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by iamatworknow
3163 days ago
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A big part of proprietary software, especially when it comes to enterprise software, is support. When it comes to something like a bank, If I'm doing business with them I'd much rather they pay for proprietary software that comes with some level of support than leave them to their own devices with open source software. "But what if the bank just hires their own staff to become experts at that open source software instead?" That could work, up until they need to make specific changes to the software for their business. So they fork the open source project and create their own variation of it. Some of the banks profits now went into paying developers for the changes in the fork. Do you think the bank's executives will just want the money they put into the fork to potentially benefit all of their competitors by having them make a pull request to the original software? Probably not...and then you end up with proprietary software again. Only in this case it's worse than the proprietary software we started with, because every bank has their own fork of the original open project. |
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Given that that is how they can avoid having to maintain a fork indefinitely, and that that is the fair thing to do after you profited from the gift of others who did the same: Erm, yes, they absolutely should want that, and most likely it is in their own best interest.