[carlosjobim]

You can't steal something which is free. This is what you should expect if you give away stuff for free to anybody who happens on it. To me it seems that FOSS people take perverse pleasure in these kind of things.

It's easy to prepare for what is ahead: Get yourself out of the filthy FOSS swamp and start charging a fair price for your work from real customers. That is something everybody benefits from and it is also dignified for everybody involved.

[pfcd]

"FOSS" doesn't mean that you cannot monetize your program.

It's just that people have taken different routes historically.

[carlosjobim]

Sell the program or give it away for free, to me both is fine. But to release the source code for free, then complain that other people take it and sell it - that's ridiculous.

If I give away my secret sauce recipe, I have no right to complain if somebody puts it in a bottle and sells it. Either you keep it to yourself or you don't.

[derektank]

> Either you keep it to yourself or you don't.

Governments have presented us with a third option, intellectual property, which allows a creator to release their intellectual contributions publicly while preventing someone else from reproducing it. Violating the terms of an open source license are generally considered intellectual property violations and allow the creator to seek damages.

[carlosjobim]

Good luck with that. If you throw your wallet onto a busy street corner, then by the law nobody is allowed to take it either. But cops will tell you that they have more important things to take care of than victims who take every measurable action at hand to make themselves victims.

[derektank]

Thankfully, you don’t need cops to pursue a civil case.

I don’t know why you’re pretending as if this is some Herculean effort. This is pretty well tread territory at this point, see Jacobsen v. Katzer. Katzer was forced to settle for $100k in 2010 for violating the license on Jacobsen’s model train software that had been uploaded to SourceForge.

[bluefirebrand]

There are a lot of things that are immoral (or just rude) to do but not explicitly illegal

Personally I would prefer to live in a society filled with people who are better than thinking "well there's no law against it so it's 100% fine"

Edit: I also don't want to live in a society where every tiny piece of social decency must be encoded in laws to get people to actually be decent

[InsideOutSanta]

Every book contains all of its content. It's "open source" by necessity. Are you saying that if you buy a book, you can do with the contents of the book whatever you want?

[carlosjobim]

Computer code is not comparable to a book. A better comparison would be a blueprint or a recipe. If Coca-Cola publishes their recipe wide and far for anybody to read, would you rage together with them when another beverage company starts selling drinks together with them?

[zelphirkalt]

Computer code is also not comparable with a wallet thrown onto a busy street corner.

Can you decide, whether you are OK with unfit comparisons or not, instead of trying to have it both ways?

[carlosjobim]

Good point! However, a book is nothing more and nothing less than its content. Code you can copy and implement wherever you want, and nobody necessarily would know it, unless you also publish it as open source.

Let me make a music comparison. If Metallica or Michael Jackson uploaded all their raw recording tracks to Napster and The Pirate Bay. The DAW files, or the separate instrument and voice tapes. Do they have a right to then get mad if people use those files to make remixes and edits?

There is a way to give away your software for free without any risk of people stealing your work: Just give the compiled binaries.

If you upload your source code to a public website explicitly created for source code sharing, which even has a one button press to copy the source code, then you have no right to be mad that somebody copied your source code. You then did everything in your might to facilitate that behaviour.

Okay, not everything. I guess FOSS people could also start hacking in to other people's computers and install their software there, so that they can turn around and be outraged that their code was stolen. That's probably the next step being prepared in the FOSS swamp right now.

[InsideOutSanta]

> Computer code is not comparable to a book

Counterpoint: Yes, it is. Both are copyrighted under the same legal system.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> the filthy FOSS swamp

Now, be nice. This isn't Reddit, and I don't think the HN mods are really into "engagement"*

I tend to release a lot of stuff MIT. I don't give a shit, if anyone takes it and gets rich (which I seriously doubt will happen). It's just that I don't want people coming after me, if they misuse it.

If, however, someone rereleases my stuff with a "gift," and makes it appear that I was behind it, then that's a Bozo no-no. I think that kind of thing is going on at GitHub, right now.

*Mud-wrestling in a cesspool

[carlosjobim]

I agree with you that taking somebody else's name or brand is foul play. I the case I was replying to, somebody had copied the code and put their brand on the author's FOSS project.

Which is the same as some very popular software, including the Safari browser, Android, and much more. That's FOSS, if you give it away you have to expect people to take it. Just as you say.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

It looked to me, like they actually took his name and brand, as well as his work, and republished it.

I guess it was sort of a "fan art" way, which isn't too bad, but they showed pretty callous disregard for the niceties of copyright, which is pretty important, for the type of work they are advertising.