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Comment by lc9er | Hacker News Reader

So if we're nice to the billionaires, they may return that kindness with table scraps - if we're lucky? Sounds like the tech version of trickle-down economics.

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Yes, but what's the better alternative? The article makes the point that you're not even getting table scraps back into your GPL project. In most cases, the companies prefer a proprietary rewrite. Now you're just stuck with a less-developed project, while the world around you uses more-developed proprietary alternatives and pushes you to do the same. But I guess, that somehow makes you feel better because you don't let the corporations "feed off your work" and instead just waste everyone's time on infinite rewrites?

Yeah, I don't get that argument. "Apple is funding LLVM, therefore it is getting better than GCC!". They are only funding it because it advances their goals. The moment they get what they want they will drop it or look for ways to keep the advantage all to themselves.

The same could be said about non-corporate contributions. "People only contribute as long as they have a personal itch to scratch. The moment they get what they want, you're on your own again".

That's always been the deal. Open source is not a guarantee of free support forever! It's a guarantee that you can always fork and keep using the project (or even developing it further)

I'm less concerned about "free support" and more about "commons-oriented R&D".

There are some projects/people that I donate a small monthly amount. I don't do it because I'm expecting a specific feature to be developed, but simply because I think it's important to have support developers and let them work on something without being concerned about how to make a living out of their work.

Indeed, that's a very important thing to foster! In fact, I published a post about this just two days ago: https://home.expurple.me/posts/non-profit-foss-solves-the-co...

It’s just the academic method of sharing your work so the collective knowledge and state of the art increases monotonically. People seem to like to productive it, but even just publishing your source code so I or my llm can read it and modify it is useful. Very useful.

Everyone only does anything if it advances their goals. Luckily Apple's goals w.r.t. LLVM are the same as everyone else's: have a high-quality compiler backend.

Beware of sweeping generalizations. Most people only do things when it advances it goals, but there certainly are people that do things simply because they think is the right thing to do.

"Doing the right thing" (whatever that means for a person specifically) can be considered a goal too. Goals don't have to be selfish.

A goal implies a clear objective. "Doing the right thing" is a guiding principle.

"Following my inner guiding principles without compromising" seems clear enough. I don't think that you have to fully verbalize and rationalize your principles in order to commit to a clear goal of following them. You clearly feel when you do the wrong thing.

> Following my inner guiding principles without compromising" seems clear enough.

To me, it's not. What are the outcomes that we are talking about here?

> You clearly feel when you do the wrong thing.

Do you think that the developers of, e.g, KHTML felt they were doing the wrong thing when they started working on a browser engine for Konqueror under LGPL? Would they continue working on it had they known that Apple would take their work to build what is arguably the most freedom-restricting web browser out there?

> What are the outcomes that we are talking about here?

Living a life free of guilt and regrets. People make mistakes and can't foresee everything. That's normal. That shouldn't imply any guilt. I was talking specifically about cases where, in advance, you think that you're doing the wrong thing at the cost of short-term convenience.

Regarding KHTML, I don't have any data and can't say for sure. But I'd be surprised if most developers regretted their decision later. They knew in advance that they were getting into an LGPL project that can be used as part of something freedom-restricting. And, in my subjective opinion, Safari isn't so catastrofic and harmful that it defies common expectations of how harmful a freedom-restricting product can be

> Living a life free of guilt and regrets.

Sorry, this is not an outcome. Maybe you can say it's an strategy to help you define your priorities and it can help you set your goals in whatever endeavor you're taking on, but it's not something that has a clear goal post.

> Safari isn't so catastrophic and harmful

Taken in isolation, no it's not so bad. But the issues of Safari are the context where its development happens. Safari is intentionally stripped of any feature that could threaten Apple's market dominance in the mobile market.

And that is the problem with too-permissive software licenses.

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