Please, just pick a side.

"I want to be the selfless craftsperson giving away work for free to anyone, but I'll also pressure profit-maximizing evil mega-corporations to give me money from the good of their heart, despite the fact that I've explicitly stated in the license they don't have to" is just not a smart position to hold.

If you want evil corporations to have to pay money in exchange for using your software, add that as a condition in the license. Ah, but then it's not "free software", sorry.

There's so much unexplored space in licenses that achieve better outcomes for both the developers and their non-giant-evil-conglomerate users, but nobody is willing to touch that subject, because then they're not writing "real free software" and the "FOSS community" will not use it.

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niam 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> There's so much unexplored space in licenses [...]

Am I wrong that this is orthogonal to "pick a side"? It sounds like you're suggesting that the sides themselves are inappropriately drawn.

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nananana9 2 days ago | parent [-]

If the issue is that large entities are using the software without contributing back in a way that goes against the "spirit of the law", the only solutions I can see license-wise are ones that restrict usage, which marks them squarely in the not-FOSS camp.

I do believe the line is inappropriately drawn, but I also have a lot of respect for what the open source/free software movements have achieved and won't spit in their face by trying to move the line or highjack the labels.

	▲	spwa4 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, and that they are always searching for ways to get out from under even their minimal obligations. For example, the practice now of "AI reimplementation" (ie. uncopyrighting) free software using AI, and training LLM models on free software without respecting the license while simultaneously claiming that the same is absolutely not allowed on their software. Oh and not only can you not train AI on their software "without permission", you can't even use their software through AI (Microsoft)

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the8472 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I suspect github might be preventing some price discrimination. If you got feature request from @amazon.com you could point them to your commercial support offering or something. Some namehandle filing an issue on github makes it less obvious who's asking for it.

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souvlakius 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We definitely have to experiment a lot more with the licenses of OSS but keep in mind that it's going to also require time for projects to use the new licenses and figure out what side effects they have.

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franktankbank 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Personally I don't trust companies not to rip me off regardless of the licensing.