[jondubois]

This is true. Most people who start an open source project don't do it for financial reasons. Usually they want to learn, to build a reputation or to create a good product just for the sake of it.

Later, after many years, the developer sees other companies making a lot of money using their OSS project but they themselves are basically broke; they're forced to work for other companies during the day and they still need to spend nights and weekends to maintain their OSS project on the side.

I'm in this situation right now but actually I'm very happy that companies are making money on top of my OSS project; I'm 100% certain that these companies would not have used my project if it wasn't MIT open source licensed.

Most companies who used my project had alternatives in the form of other OSS projects or third party services so they put a lot of trust in me and my project at the beginning. People underestimate how hard it is to compete at the beginning... Even if you're giving away product for free; it's really hard.

Just try to launch an OSS project on GitHub and try to get it to 1000 stars; I see lots of people try all the time but almost none of them make it.

[zeveb]

> I'm 100% certain that these companies would not have used my project if it wasn't MIT open source licensed.

Nope, instead they'd have hired you or a programmer like you — or figured out a way to make money from GPLed code.

The trouble with the MIT & BSD licenses is that they encourage corporations to freeload. That's why Google, Facebook, Amazon & Apple love them so much.

The great thing about the GPL is that it levels the playing field. We all get to share in a software commons.

[jondubois]

In spite of the MIT license and my project having thousands of GitHub stars, it took several years before any big reputable company started actually using it.

The problem is that if tou want to make an impact in your industry, you need big companies to be using your project; to achieve this, you need to distribut your project under a license that they like.

[Retra]

>they still need to spend nights and weekends to maintain their OSS project on the side.

They don't, though. They can simply stop working on it and say "pay me if you want updates from me."