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by wly_cdgr
1554 days ago
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Always good to see an open source dev standing up for themselves, if only a little, against all the entitled freeloaders and techbros who are all too happy to exploit them and to encourage them to continue exploiting themselves If you build a product that uses open source libraries and you make money off that product, you should pay the people who created the open source libraries, even if they don't expect it or ask for it. Period. It's not a legal question, it's a basic middle-school-civics question of not being a piece of shit. If you can't afford to do that for all the open source libraries you use while still making a profit, you simply don't actually have a viable business model, much like how if you can't afford to tip your server you can't actually afford to go out to eat |
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As an author of open source projects with thousands of users: no. You should abide by the terms of the license, which I voluntarily chose and which does not have a secret passive-aggressive clause of "you're a piece of shit if you don't pay".
(Separately, the tipping model is awful and something we should be moving away from rather than expanding).