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by KingMob 371 days ago
The current attitudes and licenses of FOSS, while good in many ways, have also enabled a ton of exploitation and free-riding, and people need to acknowledge that.

Nobody should be giving Bezos free work.

3 comments

Especially when Bezos uses that free work,to sabotage the free eco-system wherever he can. Building moats and garden walls, embracing, extending and extincting.

And you can tell by the way they move, they do not want to hurt each other- a cartel of toe-owners. Otherwise, what happened to gaming with the steam-deck, could have happened with linux to the desktop world years ago. Especially now, where the owner describing his intent, transfers to scripting glue code.

> Nobody should be giving Bezos free work.

Just use the GPLv3 or AGPL, problem solved.

The GPLv3 or AGPL still result in free work for corporations, and are easy to comply with for corporations, without paying a cent to maintainers, so do not solve the problem.
Does it really? Licensing only means as much as the enforcement that follows infringement, and good luck forcing Amazon to lose on a case like that.
Uhhh, neither of those forces Amazon to pay you for your efforts if they use your library.

I think you pattern-matched to a different argument.

The crowning achievement of FOSS is in convincing maintainers to accept exploitation as beneficial.

The FOSS era can be distinguished from the BSD/MIT era preceding it by its dedicated promotion of libertarianism in all shared source code conversations, which celebrates (quite defensively!) the resulting exploitation and free-riding as beneficial. While this is often presented as a natural outcome of BSD/MIT licensing, that FOSS viewpoint hinges on assumption-by-framing of exploitation without compensation as being morally neutral or positive. That framed assumption is false: the “scientists publish their work to each other” social climate that preceded it was openly hostile to entities who profited from work without ‘uploading’ via publication back to the community in return. Thus, the innovative social bargain of the GPL: you receive legal certainty that improvements to your source code will be shared back to you; then, FOSS advocacy uses adoption of the GPL as proof that exploitation without compensation is beneficial.

The GPL requires sharing forward, not sharing back.
Yes, that's the problem.
No, its the solution to the world wanting to reduce software freedom.
And that's also the problem when it comes to free-riding megacorporations.

Quit focusing on just the part you like.