this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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I personally think some types of openly developed software projects should have a strict non-commercial license: if companies aren't willing to contribute back to the source IMO they shouldn't be granted permission to freeload & have volunteers fix issues their paying customers run into
Donations are possibly a bit of an exception here - there are quite a few companies that still do this, albeit growing slimmer by the day.
Another big problem IMO is the subset of users that start attacking maintainers and volunteers because their "free app stopped working" etc. I see that a lot, mostly in the arduino community, but especially egregiously on the Zabbix project - I imagine a lot of those users are companies who aren't even paying/donating to the project
From my understanding, companies that use open software in paid products are charging for their services and support and not the software itself. Correct me if I'm wrong, as I may well be. I just know that's how companies like Elastic and what not get away with primarily using OSS in their products.
I agree with this although it does make me wonder what the world would look like if things had been that way since the beginning. Would the current opensource environment exist? Regardless, the times are different now and opensource is becoming more and more recognized, companies are massively freeloading and a few privileged developers get to make money on their opensource projects.
Anti Commercial-AI license