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Honestly, the privilege and entitlement of some people. You made a thing, you did a lot of work, you gave it away for free. Nobody stole it from you. Nobody eve

Honestly, the privilege and entitlement of some people. You made a thing, you did a lot of work, you gave it away for free. Nobody stole it from you. Nobody even asked you to make it. You created this situation yourself. And now you're upset that nobody paid you for the thing you make for free? "But but but... companies are making money... off the thing... that I gave them for free!! How dare they!! There is no way I could have seen this coming!!" - Either you were ignorant and didn't realize people would sell the thing you gave away, or you knew about it and are now pretending to be outraged at the thing you knew was going to happen. "But but but... they should pay me anyway, because they're profiting off my labor! It's what's fair!!" - What's fair is for someone to take you at your (and your software license's) word, to do exactly what you told them they could do (profit off it). What's not fair is to turn around after they're hooked on your free thing, and try to force them to pay you for it, after the fact. The point of open source is only to open up the source code, allow people to contribute, collaborate, and share. If you want to get paid for it too, don't put an open source license on it. It's that simple. Add whatever terms you want. But don't make FOSS and then later say it's unfair for people to do exactly what your license said they could do.

JacobKfromIRC 5d ago
Despite the submission title, I don't think I would call this proposal a way to force companies to pay for free software. They could choose not to pay if they don't want to use the software. If they've already downloaded the software, then they wouldn't need to pay unless they want to download it again, but they are free to make as many copies as they want so re-downloading is mostly going to be a matter of convenience I think. I believe free software is better than proprietary software, so I think it's good to better incentivize the production and maintenance of free software.
- 0xbadcafebee 5d ago
  Using nicer language doesn't change the argument. You're still suggesting that corporations be required to pay for the software, which is a reversal of the terms of the license. Let's ignore for the moment that this is manipulative behavior (switching from free to paid after the fact, the same thing users complain about corporations doing). This is likely also illegal. The software license is a contract. Permissive FOSS licenses grant the use of the software in current and future forms without payment. To withhold the source code until receiving payment would be a violation of the contract terms. All of the copyright holders would have to agree to change the license to no longer be Open Source, and even then a judge may well find it illegal. It's also a bad idea because it would split the community. I find this action so unethical that I would no longer contribute to or use any FOSS that required payment. I didn't get into this community to shake companies down for cash. If you want to make money off software, go do that somewhere else, or do it with services and support.
  - JacobKfromIRC 5d ago
    You don't need to change the license at all in order to do this. Withholding source code while providing an executable would violate some free licenses, but all free licenses allow withholding both an executable and corresponding source code simultaneously. An action like this could split the community, but I don't think it would be very visible to people contributing to the software, since I imagine the source code would still be available on a public git repository with the same license, for the purpose of development. Do people complain about Krita being on Steam [1]? It's not exactly the same situation, since Krita never was on Steam before, but do you think the situation would be so different if Krita had been free-to-download on Steam and then they changed it? [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita/

JacobKfromIRC 5d ago

Despite the submission title, I don't think I would call this proposal a way to force companies to pay for free software. They could choose not to pay if they don't want to use the software. If they've already downloaded the software, then they wouldn't need to pay unless they want to download it again, but they are free to make as many copies as they want so re-downloading is mostly going to be a matter of convenience I think. I believe free software is better than proprietary software, so I think it's good to better incentivize the production and maintenance of free software.

0xbadcafebee 5d ago
Using nicer language doesn't change the argument. You're still suggesting that corporations be required to pay for the software, which is a reversal of the terms of the license. Let's ignore for the moment that this is manipulative behavior (switching from free to paid after the fact, the same thing users complain about corporations doing). This is likely also illegal. The software license is a contract. Permissive FOSS licenses grant the use of the software in current and future forms without payment. To withhold the source code until receiving payment would be a violation of the contract terms. All of the copyright holders would have to agree to change the license to no longer be Open Source, and even then a judge may well find it illegal. It's also a bad idea because it would split the community. I find this action so unethical that I would no longer contribute to or use any FOSS that required payment. I didn't get into this community to shake companies down for cash. If you want to make money off software, go do that somewhere else, or do it with services and support.
- JacobKfromIRC 5d ago
  You don't need to change the license at all in order to do this. Withholding source code while providing an executable would violate some free licenses, but all free licenses allow withholding both an executable and corresponding source code simultaneously. An action like this could split the community, but I don't think it would be very visible to people contributing to the software, since I imagine the source code would still be available on a public git repository with the same license, for the purpose of development. Do people complain about Krita being on Steam [1]? It's not exactly the same situation, since Krita never was on Steam before, but do you think the situation would be so different if Krita had been free-to-download on Steam and then they changed it? [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita/