firefox which doesn't/can't effectively charge users for the software so instead makes money by selling default search engine, etc. Netscape existed as the internet was coming into existence. You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it. People barely knew how to use their computers so the activation cost for bypassing their "pay wall" was high enough.
  - SoftTalker 5d ago
    Netscape was included free with almost every ISP installation disk.
  - toast0 5d ago
    Netscape lost the ability to charge before it went open source. Among other things, Microsoft released internet explorer for free (part of embrace, extend, extinguish, afaik). The open sourcing of Netscape 5.0 happened in early 1998, and AOL purchased Netscape later that year. Firebird/Firefox came a few years later.
  - otterley 5d ago
    > You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it. That is not true. They also made it available to download over the internet free of charge (and, as others said, they licensed it to ISPs to distribute to their customers). You were expected to buy a commercial license if you used it for business, though. Practically everyone had a copy of it in 1997 and used it as their primary browser, paid or not, until Microsoft shipped Internet Explorer.
- otterley 5d ago
  First, a self-correction: Netscape did not produce open source products until it open-sourced Navigator 5.0 in 1998. Until then, Navigator was freeware: free to download and run, but not open source.[1] I shouldn't have mentioned them, but my point still stands. Second, it depends on what you define as success and failure. Netscape made its pre-IPO shareholders money if they timed their stock sales right. But the stock didn't go up because the company was profitable. It went up along with every other dot-com stock until the 2000-2002 crash, based on hopes and dreams, not fundamentals. The company never turned anywhere near close to a profit. To me, a successful company is one that makes a sustainable profit based on its business fundamentals, not one that makes its founders and early investors rich in an investment bubble. [1] Correction: Netscape did charge for the browser if used in a commercial context, but few people actually paid up.
  - masswerk 5d ago
    Netscape was actually selling a licence, which became free for endusers and eventually the entire browser was free, as the company concentrated on its Enterprise Server as a source of revenue. Netscape becoming freely available for endusers is pretty much what made the Web a mass phenomenon.
- MiroslavPokorny 5d ago
  Most people only measure success as something like being a B or Trillion dollar company, and thats part of the reason in a different way why nobody pays for FOSS.
askvictor 6d ago
There's nothing stopping you from charging money for FOSS software. Sell the first one for as much as it cost to write it.
- otterley 5d ago
  I assume you mean "sell it before you open source it." If you found one willing buyer while it was still closed source, odds are there are others. Why deprive yourself of additional income? Open sourcing does happen from closed source, but usually that's long after the income stream has exhausted itself (see, e.g., https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos).
  - limagnolia 5d ago
    Or before you make it. Lots of folks get paid to make open source- they are employees, contractors, and creators with patrons who pay them to create.
- bigstrat2003 5d ago
  There's nothing stopping you, true. But I think you will find that nobody is going to buy software for whatever thousands of dollars it took you to make it. So the limitation in this case is a practical one, not a legal or moral one.
  - otterley 5d ago
    That suggests there's never been a viable market for commercial software at all, which is obviously wrong.
    - rpcope1 5d ago
      That's kind of black and white thinking though. No one is going to pay a million dollars for QuickBooks, but a lot of people paid several hundreds. Just because no one pays you to develop a new QuickBooks (at least pre LLM), doesn't mean there's not a market there.
underlipton 5d ago
>Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it. This seems like a pet-peeve that's slipped through, because 1) It's really not; the FOSS developers never forced anyone to use their software, even if they're asking for payment for a product that was originally "marketed" as "free", and 2) With the damage to society done by the work of many of the people in the tech industry and "respectable" white collar work in general, they should hope to be as virtuous as the window washers. Service done, pay for service, they go away and don't bother you for a while? No subscription shenanigans? Don't have to give them my credit card number? No annoying marketing emails? Not intentionally designing their service to be addictive? Geez. Adobe, Google, Facebook, Amazon employees make them look like saints. People give themselves way too much of a pass just because they sit in an air-conditioned office all day.
- madrox 5d ago
  I have found not all open source to be the same in the modern era. The FOSS of yesteryear has been replaced by a lot of projects aimed at enterprise where the FOSS offering is the "free demo." This may have been novel and clever of the original pioneers of the practice, but there's a lot of cargo culting going on. The worst offenders release the source but with gotcha licensing, wait for the enterprise to use it, then detect their usage and go in demanding payment or be sued. This happened to my team enough times to be a pattern.
  - pjmlp 5d ago
    It isn't novel at all, it is going back to Shareware, demos and PD kind of software before GNU ideas took off.
- fragmede 5d ago
  One does wonder, if we'd gotten really used to the idea of paying for software, if advertising, and the resulting tracking that came from it, would have really taken off as much.
  - 5d ago
jongjong 5d ago
The thing is; if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free. Also, the most difficult problems which software solve are hidden problems. Sometimes critical, but hidden nonetheless. Nobody cares about system failure, at all, until it happens to them. No matter how good your software is, you can't effectively market it as "reliable" because every single piece of software ever created in the world claims to be realiable even though almost none of them are! The label has lost all of its meaning and hence, cannot be communicated. So this means that far worse competitors can gain adoption and take the entire market from you if there is any friction at all between the user and your product. Open source is an attempt to reduce friction as close as possible to 0. Anyway this creates a hyper-competitive environment. If you don't have a voice in the economy, open source can seem like your only option to gain any adoption at all. It's a business model born out of desperation, not out of choice.
- otterley 5d ago
  > if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free. That suggests there's never been a viable market for commercial software at all, which is obviously wrong.
  - jongjong 5d ago
    I disagree that a viable market exists. What set of arrangements exist there may be viable, for select few people, but it's not a market. A market implies that people are allowed to compete on price. If a participant can only compete after receiving investment from certain VCs (and otherwise can't participate, at any price point), then it's not a market. Also I'm not claiming anything about the past. I'm just saying today, there's no market.
    - otterley 5d ago
      > A market implies that people are allowed to compete on price. That's a pretty narrow definition. Markets can also compete on features.
jacquesm 5d ago
You entirely miss the point of open source. Open source is not about your ability to charge for the software. It is about the ability of the users of your software to modify it. "Open-source software has its roots in the culture of source code sharing that dates back to the origins of computing in the 1950s. The term was formalized in 1998 with the founding of the Open Source Initiative, succeeding the free software movement initiated in the 1980s, with the intention of overcoming the ambiguity of the word "free" — meaning both freedom and gratis — to better appeal to the business world." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source You seem to be caught up in the 'free' part of 'free software'. It does not mean 'gratis software'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
- otterley 5d ago
  I know what it means. The problem is that people are expecting to be paid after they've already released it to the public for free.
  - otherme123 5d ago
    You can make it work. Odoo is making money selling services, and there are many businesses making money re-selling Odoo in one form or another: partially rebranding, SaaS, support... A non negligible amount of FOSS follows a similar path: yes, they are OSS, but if you really need it, you'll be better served paying a fee to someone who knows how to make it work properly.
    - otterley 5d ago
      That's a different business model from trying to sell the software itself. Plenty of consultants make a living doing integration work. They don't claim to be in the business of selling FOSS software, though. Another model is selling an enterprise-grade release that builds atop the FOSS version, but with closed-source features and support. This is the model that nginx (now F5) and haproxy use.
- 0dayz 5d ago
pyuser583 5d ago
Open source was never about doing stuff for free - at least not originally. It’s about the definition of ownership. What does it mean to own a program? When you distribute the program, you must also distribute the code for it. That’s open source.
- otterley 5d ago
  It's not about the definition of ownership, either. The author of FOSS software retains ownership, unless they explicitly convey it to someone else. It's about how software is licensed--the terms and conditions under which someone can make a copy. That's why it's called the GNU Public License, or the MIT License, and why there's a LICENSE file. The mere act of copying does not convey ownership, and never has.
  - GrinningFool 5d ago
    I think the license was the best tool available for the ideology around ownership.
  - thayne 5d ago
    Yes and no. It isn't about ownership of the project as a whole, but it is about ownership of your copy of the software.
    - otterley 5d ago
      I'm an attorney who specialized in copyright law, and I don't even know what you're trying to say.
      - necovek 5d ago
        You are likely too much in it to see the other side. Free software licensing is an attempt to make copyright irrelevant: it's basically a no-copyright world it aims for, but then structured into the copyright world of licensing to use and distribute. It is nothing but a workaround, and copyleft uses it to make the default an even stronger case for reuse (by including sources). In no-copyright world, you get a copy of something and do with it as you please. No licenses, no permissions. People frequently consider this "ownership" akin to owning a physical item (you get a copy of a book, or a toaster, and you do not ask for a license to tear a page out or repaint the toaster).
michaelmrose 5d ago
[dead]
kaycey2022 5d ago
The unsolicited comparison doesn’t work when entire businesses will be defunct without it
matheusmoreira 5d ago
Indeed. It's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved, and I'm increasingly in the proprietary camp. There are two free software business models: 1. Choosing the most copyleft, most business hostile license imaginable (AGPLv3) and charging for permission to violate it. 2. Relying on crowd funded patronage via platforms like Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, Kickstarter. AI's ability to rewrite entire codebases is quickly killing 1, and even the biggest projects which are most successful at 2 don't make enough to cover even a single full time developer's salary. All of my new projects will be private by default from now on.
- AnthonyMouse 5d ago
  > AI's ability to rewrite entire codebases is quickly killing 1 People say things like this, but can you name an instance of this actually happening? What non-trivial existing free software has been displaced in popular use by a vibe-coded alternative?
  - matheusmoreira 5d ago
    Anthropic rewrote the MIT licensed Bun. The capability has clearly been demonstrated. As far as I'm concerned, the writing is on the wall. And it's not just free software either. AI can quickly reverse engineer compiled software too. It's almost scary how it made short work of all the firmwares running on my laptop. Even the days of compiled proprietary software are numbered since AI can trivially make free software out of them. We live in interesting times. The very act of publishing software at all is now questionable.
    - thayne 5d ago
      That is a first party mechanical rewrite from one language to another. And I'm sure a significant part of the motivation was as a publicity stunt to increase demand for Anthropic's products. If anthropic hadn't acquired bun and had instead "vibe coded" their own replacement, do you think that would have become more popular than bun?
    - AnthonyMouse 5d ago
AnthonyMouse 5d ago
There is a pretty reliable way to do this. Which is to distribute the code under two licenses, where one of them is the AGPL and the other is a paid license. AGPL allows you to satisfy the free software people (and the free-as-in-beer people) and correspondingly win market share and get code contributions etc., but it also scares a lot of large corporations (whether or not it should). And if their in-house bureaucrats won't let them license code under the AGPL but they still want to use it then it leaves them to pay you for the other license. Meanwhile the bureaucratic corporations are the ones with the resources to pay you anyway.
- pclmulqdq 5d ago
  Accepting contributions when you do this is a bit weird. They need to sign away their rights to their code so you can sell it. This is why the “open-source” database companies (all of which dual-license) don’t accept contributions.
  - AnthonyMouse 5d ago
    > They need to sign away their rights to their code so you can sell it. They can't accept contributions under the AGPL, but what stops them from accepting contributions under e.g. the BSD license? Does the BSD code stop Apple from selling macOS?
    - pclmulqdq 5d ago
      BSD/MIT are functionally equivalent to “sign away your rights.”
      - AnthonyMouse 5d ago
        There is a meaningful difference between allowing someone to use your code for whatever and assigning the rights to it so that you can no longer use it. And requiring contributions under BSD/MIT doesn't seem to be a huge problem for the projects that actually use those licenses. The bigger problem they have is that nobody uses e.g. FreeBSD because if they do anything interesting the code just ends up in Linux/macOS/Windows whereas the reverse doesn't happen.
Timshel 5d ago
Nothing "unsolicited" is suggested in the article ...
ozim 5d ago
It is not so black and white. I am annoyed by people who do bait and switch, like „we are open and promise free forever” - just after they build community or they manage to get some VC to talk with suddenly they start charging for project taking in all work contributors also created with it. On the other hand there is bunch of cool projects that started like that and even if they bait switched it is hard to be angry at them.
sameerds 5d ago
> Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it. I am struggling to see how this analogy is relevant. It seems more like a knee jerk to the use of "force" in the headline. TFA seems to be talking about a potential way to _generate revenue_ through side channels that are deemed valuable by the users. This is clearly different from "demand the user to pay for it" as the analogy would imply. Open source contributors don't come unsolicited to "clean the users' windshields". They just write stuff that they find useful and the inherent value of that work attracts other developers as much as users. And then the whole thing grows too large to maintain without serious money.
- deleted 5d ago
  [deleted]
- otterley 5d ago
  If the language were centered around donations (charitable gifts) instead of revenue and the implicit expectations that go with it, then I might take a different view.

singpolyma3 6d ago

In what world was Netscape a failure? Made some people an awful lot of money and then gave us Firefox... Pretty far from failure

nnutter 6d ago
Netscape basically died and was replaced by Firefox which doesn't/can't effectively charge users for the software so instead makes money by selling default search engine, etc. Netscape existed as the internet was coming into existence. You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it. People barely knew how to use their computers so the activation cost for bypassing their "pay wall" was high enough.
- SoftTalker 5d ago
  Netscape was included free with almost every ISP installation disk.
- toast0 5d ago
  Netscape lost the ability to charge before it went open source. Among other things, Microsoft released internet explorer for free (part of embrace, extend, extinguish, afaik). The open sourcing of Netscape 5.0 happened in early 1998, and AOL purchased Netscape later that year. Firebird/Firefox came a few years later.
- otterley 5d ago
  > You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it. That is not true. They also made it available to download over the internet free of charge (and, as others said, they licensed it to ISPs to distribute to their customers). You were expected to buy a commercial license if you used it for business, though. Practically everyone had a copy of it in 1997 and used it as their primary browser, paid or not, until Microsoft shipped Internet Explorer.
otterley 5d ago
First, a self-correction: Netscape did not produce open source products until it open-sourced Navigator 5.0 in 1998. Until then, Navigator was freeware: free to download and run, but not open source.[1] I shouldn't have mentioned them, but my point still stands. Second, it depends on what you define as success and failure. Netscape made its pre-IPO shareholders money if they timed their stock sales right. But the stock didn't go up because the company was profitable. It went up along with every other dot-com stock until the 2000-2002 crash, based on hopes and dreams, not fundamentals. The company never turned anywhere near close to a profit. To me, a successful company is one that makes a sustainable profit based on its business fundamentals, not one that makes its founders and early investors rich in an investment bubble. [1] Correction: Netscape did charge for the browser if used in a commercial context, but few people actually paid up.
- masswerk 5d ago
  Netscape was actually selling a licence, which became free for endusers and eventually the entire browser was free, as the company concentrated on its Enterprise Server as a source of revenue. Netscape becoming freely available for endusers is pretty much what made the Web a mass phenomenon.
MiroslavPokorny 5d ago
Most people only measure success as something like being a B or Trillion dollar company, and thats part of the reason in a different way why nobody pays for FOSS.

askvictor 6d ago

There's nothing stopping you from charging money for FOSS software. Sell the first one for as much as it cost to write it.

otterley 5d ago
I assume you mean "sell it before you open source it." If you found one willing buyer while it was still closed source, odds are there are others. Why deprive yourself of additional income? Open sourcing does happen from closed source, but usually that's long after the income stream has exhausted itself (see, e.g., https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos).
- limagnolia 5d ago
  Or before you make it. Lots of folks get paid to make open source- they are employees, contractors, and creators with patrons who pay them to create.
bigstrat2003 5d ago
There's nothing stopping you, true. But I think you will find that nobody is going to buy software for whatever thousands of dollars it took you to make it. So the limitation in this case is a practical one, not a legal or moral one.
- otterley 5d ago
  That suggests there's never been a viable market for commercial software at all, which is obviously wrong.
  - rpcope1 5d ago
    That's kind of black and white thinking though. No one is going to pay a million dollars for QuickBooks, but a lot of people paid several hundreds. Just because no one pays you to develop a new QuickBooks (at least pre LLM), doesn't mean there's not a market there.

underlipton 5d ago

>Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it. This seems like a pet-peeve that's slipped through, because 1) It's really not; the FOSS developers never forced anyone to use their software, even if they're asking for payment for a product that was originally "marketed" as "free", and 2) With the damage to society done by the work of many of the people in the tech industry and "respectable" white collar work in general, they should hope to be as virtuous as the window washers. Service done, pay for service, they go away and don't bother you for a while? No subscription shenanigans? Don't have to give them my credit card number? No annoying marketing emails? Not intentionally designing their service to be addictive? Geez. Adobe, Google, Facebook, Amazon employees make them look like saints. People give themselves way too much of a pass just because they sit in an air-conditioned office all day.

madrox 5d ago
I have found not all open source to be the same in the modern era. The FOSS of yesteryear has been replaced by a lot of projects aimed at enterprise where the FOSS offering is the "free demo." This may have been novel and clever of the original pioneers of the practice, but there's a lot of cargo culting going on. The worst offenders release the source but with gotcha licensing, wait for the enterprise to use it, then detect their usage and go in demanding payment or be sued. This happened to my team enough times to be a pattern.
- pjmlp 5d ago
  It isn't novel at all, it is going back to Shareware, demos and PD kind of software before GNU ideas took off.
fragmede 5d ago
One does wonder, if we'd gotten really used to the idea of paying for software, if advertising, and the resulting tracking that came from it, would have really taken off as much.
- 5d ago

jongjong 5d ago

The thing is; if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free. Also, the most difficult problems which software solve are hidden problems. Sometimes critical, but hidden nonetheless. Nobody cares about system failure, at all, until it happens to them. No matter how good your software is, you can't effectively market it as "reliable" because every single piece of software ever created in the world claims to be realiable even though almost none of them are! The label has lost all of its meaning and hence, cannot be communicated. So this means that far worse competitors can gain adoption and take the entire market from you if there is any friction at all between the user and your product. Open source is an attempt to reduce friction as close as possible to 0. Anyway this creates a hyper-competitive environment. If you don't have a voice in the economy, open source can seem like your only option to gain any adoption at all. It's a business model born out of desperation, not out of choice.

otterley 5d ago
> if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free. That suggests there's never been a viable market for commercial software at all, which is obviously wrong.
- jongjong 5d ago
  I disagree that a viable market exists. What set of arrangements exist there may be viable, for select few people, but it's not a market. A market implies that people are allowed to compete on price. If a participant can only compete after receiving investment from certain VCs (and otherwise can't participate, at any price point), then it's not a market. Also I'm not claiming anything about the past. I'm just saying today, there's no market.
  - otterley 5d ago
    > A market implies that people are allowed to compete on price. That's a pretty narrow definition. Markets can also compete on features.

jacquesm 5d ago

You entirely miss the point of open source. Open source is not about your ability to charge for the software. It is about the ability of the users of your software to modify it. "Open-source software has its roots in the culture of source code sharing that dates back to the origins of computing in the 1950s. The term was formalized in 1998 with the founding of the Open Source Initiative, succeeding the free software movement initiated in the 1980s, with the intention of overcoming the ambiguity of the word "free" — meaning both freedom and gratis — to better appeal to the business world." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source You seem to be caught up in the 'free' part of 'free software'. It does not mean 'gratis software'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

otterley 5d ago
I know what it means. The problem is that people are expecting to be paid after they've already released it to the public for free.
- otherme123 5d ago
  You can make it work. Odoo is making money selling services, and there are many businesses making money re-selling Odoo in one form or another: partially rebranding, SaaS, support... A non negligible amount of FOSS follows a similar path: yes, they are OSS, but if you really need it, you'll be better served paying a fee to someone who knows how to make it work properly.
  - otterley 5d ago
    That's a different business model from trying to sell the software itself. Plenty of consultants make a living doing integration work. They don't claim to be in the business of selling FOSS software, though. Another model is selling an enterprise-grade release that builds atop the FOSS version, but with closed-source features and support. This is the model that nginx (now F5) and haproxy use.
0dayz 5d ago

pyuser583 5d ago

Open source was never about doing stuff for free - at least not originally. It’s about the definition of ownership. What does it mean to own a program? When you distribute the program, you must also distribute the code for it. That’s open source.

otterley 5d ago
It's not about the definition of ownership, either. The author of FOSS software retains ownership, unless they explicitly convey it to someone else. It's about how software is licensed--the terms and conditions under which someone can make a copy. That's why it's called the GNU Public License, or the MIT License, and why there's a LICENSE file. The mere act of copying does not convey ownership, and never has.
- GrinningFool 5d ago
  I think the license was the best tool available for the ideology around ownership.
- thayne 5d ago
  Yes and no. It isn't about ownership of the project as a whole, but it is about ownership of your copy of the software.
  - otterley 5d ago
    I'm an attorney who specialized in copyright law, and I don't even know what you're trying to say.
    - necovek 5d ago
      You are likely too much in it to see the other side. Free software licensing is an attempt to make copyright irrelevant: it's basically a no-copyright world it aims for, but then structured into the copyright world of licensing to use and distribute. It is nothing but a workaround, and copyleft uses it to make the default an even stronger case for reuse (by including sources). In no-copyright world, you get a copy of something and do with it as you please. No licenses, no permissions. People frequently consider this "ownership" akin to owning a physical item (you get a copy of a book, or a toaster, and you do not ask for a license to tear a page out or repaint the toaster).

michaelmrose 5d ago

[dead]

kaycey2022 5d ago

The unsolicited comparison doesn’t work when entire businesses will be defunct without it

matheusmoreira 5d ago

Indeed. It's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved, and I'm increasingly in the proprietary camp. There are two free software business models: 1. Choosing the most copyleft, most business hostile license imaginable (AGPLv3) and charging for permission to violate it. 2. Relying on crowd funded patronage via platforms like Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, Kickstarter. AI's ability to rewrite entire codebases is quickly killing 1, and even the biggest projects which are most successful at 2 don't make enough to cover even a single full time developer's salary. All of my new projects will be private by default from now on.

AnthonyMouse 5d ago
> AI's ability to rewrite entire codebases is quickly killing 1 People say things like this, but can you name an instance of this actually happening? What non-trivial existing free software has been displaced in popular use by a vibe-coded alternative?
- matheusmoreira 5d ago
  Anthropic rewrote the MIT licensed Bun. The capability has clearly been demonstrated. As far as I'm concerned, the writing is on the wall. And it's not just free software either. AI can quickly reverse engineer compiled software too. It's almost scary how it made short work of all the firmwares running on my laptop. Even the days of compiled proprietary software are numbered since AI can trivially make free software out of them. We live in interesting times. The very act of publishing software at all is now questionable.
  - thayne 5d ago
    That is a first party mechanical rewrite from one language to another. And I'm sure a significant part of the motivation was as a publicity stunt to increase demand for Anthropic's products. If anthropic hadn't acquired bun and had instead "vibe coded" their own replacement, do you think that would have become more popular than bun?
  - AnthonyMouse 5d ago

AnthonyMouse 5d ago

There is a pretty reliable way to do this. Which is to distribute the code under two licenses, where one of them is the AGPL and the other is a paid license. AGPL allows you to satisfy the free software people (and the free-as-in-beer people) and correspondingly win market share and get code contributions etc., but it also scares a lot of large corporations (whether or not it should). And if their in-house bureaucrats won't let them license code under the AGPL but they still want to use it then it leaves them to pay you for the other license. Meanwhile the bureaucratic corporations are the ones with the resources to pay you anyway.

pclmulqdq 5d ago
Accepting contributions when you do this is a bit weird. They need to sign away their rights to their code so you can sell it. This is why the “open-source” database companies (all of which dual-license) don’t accept contributions.
- AnthonyMouse 5d ago
  > They need to sign away their rights to their code so you can sell it. They can't accept contributions under the AGPL, but what stops them from accepting contributions under e.g. the BSD license? Does the BSD code stop Apple from selling macOS?
  - pclmulqdq 5d ago
    BSD/MIT are functionally equivalent to “sign away your rights.”
    - AnthonyMouse 5d ago
      There is a meaningful difference between allowing someone to use your code for whatever and assigning the rights to it so that you can no longer use it. And requiring contributions under BSD/MIT doesn't seem to be a huge problem for the projects that actually use those licenses. The bigger problem they have is that nobody uses e.g. FreeBSD because if they do anything interesting the code just ends up in Linux/macOS/Windows whereas the reverse doesn't happen.

Timshel 5d ago

Nothing "unsolicited" is suggested in the article ...

ozim 5d ago

It is not so black and white. I am annoyed by people who do bait and switch, like „we are open and promise free forever” - just after they build community or they manage to get some VC to talk with suddenly they start charging for project taking in all work contributors also created with it. On the other hand there is bunch of cool projects that started like that and even if they bait switched it is hard to be angry at them.

sameerds 5d ago

> Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it. I am struggling to see how this analogy is relevant. It seems more like a knee jerk to the use of "force" in the headline. TFA seems to be talking about a potential way to _generate revenue_ through side channels that are deemed valuable by the users. This is clearly different from "demand the user to pay for it" as the analogy would imply. Open source contributors don't come unsolicited to "clean the users' windshields". They just write stuff that they find useful and the inherent value of that work attracts other developers as much as users. And then the whole thing grows too large to maintain without serious money.

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otterley 5d ago
If the language were centered around donations (charitable gifts) instead of revenue and the implicit expectations that go with it, then I might take a different view.