[theamk]

Those being?

Most of the so-called "corporate exploitation" cases I hear about on HN happened in exact accordance to the license. It's like clockwork:

(1) Authors releases software under license which explicitly allows anyone (including AWS) to productize it

(2) All the users flock to it (people do like it when there are multiple suppliers that can drive the price down)

(3) AWS productizes it, drives the price down. Users are happy.

(4) Developers act surprised that users don't want to pay more money when they can pay less.

(One notable exception is massive and common GPL violations by various hardware manufacturers. This is a real shame and should be enforced more... but that's not what Perens was talking about)

[Ekaros]

I have wondering about this model. Somehow developers/companies should get marketing from product being free, but then should also be paid for it... I personally see that these technologies are often picked up because they are free. Meaning that if they were not it would have been unlike option to choose.

It is like having your cake and eating it too...

I'm not sure if there is any good solution. Maybe it is just going back to something like source available... And selling actual products or services.

[slowhadoken]

You’re rationalizing exploitation. There are open source rules and corporations are breaking them. OpenAI most of all these days.

[theamk]

By "OpenAI", do you mean Github Copilot training on open source data?

Even if government makes new laws, it's not going to be nearly enough. Github Copilot had $100M revenue (not profit) 6 month ago [0]. Let's say MS dedicates half of it to payment to providers of training data. Github currently has 120M public repositories [1] - that's less than $0.50/year for each repo. Even if we say only 1% of repos are "alive" and need payments, that's still $50/year, not enough to pay for any development.

So I agree that OpenAI is unfair and should be prohibited from scraping all copyleft code, but fixing this won't help with open source payments at all.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37835486

[1] https://github.com/search?q=is%3Apublic&type=repositories

[slowhadoken]

By "OpenAI" I mean anything that scrapes open source code to profit off of it especially without giving credit. Any other conversation is a distraction. And while tech bros pontificate Red Hat is dying.