▲ | bigstrat2003 2 days ago | |
Not quite. The point of permissive licenses is that you're making a donation to everyone. If private industry uses your donation fine, if not that's fine too. But it's certainly true that if you have a problem with private industry using something you freely gave them, permissive licenses aren't for you. | ||
▲ | ants_everywhere 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | |
If you wanted to make a donation to everyone, you'd use a copyleft license. The point of permissive licenses is to grant the ability to exclude people from the enjoying the benefit of improvements. I.e. they're not for creating public goods. They're grants for making it easier to create excludable goods. | ||
▲ | tw04 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |
I think we need to distinguish using and abusing. IMO a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing. When corporations utilize the code and make a good faith effort to contribute back something, no matter how trivial, they are using the source. Just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right and I feel confident given the current state of the world saying that we should start expecting more from corporations. The idea “they only exist to make money” is how you break the social contract. |