but did the megacorp?
I write open source software. I don’t want my users means tested by the moral brigade to determine they should have coughed up money. I put it out there to literally prevent people from wasting humanity re-inventing the wheel.
It’s right in the damn license. If you want to create an obligation, stay the fuck out of the open source community.
The "fucking point of open source" was, in part, that "free software" didn't send the right message and that we needed a new term that didn't imply "free as in beer".
Open collaboration and the freedoms to fix/modify/distribute the software you own doesn't conflict with the idea that maybe megacorps benefiting from it should chip in a little towards the maintenance of the thing they're making megabucks off.
It is entirely ethical to use free software, even to generate massive profits, without paying anyone anything. That's literally the whole point of software freedom: you're free.
Definition of ethical
1 : of or relating to ethics
// ethical theories
2 : involving or expressing moral approval or disapproval
// ethical judgments
3 : conforming to accepted standards of conduct
// ethical behavior
Definition of moral (Entry 1 of 2)
1a : of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior : ETHICAL
// moral judgments
b : expressing or teaching a conception of right behavior
// a moral poem
c : conforming to a standard of right behavior
// took a moral position on the issue though it cost him the nominationI think that we can all agree that blowing people up with bombs is dickish behavior, and yet the software that has been released with otherwise-free licenses that prohibit its use in such bombing systems has been rejected by the free software community as nonfree.
The idea behind free software is that no other party gets to tell you what you can or can't do with it, such as "make money without donating anything upstream", "bomb children", or any other such thing.
Developers impose the license. If they don’t want it used by corporations freely it’s trivial for them to say so. You’re implying that the developers are encouraging dickish behavior by doing what they want with their software.