| Most, but not all, companies generally don't donate any money to server OSes and open source they deploy by the hundreds of thousands. It sucks but it's the current state of affairs. (I think more FOSS should be be less free and monetized more in the context of large-scale enterprise purposes, in order to keep developers' bills paid and support quality up. The honor system doesn't work because most corporate choose to "cheat" where possible.) If a project releases open source totally for free, it cannot realistically expect sponsorship to magically appear. If a project needs sponsorship to keep the lights on, the we're closing up shop, unless ... routine works. If a project prefers to become a commercial product with a freemium option, they should do such. Otherwise, don't slave away on a project and resent what you cannot afford to give away. Just don't do it, if you can't live with it being exploited by companies for free. Punishing everyone for the sin of a few rogue companies is the kindergarteners routine and childish. It doesn't work and it just angers people without solving the licensing issue at a core level. PS: Perhaps grsecurity may want to instead consider a sensible noncommercial license similar to somewhere between AGPL and something like what good ol' evil Oracle would license their DBMS, i.e., companies over X employees or Y revenue need a license; hobbyists, academics and individual developers exempted. Drama resolved. |
Being a set of Linux patches, it would be hard for them not to make their code available under GPLv2.
They can do the Red Hat thing of making code available only to paying customers, and terminating their customers' accounts if they redistribute things publicly. They mention that in the post.