How can this be fixed?
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2024
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Devs can convince their companies to sponsor open source projects that companies use. Most devs don't care, why would companies?
redirect a bit more of it to the devs and you get a bigger and better ecosystem.
make it free for non-commercial use. this works even as a business model of sorts.
Wait, what are the original devs getting from it at all? What did they think they were going to get from it?
From one project I worked on: a fun community, experience with managing a project, a nice item on my resume, and an unexpected distaste of companies pretending to love open source and not giving anything back.
Oftentimes it's someone creating and maintaining a piece of software or tooling for themselves and their own benefit. They just happen to be nice and forward thinking enough to share it.
There are donations, even of those big corpo (although way to little).
What if i have an idea and part of that idea is that it's easy to implement; once the idea is out in the world, it's easy to build alternate clients for it. How do i keep megacorps from using their ressources to take the whole thing over à la Google Chrome? Should i patent the idea?
You can patent it, but here comes the patent trolls.
Patent trolls are companies that generate hundrets of as vague as possible patents and then sue you if you try to patent something similar.
This has also beed done by companies like Apple.
You don't really have a good recourse when you a fighting an army of lawyers.
Additionally depending on where you are patent that you file may be entirely ignored on the other side of the globe.
Chinese companies are infamous for doing that, but history shows that American companies also did this before their economic boom.
Other options are to use some kind of license. Very often this is used when we are talking about code.
Additionally depending on where you are patent that you file may be entirely ignored on the other side of the globe.
Swiss patent office good enough?
Other options are to use some kind of license. Very often this is used when we are talking about code.
But you can't license ideas, right?
If you want to patent something globally you have to patent it in every country, and there are some things like software that aren't patentable in some countries.
A license just tells someone what they can and can not do with something, it doesn't protect an idea. For code it literally just protects the written code, someone could write a clean room clone, i.e. never looking at your code.
No clue, not that deep into the subject.
Agpl bitches!
❤️ We all know you’re doing it for your love of the product ❤️ our appreciation is payment enough for you to keep going ❤️ and don’t you dare to not implement what I demand or I’ll tell everyone you suck ❤️
Go for Free Software with copyleft
Yay for zero-sum thinking!
If you went into open-source hoping to
- get paid now
- sell it later
- be financially successful
- live large on licensing
- rake in that support pork
You're in the wrong place. Like 100% of people whose motivation for a career in comp sci was the money, it's better to quit now before you invest time and your own money for absolutely nothing.
Of those 100%, some of them went onto rewarding careers elsewhere. Some of them went into dreary jobs elsewhere. But they all eventually went elsewhere.
You can always release your software under the GPL and charge a licensing fee for an alternative proprietary license. Even the FSF and Richard Stallman are okay with that and it can absolutely be a viable and ethical business model.
That's just not true. Plenty of people have made a career in comp sci entirely to make money. What are you talking about?
It's the typical basement dwelling no true Scotsman nerd. You're only a real programmer if you spend 18h a day writing code or complaining on IRC why your neovim doesn't work.
This arrogance is BTW exactly the kind of thinking that brought us Musk. Tech is great, tech will save us all, I can tech, I am great, I will save us all.
I wish the people in it for the money would hurry up and leave the market is so saturated
money grubbers, always grubbing for money. discusting
That's why only gpl like licences is viable for opensource, because look at freebsd, Apple uses it, Sony uses it, and many others, but did they contributed back as much as Google and others did to Linux? Nah
Except that Sony did contribute to FreeBSD on many occasions. Although I am not sure about Apple and others.
I love that the gpl license is taking over more and more. I have a couple projects and I proudly use the gpl license. You want to use it? As long as you're at least as open as I am go for it! You want to close source your code? You're going to talk to me about licensing my code then.
I would like to see what would happen if copyfarleft & post-open source licenses had more uptake.
Don't license it as free to use then.
Hope you realise the entire point of open source is to deliver value to OTHERS
First of all, pick a lane. If the entire point is to deliver value to others, then you can’t portray open source devs as the victims of others’ derived value.
But zeroth of all, delivering value to others is virtually never the entire point. There’s a gamut of reasons why people produce open source software, and as well as a wide range of financial compensation that developers get for their labor, from bupkis to high six-figures.
Apache wasn’t written simply out of the goodness of people’s hearts. It was written by the first internet companies so they could make insane amounts of money, and some of those developers won the internet lottery from their stock options and are rich as hell now. https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/10/the-webs-first-banner-ads/
There's licenses that restrict monetary use. Not saying that's the best thing to do, but that certainly would mean you only provide it to people who don't make money from it, which might still be a lot of people.
You can do that with GPL. It prevents massive corporations from essentially leaving off your hard work but can still be free value to everyone else.
No it doesn’t. You can resale GPL & you can even ask money just to get access to the source code & still comply with the license. You can host it without sharing anything (AGPL), & apparently you can train a LLM model on it which can then regurgitate the code which also apparently seems like it will be legal.
Then you can't make good software... Reinvent the wheel over and over again
This is what we call a decision. Choose.
You can license it GPL though
the meme doesn't do it justice; the delta along makes the gilded and georgian times look like a temporary madness.