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0 pointsechelon1mo ago0 comments

Not to mention that "OSI open source" is basically sponsored and advocated by the firms that stand to benefit the most: hyperscalers that will embrace, extend, and encrust the thing you built with their monetization tendrils and leave you without a way to make money on it yourself.

See: Redis, Elastic, etc.

Not an ounce of AWS or GCP is open source, yet they'll happily spin up a managed version of your thing and make hundreds of millions without cutting you in.

We need new licenses that are more "shareware" like. That permit individuals, but slap big trillion dollar companies.

"Fair source", "Fair code", the defold license, etc. are all pretty good.

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6 comments · 3 top-level

matheusmoreira1mo ago· 3 in thread

AGPLv3?

tardedmeme1mo ago

They'll find loopholes around that too, in time - they already found some, which led to the SSPL being created.

What you actually want is some kind of noncommercial clause: you can use my free shit as part of your free shit. If you want to make money off my shit, the rules change to "fuck you, pay me"

"But what if a company just wants to try it out?" well they can live within the already existing exception called "not telling me you're breaking my license". If I don't know about it I can't impose any penalties on you. Every good business already knows how and when they can break the law with impunity, and that's one of them.

matheusmoreira1mo ago

What are some good licenses for that? I generally do want fellow programmers to enjoy my work but I don't really want corporations finding ways to make trillions off of it and leaving me with nothing. I've been slapping AGPLv3 on everything I make for that reason. Any "open source" nonsense is just wealth transfer from well meaning developers straight into the pockets of corporations, so I picked the most copyleft license imaginable. I'm open to even stronger AGPLv3 alternatives. Anything that helps individual hackers and gets corporations to pay.

echelonOP1mo ago

This. It's that simple.

Companies shouldn't get your labor for free. Especially the big ones.

Trillion dollar companies don't deserve hand outs.

We should have figured this out twenty years ago.

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uncircle1mo ago

I agree. Free Software is a good idea in concept, but it is the foremost reason there exist billion dollar tech monopolies today built on the free work of idealists worldwide.

In the age of LLMs and entitled users, I must be selfish and cannot release my work as free software any more. The best of all worlds, for me, is to provide source code along with binaries to paying customers.

-mlv1mo ago

Firecracker and gVisor are used by AWS and GCP, respectively, are open source. That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there's more, there's also the whole Open Compute Project, after all.

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