Comment by boublepop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boublepop | Hacker News Reader

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> Seriously. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down?

You can’t offer people a free lunch and then claim they are steeling if they don’t voluntarily tip you the full cost of a lunch.

Open source software is provided under a license and if Apple or Amazon or whoever do not violate that license they are not steeling. If you didn’t want them to use the software under the license you provided the software under chose a different license.

The point of open source is exactly to provide software under open source terms. If you want to add additional terms like “unless you make money then I want to get paid”, then just do that! It’s your software and your license! But you cannot have Heisenbergs open source software which is open source only until someone picks it up and makes money at which point it retroactively becomes proprietary in order to force that moneystream past you.

> You can’t offer people a free lunch and then claim they are steeling if they don’t voluntarily tip you the full cost of a lunch.

No, but I can be miffed if I offer people a free lunch and they turn around and sell the free lunch I paid to make and keep all the money.

You certainly can, but why? It’s a problem easily solved by not giving away free lunches or adding terms.

It seems odd to me to have the solution completely within my power to fix, but not fix it, and complain about the situation.

In my view, the license is specifically made to allow reselling. That’s why I pick MIT, Apache, and BSD. If I don’t want people to resell then I pick GPL or some other license.

Because I want to give my software away to individuals and small companies, but if someone gets big enough that they can afford to pay, I want them to pay me then. I don't want to discourage them from using my thing when they're small.

That makes sense. What I mean is that you can do that. Set up a license so rich people can’t use it.

What I meant is that releasing software under a license that doesn’t reflect what I want and the complaining will just lead to frustration.

This seems like a simple problem to solve, just release under whatever license I want. This faker.js project is released under MIT. The author can continue development under some non-OSS license and I think that will make him happier because rich people would stop using it. But I don’t think it will make him the income he wants.

I think the problem is that non-OSS licenses will result in people just not using the project, not that rich people will start shelling out.

As a small business, I would avoid these licenses as well because having multiple licenses kick in at different levels will be confusing and expensive. I’d rather use OSS or just buy commercial products.

Oh, agreed. I'm more lamenting the fact that there's no good license for this (that I'm aware of, anyway).

> As a small business, I would avoid these licenses as well because having multiple licenses kick in at different levels will be confusing and expensive. I’d rather use OSS or just buy commercial products.

You could just license it from the start and not have to worry about the license kicking in, though.

That's exactly what the maintainer of faker.js is doing. He decided to stop giving away free lunches.

Not really. The repo is still MIT. He said he won’t make further changes, but hasn’t set up his project with a different license.

It seems like his current take is just seeking patronage to keep working on an MIT project.

I think this happens quite a bit, but not normally this way. There are lots of companies who employ people with the sole purpose of writing for MIT/Apache/BSD projects. So I guess that’s a form of patronage.

I hope this guy gets what he likes. I’ve never heard of this project, but it has at least 26k people who liked it enough to star it on GitHub. Not sure how that will ever equate to 100k+/year.

Wait, doesn't GPL also specifically allows reselling ?

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

(And GNU even encourages it.)

See also about selling exceptions to GPL, like Qt does :

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html

It allows reselling, yes, but since anyone who buys it could give it away to everyone else for free, it doesn't really happen much.

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