OSS licenses generally don't have a "leave a penny" type of clause in them.
Writing software under some variety of a free license is essentially a donation. Authors shouldn't expect to get back anything: Imagine a person donated a ventilator machine to a hospital and it saved a few dozen lives and helped out hundreds more. It would seem strange to me if that person was later ranting that the combined net worth of the people helped by that machine was in the $millions and yet they never got any of that money.
That's how it sounds to me when when foss authors complain about not getting paid. It sounds like the subtext is, "If I had known how useful and popular this would be I would have charged for it." Which seems like a strange attitude to have when making something you give away for free in the hope that others found it useful.
I assume you mean "take a penny" = "use the software for free" and "leave a penny" = "contribute back" (money or time).
With the plate there's a sign that says both "take" and "leave". In this case there is also a sign (the license) which only says "take". The intent is clear in both.
It's further not comparable because taking a literal penny deprives the next person of it, whereas here using the software for free costs the other users nothing.
But I'm not trying to nitpick the analogy, I only want to point out the the obligations (both social and contractual) are not the same, neither are the consequences.
Again, if he wanted to make money from his software, he should've put it in the license and charged the big users for it.
It's very normal for packages to have donation requests, and for developer pages to have donation links.
The metaphorical sign does say take and leave, and the take vastly outweighs the leave.
> Again, if he wanted to make money from his software, he should've put it in the license and charged the big users for it.
A developer shouldn't have to ruin the open-source nature of the software to get there.
Maybe if we could invent some standardized almost-open-source license that doesn't terrify companies we could get there, but we can't even seem to define "commercial" in a way that doesn't break everything. Better still it would be nice if we could use social pressure to get companies to donate a small fraction of the money open source saves them.
This is how I feel about people who create small but popular libraries and then complain about the workload. They're squatting on a valuable and finite resource, attention, that they don't like or appreciate. If you don't want it, sunset your library and let me write a replacement. I'll happily rewrite faker or left-pad for free, and so will hundreds of other developers.
Writing software under some variety of a free license is essentially a donation. Authors shouldn't expect to get back anything: Imagine a person donated a ventilator machine to a hospital and it saved a few dozen lives and helped out hundreds more. It would seem strange to me if that person was later ranting that the combined net worth of the people helped by that machine was in the $millions and yet they never got any of that money.
That's how it sounds to me when when foss authors complain about not getting paid. It sounds like the subtext is, "If I had known how useful and popular this would be I would have charged for it." Which seems like a strange attitude to have when making something you give away for free in the hope that others found it useful.