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Comment by grokys | Hacker News Reader

And then people complain about "bait and switch " or "pulling the rug" when an OSS project becomes successful and tries to fund itself in some way. "But that should be free" shouts everyone. I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that OSS was the biggest swindle the corporations managed to pull off.

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Select the right OSS license and use dual licensing.

GPL/AGPL/LGPL is the way to go for business. There are many dual-licensing success stories using GPL/AGPL, both large and small: Qt, iText, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Mattermost, Cal.com, Baserow, and even MongoDB originally.

Qt is an especially interesting case because KDE and the Qt Company have a written contract. Qt can't just switch licenses. They have retreated from every voluntary contribution to open source, but the contract binds them and they can't do anything to it unless they do complete rewrite from scratch.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't mind at all when an open source project switches licenses or whatever. They gave away the fruit of their labor, but I am not entitled to any more of it.

What does bother me is when the projects pivot to claiming that users now have a moral obligation to financially support the project. There is a kind of dishonesty in this move.

It's not that a successful project "should be free", it's that its success depended on it being free. If they had said all along that they'd eventually ask users to pay, that would be honest... but then they wouldn't have seen much of that adoption in the first place.

In my case, I never intended on my open source project becoming popular, it just did and I had to either abandon it or make it my job. I'm not sure where that falls in your judgement.

I suspect this is also the case for PHP though.

It's your project, to the extent that you own the copyright. You are free to switch the license on your project, etc. If anyone tries to shame you for this, you should pay no mind. (Edited to add that you are also free to abandon it, and you could do that with a clear conscience.)

Likewise, users are free to continue using open source software without payment or donation, to fork the project, etc. If anyone tries to shame them for this, they should pay no mind.

Why would you have to abandon it instead of just keeping on in your preferred pace? If anybody wants more rapid development they can fork it, not your problem.

Some people also have tried the paid new feature prioritization where it later lands for everyone. I think it worked in some projects but project must have been really good otherwise.

I mean: who doesn't want to work full time on their passion project? Especially when I'd just been made redundant, I feel most people would do the same.

Full time on passion project only makes sense if you're also getting paid a decent salary. Full time for a bunch of free loaders does not make sense.

Also it gets less fun when people start making demands of you and you have to deal with taxes and all the unfun stuff.

> I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't mind at all when an open source project switches licenses or whatever. They gave away the fruit of their labor, but I am not entitled to any more of it

It only bothers me when they try to claim their new license is open source or use misleading language when it isn't. Which seems to be what 90% companies doing that do.

People can do whatever they want with their intellectual property as long as they aren't lying about it.

I've been shouting this from the rooftops for ages now. OSS is a trojan horse, something meant to devalue the work of independent developers/small businesses and ensure that the only way the software can be supported is through the patronage of big tech, who earn the money to control such OSS through their unethical monopolistic practices. Look at the languages with funding, and where it comes from. C and C++ (both LLVM and GCC), C#, JS/TS, Java, Rust, Go, Python are all directly funded by big tech. The naive idealism results in everything falling into the hands of ~10 corporations plus some VCs who gamble on which ones will become worth acquiring by big tech, and then we wonder why everything goes to shit and our entire ecosystem is so user-hostile.

And the indoctrination is so strong that even after all I've lived through and seen, my default is still "let's open source this".

I'm not saying that big tech isn't hijacking open source software, but that does not mean that free or OSS was always "meant to devalue" devs or small companies.

Until very recently, big tech pumped untold millions of dollars into obliterating FLOSS altogether, calling it a cancer that will destroy any enterprise it touches.

You mean just Microsoft. Microsoft was an outlier. Even in the 90s, Linux and GCC were being funded by big tech. Obviously they were developed with the best of intentions, but I think it's accurate to say that OSS is "meant" to devalue developers because the purpose of a system is what it does, and that is what it does in practice.

Or Oracle, Adobe, … it’s more than just Microsoft.

"The purpose of a system is what it does" is the weirdest cliché I encountered here, and that's not just because it is horoscope nonsense dressed up as a fact, but because it brilliantly illustrates how many people here think they just know what a system does on a glance.

But if it was true: In the 90s, millions of small businesses around the world used FLOSS to host websites and offer services over the internet. That was decidedly not the route big enterprises wanted to go. They wanted to push through big standards through ITU et al, build giant, patented moats, and host it all on big mainframes with huge Oracle databases.

Even today, there exist small to medium businesses in the hosting and shopware space, and they can only do that because big tech could not push them out of that space because FLOSS protected them.

This is why Free Software is important. It is about a lot more than just being open source.

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