[xienze]

There seems to be this mentality among a large number of people who publish open data/research/software that everything is fine as long as no one else makes money using it. The second that happens, they're furious and act as though someone unfairly profited off of their "unpaid labor" (read: that thing they did purely for the love of the game). I think it has to be some sort of feeling of resentment and/or stupidity that _they_ were the person with a million dollar idea that let it slip through their fingers.

[fluoridation]

It's not that difficult. You invest effort into research in the hope it'll give you a competitive edge. If someone else can come along and reproduce your results practically at a much lesser cost, then you lose that competitive edge. You're back at square one, except you've lost the cost of the research.

[olalonde]

Hence why most companies don't publish research and most software is proprietary. Publishing and open source only make sense in certain situations.

[1718627440]

Open source doesn't mean, it's available to the general public.

[fluoridation]

What's your point?

[1718627440]

That the point he is making does not apply to open source, but rather to freeware (which is open source too). Open source can be completely B2B, without releasing it to third parties. Also open source is not free software, so you can also forbid your costumers from sharing the source further.

EDIT: That's crap. I only thought about the aspect of continuing sharing, but if you also don't want your direct customers to know, then of course open source is very much relevant.

[fluoridation]

The point is "most companies don't publish research and most software is proprietary [because that entails giving up the competitive edge]". I don't see anything in there about price. Also, I think most people would say that if you have to pay an exorbitant license fee to see the source code then the software is still proprietary. I don't see how it's not true that most companies keep their software proprietary to retain a competitive advantage.

[olalonde]

It seems you are confusing source-available and open source. One of the criteria of open source is free redistribution. If your license forbids sharing the source then it's not open source.

In practice, if you use an actual open source license in a B2B setting, it's best to assume that your software will become available to the general public (e.g. it just takes one person to publish it on GitHub).

[alt227]

Is this not why copyright exists?