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by kstrauser 2799 days ago
What is freeloading? MongoDB is building a project off the works of others and selling it. So am I. If you're employed, so are you. And in return, hopefully we all contribute back to that ecosystem so that the next person can build off our new work.

You say "freeloading". I say "participating in a rich culture of shared work". Maybe I don't contribute all my local work to Emacs upstream, but I push out a lot of Python stuff. Maybe you don't bother sharing all the Python tweaks you've made, but you're an active Vim contributor. Perhaps there's someone else that's a Vim "freeloader" but who cranks out a lot of kernel code that you and I both benefit from. I think that's a healthy, mutually-beneficial arrangement.
1 comments
toomuchtodo 2799 days ago
Try paying your rent and grocery bill with “participating in a rich culture of shared work”. It’s just as much of a joke as “pay you? It’ll give you exposure!” frequently expressed to creatives.

It’s clearly not mutually beneficial when one side is reaping outsized rewards (and not at all ashamed about it), and your example of small contributions to vim and python is disingenuous; we’re talking about entire software packages used without compensation by businesses (Redis, Elastic, Mongo to name a few).

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kstrauser 2799 days ago
Did Redis, Elastic, Mongo et al pay for Linux development, or glibc, or their text editors, or compilers, or ...? Why should they get the financial benefit from building on top of others' donated work - and claim to be an equal participant in the FOSS ecosystem - and then be peeved with others expect the same in return?

If Mongo were a closed, proprietary product who wanted to be paid, sure. I happily pay for Apple stuff, for instance. But saying "hey, come use our FOSS project!" and then pivoting to "...as long as you pay up!" is extremely disingenuous.

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toomuchtodo 2799 days ago
Situations change. What you get for free today, you are not guaranteed to get for free tomorrow, nor should you feel entitled to continue using a tool previously provided for free.

This is absolutely no different than commercial vendors who change pricing or licensing terms year to year (ie “we no longer offer an on prem version; SaaS only now; last year you paid $100k, this year our price is $200k”). You’ve just been anchored to an unusually low price previously.

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