Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Its weird what people and businesses will and will not support.

Businesses will shovel loads of money into SaaS and cloud hosting without blinking, but support a programming tool? Never! Another hundred Office users and 50 more AWS VMs? No problem.

People will spend $10 on a coffee but would never spend $5 to support a project that saves them hundreds or thousands of hours of work. They'll spend $15/month to host a site, but would never pay for the software that runs it even though that took far more effort than racking up some servers.

No wonder everything is surveillanceware and mega-corp silos. We get what we pay for, or rather we don't get what we won't pay for... like independent software.

View on HN

Sure. In the case of Qt, it was very expensive but well worth paying for because it does a good job. The LGPL stuff is important because it provides us with an "out" if the Qt company goes crazy with prices.

Avoiding the "out" makes me not want to make use of the new modules. And the hassle of audits makes be question the cost of the inconvenience to me, the dev, of having a license.

It's tradeoffs all the way down.

It's outrageously expensive. And you can't just buy what you really need, just all or nothing. In many projects I only need Qt Core; for that I would have to buy a license for everything from these people with a far worse contract than LGPL and pay royalties. No thanks.

Exactly, that is why you can only have nice tools when working for big corps.

FOSS made it fashionable to want to be paid for work, while refusing to pay for the work of others, and in the process using clunky tools.

Naturally upstream cannot pay bills from PR and eventually moves on.

I wouldn't take it that far, but IMHO the free (as in beer) part needs to be questioned at least when it comes to for-profit commercial uses of software.

I'd like software to be free and open source for people and academic or non-profit uses, but I would like it if corporations for their use if they are using them in certain ways. Particularly problematic is the use of FOSS to power closed SaaS.

ZeroTier (of which I am the founder) just adopted the BSL toward this end, but the BSL isn't perfect. I think a better sort of license and maybe one more compatible with traditional FOSS needs to be developed. I'm chatting with a few people.

I think what ZeroTier is doing is totally reasonable, and more companies who aspire to make money from open source should do it. One thing I especially like about ZeroTier's approach is that you publish a standard price list for your commercial license.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com