this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
804 points (98.0% liked)

linuxmemes

20880 readers
3 users here now

I use Arch btw


Sister communities:

Community rules

  1. Follow the site-wide rules and code of conduct
  2. Be civil
  3. Post Linux-related content
  4. No recent reposts

Please report posts and comments that break these rules!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (4 children)

ignorance is one thing, but it's a whole nother level of loser behaviour to intentionally do unpaid work for big tech companies in your free time

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

"Unpaid work" is pretty much all OSS development. "Here's a thing I made, anyone can use it for whatever they want as long as they give credit" is a very simple philosophy. Not everybody who works on OSS is opposed to the existence of closed source commercial software, and rather a lot of people don't like viral licenses like the GPL. Really out of line to call people who contribute their time and effort to making free software available to everyone losers just because you disagree with their choice of license.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I take it that you’re in the first camp

You’re doing it for yourself/for fun/to better humanity

If some corporate fucks want to abuse that then it’s their problem not yours

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Publishing it under GPL does benefit the humanity because any improvement on it will be also available to everyone. Letting corps take your work and put a monetary/legal block for people to use freely doesn't seem like benefiting humanity that much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

No, it will not be available to everyone. Just the clients of the corpo and they can request the source. If you're not a client, you still have no rights.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What if your open source code is awful and is unusable, and a company comes in and makes it actually useful? What if it's used in a medical device that saves hundreds of peoples lives every day?

You've now gone from free but unusable, to also fee an unusable, but in addition to paid and actually useful.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

First of all, in many cases, writing new code is lot easier than trying to modify/salvage old code from someone else. Unless you can just plug it in for a modular function in that case your code is not useless.

And if they think your code is valuable enough to save that many people after they improve it, they can approach you for dual license or other agreements. They pay people with patent all the time, so they can do the same for people who's volunteering their time for open source.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

You're clearly someone who never contributed to open source.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You're making it for fun. You've achieved your desired fun, and lost nothing if some rando takes it and makes another fun project, or big mega corp uses it.

What's gonna stop them from just stealing it anyways? Why would they care about Joe Shmoe when they have infinite number the lawers you have? Also AI kinda makes this irrelevant because it will rewrite the code in a way that's probably not protected, or at least provide enough shielding that their 10000 lawyers will.

Also also, what about all the mega corps that already use linux? That's free an open source and they're free to run their proprietary code on it. If you've ever contributed to linux, or any tool that's built into a distro you're not this supposed loser who's done free work for a big tech company. It's silly to complain about this.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

GPL enforcement has, in fact, been very successful so far. I recommend this Wikipedia entry.

And then there is the very successful lawsuit from the Software Freedom Conservancy against Vizio.