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0 pointsmitchdoogle4y ago0 comments

What? Open source is about giving to the community. It's not about what you get from it. It's about providing something useful to people without expecting something in return. It's a core part of computing that makes it so wonderful to be a part of and so aggravating when people abuse it.

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5 comments · 3 top-level

b1124y ago· 1 in thread

Quite.

I find this doubly troubling, when someone using Linux for a desktop, learned how to code via free websites, with free software, builds a product using OSS libraries, etc, etc, and then wants to be compensated handsomely for their product.

Which is, of course, a tiny tiny little thing, compared to everything it depends upon.

OK. Fine. Did you compensate every part of the chain you used?

So weird.

AWS seems paricularly bad here. So does anyone who doesn't contribute back.

Ah well.

jodrellblank4y ago

> "OK. Fine. Did you compensate every part of the chain you used? So weird."

GPL: "Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish)"

MIT License: "including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software"

Apache License: " each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work"

What's weird is giving people permission to do what they want, telling them it's because you value freedom, then when they do something you don't like, complaining.

"Freedom! ... not like that!"

saila4y ago· 1 in thread

I think what you're describing here is more like free/libre software and not open source, although the lines between those terms have become fuzzy. IMO, open source is pretty much all about expecting something in return.

sigg34y ago

Free software isn't not commercial software. The GPL _encourages you_ to get paid for software. Free software is not good because of charitable reasons, or any contingent historical artefact. Counterfactually you can imagine a world without patents and software licenses, but the GPL would still be needed as a philosophical concept.

Free software (in FSF / libre sense) is traditional Kantian philosophy, viz. everyone takes part of the whole by attending to their own needs, the Kingdom of Ends. What's not Good -- and in software what the GPL intends to prevent -- is any action that superficially might benefit the actor but undermines the whole (and ipso facto the actor) in the long run.

Making money with proprietary software is a Wrong because proprietary software undermines the activity of writing software at all.

This is my understanding of it anyway YMMV.

mooreds4y ago

I took the comment to mean "there's more to value than pure $$$, and that open source has been a prime example of this truth".

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