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by bad_user 640 days ago
You're being disingenuous.

There are 2 reasons freemium shared-source-style licenses are bad mouthed:

1. The products get advertised as open source; inviting people to look at it and contribute, the problem being that they are legal minefields, copyright or patents lawsuits that are waiting to happen. This was the biggest complaint against Microsoft's Shared Source initiative back in the day, and it's just as true now.

2. Some companies made their product popular via Open Source, like MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, took all the contributions and the free marketing, then switched; such instances being a bait-and-switch. Elasticsearch in particular is interesting because what they wanted was to withhold security patches from the OSS version, and Amazon got on the way by pushing PRs for patches.

All these cases are more glaring examples of value extraction, benefiting from unpaid labor.

There is nothing wrong with developing proprietary software, but you need to be honest about what you're selling.
1 comments
nqzero 639 days ago 

  - me: solo dev or small team
  - you: microsoft, mongo, redis
one of us is being disingenuous, but i don't believe it's me (username on point ;)

i agree with both your examples being bad. for #2, they required one-sided CLAs while "open source". the alternative to signing the CLA was to fork, which is rarely well-received by the community, ie the same basic issue i raised

FLOSS is great in that it can facilitate collaboration and adoption, but at the expense of greatly limiting the business models. and even then context still matters - eg there's big difference between the kernel with 1000s of independent contributors, and mongo with one party holding CLA rights to the entire codebase (FLOSS in name only, i'd argue)

  - for me, what's ultimately important is that people are free and that people that do good work are rewarded
  - software licenses are just a tool to help us get there
  - non-FLOSS might enable much of that same good while scaling to more business models and software
  - they might ultimately be good for society, but getting the details right is hard
  - i'm no longer actively working on my own stuff, but my attempt was: https://github.com/db4j/pupl
  - note: if i was doing this today, the core limit would be much higher
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