Comment by whatis991 9 hours ago
This might be a controversial view:
What if the exploitative aspect is open source itself? Trick some above average but naive developers into giving their talent, effort, insights and time away for free or very little? Maybe open source or something similar could have been organized in a way that wasn't exploitative and wasn't (possibly) unsustainable, but that is not how things ended up with what Richard Stallman and others organized.
No it isn't. People having control over their own computer is in direct contradiction with people paying for software labor. In an honest world, sure, but in reality, people don't want to pay for shit and are going to steal from you. The Pirate Bay is still running and isn't going away. So is Anna's archive.
I think at least the license should say something like we will charge on a per CPU or whatever basis for commercial usage.
You give it away for free so don’t be surprised to get abused. Human nature working at its best and worst here.
We shouldn't let cynical greedy bastards set the terms for how the rest of society wishes to engage
There can be "cynical greedy bastards" in many places. If you optimize against them in one regard and place, will you also handle them elsewhere well? And calling for change can be abused by some of them to open new opportunities for exploitation, this time benefitting some different group of them.
You need to have an alternative, and it needs to be a credible and reliable one, to ensure that it does not end up being the case that one scam is replaced with another scam.
I really think that criminal theory needs to progress. We differentiate between say consensual intimacy and rape and we don't let the existence of sexual abusive people set the terms for our romantic encounters.
We have carved out a class of engagements, labeled it deeply asocial, criminalized it and now we pursue people who engage in it through legal means.
Business really doesn't have this. Personal example - last week I was at a place where the business owner tried to overcharge me by an order of magnitude and then verbally attacked me when I caught him and backed out of the transaction.
His google and yelp reviews are full of people claiming false charges and all kinds of fraud, refusal to correct and repeated abuse until they closed their cards. It's wildly obvious what's going on here and I was on the ball enough to catch it.
I contacted the police and they said "well you should call the BBB or something". It's dozens of reviews of clear credit card fraud and for some reason because he's a merchant, doesn't seem to hit the radar.
These are purely criminal matters - people acting habitually in bad faith with ill intent in a brazenly dishonest manner.
Whether it's plundering the commons, polluting the public discourse, or breaking other types of social compacts, these should be treated the same as any other crime.
Does your country allow suing him for a large monetary amount? Have you talked to the media? A lawyer? Maybe together with others? Made it as easy as possible for the police to get him, paper trail, receipts and all?
You do have points, though, but there might at least be some actions that you and others can take in this case. Maybe a medium change like changing the law on this specific point might make sense.
I'm not law enforcement. This shouldn't be my job. If I see someone robbing a store with a mask on and a gun I should be able to call the police, report it, and hand it off.
If there's an accumulation of complaints against this merchant then that should warrant an investigation.
The police have like half the local city budget, can't they do their job?
The exact moment you charge for something, you need payment processing, a bank, a legal entity to hold said processed funds, you have liability, you need some sort of marketing / sales process (even if it's just copy on a website), and the barrier for someone to use your product is suddenly extremely high, simply because it costs something.
Release it for free, no barrier to entry, no legal liability, the entire world can use it instantly. This is why free software spreads and catches on - precisely because it's free.
There is no way to form a business around FOSS without becoming a gatekeeping high-barrier entity. You can release for free then charge extra for consulting or special features, which many have done and continue to experiment with.
But the core reason why FOSS spreads and took over is precisely why it is difficult to fund. No one is going to pay for something when the alternative is free. And the moment you start to charge some free alternative comes along and your prior users spurn you as greedy
This is an upfront cost and is possibly a one-time cost per-agreement.
Practically nobody downloads and installs sudo directly from the project website; people install it with their distribution of choice. The agreement could be automated and included in the licensing process. ie: the license gives specific distributions access to the software (either via paid or other agreed-upon terms appropriate to the distribution) and perhaps individual licensing terms for non-commercial entities.
Of course, the bigger ask in this decade is in use for training LLMs. OSS shouldn't be laundered through an LLM (IMHO) for license avoidance. Maybe some projects are OK with that (eg: many BSD licensed works.) There are some that likely aren't.
> The exact moment you charge for something, you need payment processing, a bank, a legal entity to hold said processed funds, you have liability, you need some sort of marketing / sales process (even if it's just copy on a website),
That seems like an area that's ripe for innovation. What does it take to get setup on a platform like Patreon? Seems like something similar ought to be setup for open source/independent development, probably an idealistic nonprofit.
> and the barrier for someone to use your product is suddenly extremely high, simply because it costs something.
All the organizations who really ought to pay are already setup to do all that, and do it all the time.
> But the core reason why FOSS spreads and took over is precisely why it is difficult to fund. No one is going to pay for something when the alternative is free. And the moment you start to charge some free alternative comes along and your prior users spurn you as greedy
What we need is innovation. Maybe a license that has a trip-wire? If not enough money is voluntarily deposited into a tip jar over a certain period of time, the license requires a modest payment from all for-profit organizations of a particular size.
That's up-front, is for the most part free, and incentivizes some payment.
That's a good point. There's no good way to ensure your open source (source available?) project isn't being ripped off by some company.
Even if you add functionality to phone home, it can be removed by all but the dumbest offenders.
I think you have good arguments, but I wonder if there are alternatives that could work in at least some cases. Like, how Unreal engine's license works. Source-available to game developers, but in theory limited to paying customers, or something along those lines.
All of this is true, but ironically Free Software is about ensuring people have control over their computers, and Open Source spun the narrative to make it about getting software cheap or without paying at all.
People having control over their computer (and even having the right to share what they run on their computer!) is completely compatible with people paying for software labor.