Comment by ThrowawayR2 2 months ago
> "It makes no sense to write amazing software, used by large corporations to generate billions, while you end up poor and bitter."
Lots of us said this in the 1990s by the way. Even back then, the belief that many developers and businesses would reciprocate by freeing their own source or even that enough would reciprocate for FOSS to be self sustaining was clearly, ahem, unrealistic.
Android (and to some extent, Chromium) are weird cases of a major corporation weaponising open-source to broaden their already market-dominant position.
Android in doesn't even accept patches from the like of you or I, and future versions are developed almost entirely in secret.
SQLite is developed in a similar way, by the way. Maintainers aren't required to accept community patches. It's not part of the four freedoms or whatever. Realistically, open-source licences only give the user the rights to use the software, redistribute it and fork if needed, but no "voting" rights regarding the upstream copy.
You're talking about open development and governance, which are often associated with open-source, but aren't required.
You are correct, but I'm not sure that the colloquial usage of the term "open-source" is very consistent with propietary platforms that just happen to make source code available
This is what has happened with things like Linux, Android, chromium and so on because they are released products.
GPL didn't foresee SaaS becoming such a huge thing. As I understand, AGPL is a step on the way to fixing this.