Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

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Agree. The fundamental differences between Free Software and Open Source but Commercial Software were always tricky.

The "we'd like you to contribute to our code base, but we want to be the only people making money from it" position of a lot of Open Source companies is untenable. And you can easily see how the original "anyone can make money off this code" position would get warped over time and board meetings to "these parasites are stealing our revenue".

I think it reflects the other side of the problem, the way that maintainers of open source packages get abused and taken advantage of. We need to work out some way of funding and rewarding software development that allows it to be freely used and also adequately compensated. This is not easy.

I think there’s a place for “we did 99% of the work here, but we want you to be able to tweak things if you need, read the code, and compile it for new systems without us in the loop.”

In that case I see no problem with the main sponsor company not wanting just anyone to come and make money off their work. They might accept contributions if offered up, but they are not hoping to gain much from them.

That’s in stark contrast to a project like Linux where it much more heavily relies on outside people getting into the development cycle.

To your point actually, I think it can be sticky for an open source maintainer of a small project when someone comes along and tries to be a more active contributor and treat your project like the latter when you’re really intending it to be more like the former. There’s no great signal of what type of open source you’re intending to create apart from saying “I don’t really want significant contributions” in your readme.

> In that case I see no problem with the main sponsor company not wanting just anyone to come and make money off their work.

There is space for that, but it's not open source or free software, and the project should use a license that reflects that.

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