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How can this be fixed?
Devs can convince their companies to sponsor open source projects that companies use. Most devs don’t care, why would companies?
In my experience it’s because companies desire a year end return greater than the last. To do so means every investment of time to them needs to be of monetary gain, or else they show gains by cutting the employees that would work on that project and the bottom line goes up. Aka more investors and stock increases (overlap occurs there)
Most companies put money aside for community initiatives. This is important for companies because it improves moral, thus reducing employee churn, which is costly. Spending a thousand bucks a year in sponsorships is a drop in the bucket for any mid sized company. If you never ask, you’ll never know.
Why would you want to prevent strangers, future humanity or governments from using open source?
I don’t think they do, I think they are inquiring into how we can get them to support production of these products without emphasizing on their own profits.
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.
Okay, I would love that but let me see if I can play devils advocate and get productive responses that work in the capitalistic world we are stuck in.
Why would a company pay a team millions of dollars annually to give it away for free. That destines their entire company for failure in their mind. They get no kick backs other than a thank you note for doing so… Which means nothing to their bottom line but down.
i think you misunderstood it.
take a look at libreoffice, proxmox, pfsense, flexiwan, canonical, redhat if you want an example of this business model actually working, at different stages of success.
It’s no longer open source if you restrict commercial usage. Sure, licence your software that way if you want to, but don’t call it open source.
is ubuntu not open source then? or libreoffice?
if so, sure.
Ubuntu and LibreOffice are both free for commercial use. Or am I misunderstanding what you mean?
canonical and libreoffice are examples of companies that do commercial support contracts. proxmox is an example of a free for personal use, but paid for businesses.
im talking about licensing and business models, by giving a few examples of how devs can be paid while being free and open for users, but paid somehow for companies. and how that doesnt necessarily mean it has to be closed.
I see what you mean. Yes there are great examples like those that offer support contracts for the open source software projects.
I think one point of confusion here is that as open source licenced projects, they do not restrict commercial use. The companies that lead the development just happen to also offer the best paid support.
Minor correction: proxmox is AGPL so free to use commercially without their support contract.
i usually advocate for a more restrictive license for commercial use, to avoid openssl type situations. where huge corpos will take it, use it to build big infrastructure without compensating the creator at all, and not even bothering to help with maintenance.
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 leaching 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
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
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.
Except that Sony did contribute to FreeBSD on many occasions. Although I am not sure about Apple and others.
I would like to see what would happen if copyfarleft & post-open source licenses had more uptake.
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.
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.
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.
So it wasn’t open was it, it was now paid for to someone else?
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
❤️ 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 ❤️
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.
the meme doesn’t do it justice; the delta along makes the gilded and georgian times look like a temporary madness.
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.
Oh they do love using open source for sure. It’s free after all! /s
A nice item on my resume presumes a company sees profits which you are assuming a company desiring profits is willing to make 0 profit deals when spending money on assets. It’s flawed at its core.
Capitalism forbids it
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).
Go for Free Software with copyleft
Agpl bitches!
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Is it though? Like who was promised anything for doing open source software development. It’s like volunteering at the soup kitchen. Yeah you’re not going to get paid and people are going to eat and leave. That’s kind of the point.
Some people do it for resume points.
Personally, I open-source my random crap because it’s possible that someone else had a similar problem and would appreciate a pre-made solution. I have been on the receiving end of that many times, and paying it forward is the least I can do.
I open source everything I make whether it’s useful to anyone or not just for the sake of it, I document it for CV points
the action of making use of and benefiting from resources.
Yes, they are indeed benefitting from this, but so is everyone else that uses the software if you’re going by textbook definition.
No one held a gun to their heads and made them write the software nor give it away for free.
Well…
People are getting harassed a lot for not supporting their software as others think they should. Look at the xz guy, he basically quit because he couldn’t take it anymore.
It’s emotional extortion, not a physical gun.
Some people’s sense of entitlement is bottomless, despite not being owed a damn thing. They are very silly, and oblivious to it.
I just tell them, what do you want for nothing, your money back?
