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by danShumway 2578 days ago
> some competing project elsewhere - student projects, in your example - will eat your market.

If a student somewhere is willing to do the same thing as your company for free and release their work under MIT, why is that a problem?

This smacks to me of Microsoft complaining that projects like Linux shouldn't be allowed to exist, because its unreasonable to expect them to compete with free.

If eventually we get into a state where Open Source development really isn't viable, then people will stop doing it, fewer people will be eating your market, and then Source Available projects will become commercially viable.

1 comments

> If a student somewhere is willing to do the same thing as your company for free and release their work under MIT, why is that a problem?

There isn't a problem with that. The problem is when such projects aspire to commercialize their work, find it hard, and then complain when other commercial entities exploit their work.

The hypocrisy I am pointing out is that to get a software adopted initially projects choose overly permissible licenses; then when they try to monetize the project, they run into issues and cry foul.

"exploit", you need the quotes because nothing was exploited. Someone else was able to execute better than you were, that isn't a crime.