[marcodiego]

Check how often guitar-pro changed their format for no perceived benefit. Corel didn't even support svg, last time I checked (years ago, admittedly).

The point is: a locked proprietary format is in the interest of proprietary software vendors. It benefits the vendor but hurts the user.

The vendor can even make something document well enough to be used by governments but closed enough to be impractical to be freely implementable. See ms office formats.

[kube-system]

That’s not because of the license, though. Both the license choice and the hostile formats are caused by the author being hostile.

The authors point here isn’t that all companies that use proprietary licenses are good. It’s that a proprietary license doesn’t have to make you bad.

For B2B users, there are often FOSS terms that they find to be hostile. Limitations of liability being a big one. Waiving one’s right to use the legal system is a big deal to some people. FOSS programmers like this because it protects them. But for non-developers, this only limits their own rights.

[monocasa]

> For B2B users, there are often FOSS terms that they find to be hostile. Limitations of liability being a big one. Waiving one’s right to use the legal system is a big deal to some people. FOSS programmers like this because it protects them. But for non-developers, this only limits their own rights.

That's only if you don't pay someone for a support contract. I've never seen a support contract for FOSS that waived liability.

If you want someone to be liable, you can pay them for the privilege, just like with proprietary software. And you don't have to just choose the original developers. This gives the end users more rights, not less as you're suggesting.

[kube-system]

You can certainly buy support contracts but they tend to accept liability primarily in regards to their support capability, not the total extent of what the law would otherwise allow. While FOSS may convey rights that proprietary software doesn’t, those rights are not necessarily valuable to any one user in particular.

This is why people choose different licenses. A software engineer in their dorm room cares about different things than an accountant in an office.

[monocasa]

I've never seen a support contract that conveys all liability the law allows. In general the more you spend the more the lawyers get really specific about what SLAs, etc. actually mean. And the baseline is never 'the developer is responsible for everything'. This is just as true for FOSS and it is for proprietary software.

And to talk about FOSS as happening in dorm rooms is 90s level FUD.

[kube-system]

> And to talk about FOSS as happening in dorm rooms is 90s level FUD.

It was an example of polar opposite use cases, I certainly was not meaning to convey that all users belonged to one group of the other.

[monocasa]

It's also simply not representative of what's being discussed. Support for FOSS is a many billion dollar industry, and describing it as happening in dorm rooms is absurd.