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| ▲ | nananana9 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you want evil megacorps to give you money when they use your thing, maybe say "if you're an evil megacorp you have to give me money when you use my thing" in the license? If your license reads "hey, you can use this however you want, no matter who you are, and don't have to give me money", people will use it however they want, no matter who they are, and won't give you money. Unfortunately, for decades, free software fanatics have bullied inexperienced and eager programmers, who don't know any better into believing that an actual sustainable development model that respects their work is evil and that we should all work for free and beg for donations. | | |
| ▲ | gorjusborg 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > free software fanatics have bullied and eager programmers We must travel in different circles. I've been around a while, and I've never seen _any individual_ bullied for keeping their code closed source. That said, I have an extreme bias toward only using open source code, for practical reasons, and I'm open about that. | |
| ▲ | markus_zhang 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What if they simply use the code and don't give you the $$$? Are you going to sue them? | |
| ▲ | vablings 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The idea that software that is free NEEDS to be open source because "I don't want something running on my computer" but then will go and download the precompiled binary hurts my head alot | |
| ▲ | sfRattan 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Unfortunately, for decades, free software fanatics have bullied inexperienced and eager programmers, who don't know any better into believing that an actual sustainable development model that respects their work is evil and that we should all work for free and beg for donations. Silicon Valley hype monsters have done this, sure. And so have too many open source software advocates. But all the free software advocates I've read and listened to over the years have criticized MIT- and BSD-style permissive licenses for permitting exactly the freeloading you describe. | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I agree that MIT may not be the best licence here in such a use case scenario. The question is why corporations think they can be leeches though - and the bigger, the more of a leech they are on the ecosystem. That's just not right. | | |
| ▲ | buran77 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > The question is why corporations think they can be leeches though Because they can, they don't just think they do. Everything about the framework they operate in allows or even encourages them to do it. > That's just not right. As a matter of morality, you're right. This is something very few people or corporations concern themselves with just as soon as there's real money to be made by not concerning themselves with this. | |
| ▲ | graemep 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The question is why corporations think they can be leeches though because they can be. They do not think they can be leeches, they know they can be leeches. > That's just not right I somewhat agree with you, but they do actually have permission to do it. | |
| ▲ | jonathanstrange 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | IMHO, this is the wrong way of looking at it. You can choose any license you like. Choose the right license, and that should be the end of the discussion. |
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| ▲ | RcouF1uZ4gsC 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | With the cloud, GPL won’t protect you either | | |
| ▲ | dspillett 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | AGPLv3 largely does, if you can and do enforce it in some way when breaches happen. |
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| ▲ | atls 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | AGPLv3 attempts to solve this problem, by forcing SaaS providers to open-source their modifications. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html | | |
| ▲ | j1elo 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Depends on the needs of the licensor. AGPLv3 solves the problem of other players taking the code, improving it privately, and not sharing those improvements. But AGPLv3 is not a silver bullet for people who write Open Source code and pretend to make a living from it. "Open Source is not a business plan". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095581 |
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| ▲ | frizlab 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And whatever license you use, expect it to be crawled by AI, and have AI provider make millions on it. | |
| ▲ | Andrex 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Maybe Stallman had something of a point... | | |
| ▲ | RcouF1uZ4gsC 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Nope. Stallman helped create this mess. Free software underpins all the infrastructure of surveillance capitalism. | | |
| ▲ | Andrex 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It underpins all software, and has wormed its way into Windows. I'm not sure this is as good a point as you think. |
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| ▲ | ekjhgkejhgk 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Stallman is always right, and HN always downvotes it. | | |
| ▲ | 0_____0 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | He's a terrible communicator, and sort of repellent in person. Contrast someone like Cory Doctorow who manages to be right about stuff and actually communicate effectively. | | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't really share that point. If the message is correct, why would the other things matter? Due to "social norms"? It is a similar problem with Code of Conducts. In general I don't care about CoCs. That does not mean I act in the opposite manner either - I just don't feel the need for CoCs. | | |
| ▲ | _aavaa_ 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > why would the other things matter Because on the other end of the argument is an audience of human beings, not a theorem solver. Pretending that delivery does NOT matter, or even shouldn't matter, is out of touch with reality. |
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| ▲ | littlestymaar 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Publicly defending pedophilia arguably isn't “right”, but if you restrict Stallman's positions to software licensing, then I'd agree with you. | | |
| ▲ | ux266478 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The only instance in which he's ever engaged in "publicly defending pedophilia" was in remarks he made 20 years ago about the innocuity of "voluntary" sex with minors. He has since retracted those statements and publicly espoused a different and more informed opinion. There's certainly a large amount of very low-quality journalism engaging in bad-faith interpretations of things he's said in other contexts, though these aren't serious characterizations, only hallucinations manufactured by professional scheisters to fulfill unspoken agendas. At this point dredging it up and holding it against him in-perpetuity is a bit wrongheaded. | | |
| ▲ | graemep 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Of course restrict it to his opinions on software licensing. I think that is the sort of thing people mean when they say he was right. Lots of people made similar claims. Most notably The National Council for Civil Liberties (now called Liberty), the UK's leading civil/human rights organisation made submissions to parliament claiming that sex with minors was not always harmful, had a pro-paedo organisation as an affiliate and give them a representative on the gay rights subcommittee: https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/scotl... The people involved were unaffected, some reaching fairly high political permissions. A lot of other people whose works are respected have actually had sex with minors. Eric Gill and Oscar Wilde for example. None of that makes Stallman's opinions defensible in my opinion. On the other hand I am happy to ignore his opinions on that topic and still value his opinions on other things. | | | |
| ▲ | peaseagee 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tell that to my spouse who, at age 14, was given his contact card by him directly. | | |
| ▲ | dTal 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not following - are you implying that handing a contact card to someone is a sexual pass? Or is it only considered sexual when the recipient is underage? | |
| ▲ | corndoge 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Wow, I'd be thrilled if I met stallman and got his contact card at age 14! | |
| ▲ | ekjhgkejhgk 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I wish at 14 I had people of such integrity around me. |
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| ▲ | tredre3 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | He was wrong about refusing to make gcc more modular by fear that it would be used to insert proprietary plugins, which is why llvm is behind every new language or dev tool now and gcc is only relevant because the kernel still depends on it (for now). His opinions on software have been largely out of touch for the past 20 years. People might yearn for his ideals, but it's just not the world we live in. | |
| ▲ | ekjhgkejhgk 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I keep hearing this. Please quote Stallman's quote where he defends pedophilia. Not a quote of someone else saying that Stallman defends pedofilhia, but a quote by Stallman himself. |
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| ▲ | smegger001 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > if you license it MIT, and it's useful, expect Amazon to make a fork, not give you the source code, thats why the gpl family of license exist. MIT/BSD family licenses are do whatever you want with this, if you want to make money off of you pet opensource project I recommend multi-license it with a copyleft with copyright assignment required for contributions and offer other licenses with a fee. | |
| ▲ | mkehrt 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't understand your point? If you write code with an MIT license, this is what you would expect. | | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Totally agreed. I find it strange that people use the MIT licence and then complain "big greedy corporation did not contribute back anything". Though I also agree that this leeching approach by corporations is a problem to the ecosystem. MIT just is not the right licence to fight that. |
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| ▲ | gowld 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | So? I am not about to create AWS. I'm glad people can use my free software on their own machines, on rented servers, or hosted by an expert. | | |
| ▲ | alpaca128 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | AWS can profit more from it than smaller organizations or individuals, making it even more untouchable by potential competition. A market with little competition costs you too in the long term. | |
| ▲ | Ma8ee 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are you still glad when AWS starts selling you software as a service and make hundreds of millions and you get nothing? |
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