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by rmbyrro 851 days ago
It's not an abuse. This is by design. It's one thing many don't get about Open Source. The goal is to not discriminate against any kind of use.

If you want to discriminate users by how they use it, then you don't want open source.
2 comments
ecf 850 days ago
Your thoughts regarding open source are borderline irrational when places like Amazon will copy and paste your repository and start making billions off of it.
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rmbyrro 850 days ago
What's the problem with that? If I didn't want others to use my code or make money with it, I wouldn't have gone open source in the first place.

I'd rather use an AWS service with an open source core than a closed-source service. Migrating away from AWS in the former case is arguably easier than in the latter.

And this is because of the open principle.

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ecf 848 days ago
> If I didn't want others to use my code or make money with it, I wouldn't have gone open source in the first place

> I'd rather use an AWS service with an open source core than a closed-source service.

I guess it’s just a problem with the people who work in software engineering. You won’t use anything closed source, but also don’t care if other engineer’s valuable open-source tools are hijacked by companies with billions in resources.

Basically, you want to have your cake and eat it too.

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spencerflem 851 days ago
Its not illegal, but it is abuse
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rmbyrro 851 days ago
If you consider this an abuse, you're not in favor of the spirit of open source to avoid discrimination.

You think uses should be discriminated between acceptable and abusive.

It's OK to think that way, but it's not an open source way of thinking.

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spencerflem 851 days ago
The original goal of Free Software, and the part I vibe with, is that you should have full freedom and control of the software you run.

The people taking someone else's tool and rehosting it with better SEO and more ads steals revenue from the original author and makes them less likely to make more open source stuff. It's greedy and hurts the community. I get why people would want non-OSI licences that allow everything but that.

As for whether its Abuse, idk, I don't want to lay out a precise definition and have a semantics argument. But its definitely not a cool thing to do

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oliwarner 851 days ago
> A number of them even have the gall to post links advertising them in the comments of my own tools.

That and the search engine mayhem are abusive behaviour, even if not abuse of the license.

It's being a dick, deliberately.

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