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I stopped contributing OSS lately after seeing how many startups use some of my modules. Why should I work for free to help others profit? Yet if I use restrict

I stopped contributing OSS lately after seeing how many startups use some of my modules. Why should I work for free to help others profit? Yet if I use restrictive licenses people just avoid the software altogether. If my open-source software is successful I just end up being exploited financially. EDIT: Downvotes? I guess it's socially unacceptable to not want to contribute to OSS because someone else will just make money off your work.

pc86 12y ago
Why not use a license that merely prohibits commercial use? And presumably the startups in question are actually adding some value to your code beyond just implementing it with a wrapper. It's not like they are building a business around your piece of code (or are they?)
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  Such a license would mean your software is proprietary, and thus dissuade not just businesses but a lot of end users as well, e.g. from not being featured in distro repositories (or thrown away in some third-party repo) due to not meeting licensing guidelines.
- dreamdu5t 12y ago
  Because people actively avoid OSS with licenses like that, always opting for projects that have MIT/BSD type licenses.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    False premise: Software with such a license by definition is not OSS.
  - pc86 12y ago
    I would imagine people actively avoid them if they plan on charging for something. I'm honestly not sure what you wanted. You contributed code to something, and people used it. Some of those happened to make money on code that included yours (I'm sure the impact yours had on their bottom line is debatable). Did you expect financial compensation? Did you just hope for whatever reason that nobody would make any money off any code that you wrote? If you didn't want people to "avoid" your software, you wanted them to use it, right?
    - dreamdu5t 12y ago
      I didn't want anything. I was stating why I mostly stopped contributing: Other people were making money off of my work without me being compensated. OSS is a vehicle for companies to exploit unpaid labor. The hacker community just hates to hear that.
      - pc86 12y ago
        > OSS is a vehicle for companies to exploit unpaid labor. OSS is freely given, sometimes by people who are paid to do exactly that. The term "unpaid labor" has a specific connotation akin to slavery or indentured servitude. The two are not comparable. Complaining that someone somewhere makes money (at best, indirectly) from an OSS contribution is the same as complaining that Good Will resold my donation at a profit.
        dreamdu5t 12y ago
        Yes, I should have been more clear: The idea that contributing to OSS is A Good Thing is dogma. It is a vehicle for companies to profit from work they don't have to pay for. It has nothing to do with whatever political axe you have to grind.
        forgottenpass 12y ago
        The term "unpaid labor" has a specific connotation akin to slavery or indentured servitude. The two are not comparable. Is this a legal term of art or common knowledge definition? It was unknown to me so I've tried some googling and am turning up primarily volunteer work and unpaid internships under that title. I know wikipedia isn't the greatest source, but over there "unpaid work" is a class of things including both slavery and working at a family business or coop.
      - ndj7 12y ago
        OSS also empowers individuals to create great things - despite limited financial resources.
      - treve 12y ago
- agj 12y ago
  Similarly, if your modules are that popular and causing enough of a support burden to result in resentment, maybe this is a signal of an opportunity? If your code is popular, why not offer support to, or seek out sponsorship from, the companies that are using your modules/applications? A revenue-focused startup is probably a bad resource to tap for this. But getting a few companies to spread out a few hundred dollars each from their engineering/marketing budgets isn't completely unlikely. Otherwise, you can always recite the age-old mantra to cleansing open source entitlement resentment: "Patches welcome."
- bandrami 12y ago
  Because that makes your software not just proprietary but _hugely_ proprietary (remember, even GPL software has absolutely no conditions on _use_, deliberately). Come to think of it, it's not even clear you could effectively write such a license for software (the analogous artistic license is generally about performance/broadcast, which doesn't have an equivalent in software). Once the user has received the code from the licensor, legally the situation is out of the licensor's hands _except for the issue of redistribution_, which is what the GPL restricts.
mhurron 12y ago
Releasing software that others are legally allowed to use, and then them using it is being 'exploited financially.' Interesting.
- dreamdu5t 12y ago
  Because you want to split hairs over terminology, I will rephrase: I did not want to contribute to OSS anymore because watching other people make money off of my unpaid work made me feel undervalued and resentful. It also made me realize I didn't have to do any OSS contribution to get good jobs and spend unpaid time coding stuff for other people to use. There I didn't use the word "exploited".. are you happy now?
  - mhurron 12y ago
    I'm not splitting hairs. You made work freely made available for others to use, they used it, this somehow exploited you. > I did not want to contribute to OSS anymore because watching other people make money off of my unpaid work made me feel undervalued and resentful. Again, what did you think was going to happen to work you freely made available for people to use as they saw fit. They used it as they saw fit. You are complaining that people did what you expressly allowed them to do. It's probably best that you stopped contributing, you clearly didn't understand what you were doing.
    - cwyers 12y ago
      Think of it this way. Community-developed software kinda runs on a stone soup model -- everyone brings something to the pot, everyone gets something back OUT of the pot, everyone gets something that is better than the sum of the parts contributed to it. This can be a good thing. It doesn't stop you from being miffed if you figure out that there's a restaurant in town that's coming, dropping off a bit of mirepoix, hauling off a cauldron's worth and selling it the next town over. And in the macro sense, there are a lot of companies who have figured out how to use the communities that have developed around open source and free software as a low cost to free source of labor. And important infrastructure products like OpenSSL end up being used EVERYWHERE but starved for resources because everyone can just freeride off the work of a few people until something like Heartbleed comes along and exposes the costs of it. And there's probably at least a few products that are in the same boat as OpenSSL and we just won't know what those are until the next Heartbleed. And it makes it really, really hard to solve these problems when we can't even talk about them openly without people being personally attacked for discussing it.
liveoneggs 12y ago
Why did you do it in the first place? Here's why you might consider contributing to OSS even though others use it to make money: If you have contributed to a successful project it's a major leg up in getting hired by someone using that project If you use that product in your own work, then you are paying that benefit forward and can expect some (additional) returns in the future If you learn something new/interesting that is outside of your normal work-a-day stuff
- dreamdu5t 12y ago
  You can get good jobs without having an active OSS history. I'm not asking for financial compensation. I was stating why I contribute much less now than I used to.
  - Crito 12y ago
    You don't need to put your software under a GNU approved FOSS license in order to put it up on github and get all the benefits of listing it on your resume. You can easily put your code up there with a non-commercial non-free open source license, and still list it on your resume. Seriously, companies typically give zero shits about which software license you personally prefer, they just want to be able to look over what you have accomplished.
sobkas 12y ago
>Yet if I use restrictive licenses people just avoid the software altogether. Do you mean gpl/agpl? If yes, why do you care if leaches don't use your code?
frik 12y ago
You could use the (A)(L)GPL license. With AGPLv3 even SaaS is covered. But it's a tradeoff as companies will prefer MIT/BSD over GPL, if there are alternatives.

pc86 12y ago

Why not use a license that merely prohibits commercial use? And presumably the startups in question are actually adding some value to your code beyond just implementing it with a wrapper. It's not like they are building a business around your piece of code (or are they?)

vezzy-fnord 12y ago
Such a license would mean your software is proprietary, and thus dissuade not just businesses but a lot of end users as well, e.g. from not being featured in distro repositories (or thrown away in some third-party repo) due to not meeting licensing guidelines.
dreamdu5t 12y ago
Because people actively avoid OSS with licenses like that, always opting for projects that have MIT/BSD type licenses.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  False premise: Software with such a license by definition is not OSS.
- pc86 12y ago
  I would imagine people actively avoid them if they plan on charging for something. I'm honestly not sure what you wanted. You contributed code to something, and people used it. Some of those happened to make money on code that included yours (I'm sure the impact yours had on their bottom line is debatable). Did you expect financial compensation? Did you just hope for whatever reason that nobody would make any money off any code that you wrote? If you didn't want people to "avoid" your software, you wanted them to use it, right?
  - dreamdu5t 12y ago
    I didn't want anything. I was stating why I mostly stopped contributing: Other people were making money off of my work without me being compensated. OSS is a vehicle for companies to exploit unpaid labor. The hacker community just hates to hear that.
    - pc86 12y ago
      > OSS is a vehicle for companies to exploit unpaid labor. OSS is freely given, sometimes by people who are paid to do exactly that. The term "unpaid labor" has a specific connotation akin to slavery or indentured servitude. The two are not comparable. Complaining that someone somewhere makes money (at best, indirectly) from an OSS contribution is the same as complaining that Good Will resold my donation at a profit.
      - dreamdu5t 12y ago
        Yes, I should have been more clear: The idea that contributing to OSS is A Good Thing is dogma. It is a vehicle for companies to profit from work they don't have to pay for. It has nothing to do with whatever political axe you have to grind.
      - forgottenpass 12y ago
        The term "unpaid labor" has a specific connotation akin to slavery or indentured servitude. The two are not comparable. Is this a legal term of art or common knowledge definition? It was unknown to me so I've tried some googling and am turning up primarily volunteer work and unpaid internships under that title. I know wikipedia isn't the greatest source, but over there "unpaid work" is a class of things including both slavery and working at a family business or coop.
    - ndj7 12y ago
      OSS also empowers individuals to create great things - despite limited financial resources.
    - treve 12y ago
agj 12y ago
Similarly, if your modules are that popular and causing enough of a support burden to result in resentment, maybe this is a signal of an opportunity? If your code is popular, why not offer support to, or seek out sponsorship from, the companies that are using your modules/applications? A revenue-focused startup is probably a bad resource to tap for this. But getting a few companies to spread out a few hundred dollars each from their engineering/marketing budgets isn't completely unlikely. Otherwise, you can always recite the age-old mantra to cleansing open source entitlement resentment: "Patches welcome."
bandrami 12y ago
Because that makes your software not just proprietary but _hugely_ proprietary (remember, even GPL software has absolutely no conditions on _use_, deliberately). Come to think of it, it's not even clear you could effectively write such a license for software (the analogous artistic license is generally about performance/broadcast, which doesn't have an equivalent in software). Once the user has received the code from the licensor, legally the situation is out of the licensor's hands _except for the issue of redistribution_, which is what the GPL restricts.

mhurron 12y ago

Releasing software that others are legally allowed to use, and then them using it is being 'exploited financially.' Interesting.

dreamdu5t 12y ago
Because you want to split hairs over terminology, I will rephrase: I did not want to contribute to OSS anymore because watching other people make money off of my unpaid work made me feel undervalued and resentful. It also made me realize I didn't have to do any OSS contribution to get good jobs and spend unpaid time coding stuff for other people to use. There I didn't use the word "exploited".. are you happy now?
- mhurron 12y ago
  I'm not splitting hairs. You made work freely made available for others to use, they used it, this somehow exploited you. > I did not want to contribute to OSS anymore because watching other people make money off of my unpaid work made me feel undervalued and resentful. Again, what did you think was going to happen to work you freely made available for people to use as they saw fit. They used it as they saw fit. You are complaining that people did what you expressly allowed them to do. It's probably best that you stopped contributing, you clearly didn't understand what you were doing.
  - cwyers 12y ago
    Think of it this way. Community-developed software kinda runs on a stone soup model -- everyone brings something to the pot, everyone gets something back OUT of the pot, everyone gets something that is better than the sum of the parts contributed to it. This can be a good thing. It doesn't stop you from being miffed if you figure out that there's a restaurant in town that's coming, dropping off a bit of mirepoix, hauling off a cauldron's worth and selling it the next town over. And in the macro sense, there are a lot of companies who have figured out how to use the communities that have developed around open source and free software as a low cost to free source of labor. And important infrastructure products like OpenSSL end up being used EVERYWHERE but starved for resources because everyone can just freeride off the work of a few people until something like Heartbleed comes along and exposes the costs of it. And there's probably at least a few products that are in the same boat as OpenSSL and we just won't know what those are until the next Heartbleed. And it makes it really, really hard to solve these problems when we can't even talk about them openly without people being personally attacked for discussing it.

liveoneggs 12y ago

Why did you do it in the first place? Here's why you might consider contributing to OSS even though others use it to make money: If you have contributed to a successful project it's a major leg up in getting hired by someone using that project If you use that product in your own work, then you are paying that benefit forward and can expect some (additional) returns in the future If you learn something new/interesting that is outside of your normal work-a-day stuff

dreamdu5t 12y ago
You can get good jobs without having an active OSS history. I'm not asking for financial compensation. I was stating why I contribute much less now than I used to.
- Crito 12y ago
  You don't need to put your software under a GNU approved FOSS license in order to put it up on github and get all the benefits of listing it on your resume. You can easily put your code up there with a non-commercial non-free open source license, and still list it on your resume. Seriously, companies typically give zero shits about which software license you personally prefer, they just want to be able to look over what you have accomplished.

sobkas 12y ago

>Yet if I use restrictive licenses people just avoid the software altogether. Do you mean gpl/agpl? If yes, why do you care if leaches don't use your code?

frik 12y ago

You could use the (A)(L)GPL license. With AGPLv3 even SaaS is covered. But it's a tradeoff as companies will prefer MIT/BSD over GPL, if there are alternatives.