[cnnlives69]

I worked for a startup company that built and hosted our own custom systems, which were fairly specific to our company and production needs. Our production manager no longer wanted to pay for internal development, so he asked for a demo of a SaaS product from a Chinese company that sounded similar to ours. It turned out that they already had our source code, likely from a Chinese contractor that worked with our team a few years prior, because the product they were selling was almost exactly the same.

While we could not prove anything, it would seem that intellectual property theft just happens.

Today, we use tools daily that probably function because of intellectual property theft.

While this is traumatic to me, if I really try to be objective, aside from the additional theft of art, I don’t see how this is much different than what RMS and FSF stood for. Data finds a way to free itself.

[port11]

The incentives were always misaligned, with having some code be free (open) and free (gratis), but the underlying system being value-extraction growth-obsessed capitalism. If processed food was sold for a profit based off farmers selling their produce for free, I don't know… the analogy makes me shiver.

Somehow we expect FLOSS coders and maintainers to do all this free labour to keep companies from paying the True Cost of everything. Externalities, externalities…

If I ever start another business, I hope I can set aside enough cash to support for the primary open-source tools that we depend on.