This seems like complaining that the BSD license does exactly what it intends to do.
Yeah, as if the authors had no idea what terms the license has…
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
“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.
I am of the opinion that such people are fools. That is their right of course, just as it’s my right to call them fools.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like most people base their decision on license purely on anecdotes of a handful of cases where the outcome was not how they would have wanted it. Yet, most people will never be in that spot, because they don’t have anything that anyone would want to consume.
If I had produced something of value I want to protect, I wouldn’t make it open in the first place. Every piece of your code will be used to feed LLMs, regardless of your license.
It is perfectly fine to slap MIT on your JavaScript widget and let some junior in some shop use it to get their project done. Makes people’s life easier, and you don’t want to sue anyone anyway in case of license violations.
If you’re building a kernel module for a TCP reimplementation which dramatically outperforms the current implementation, yeah, probably a different story
Someone biulds a thing and puts it on the curb in front of his house with a sign:
I had fun building this and learnt a lot. Do with it whatever you want.Then someone else comes along, takes it, and sells it.
I fail to see how the inventor was taken advantage of. They presumably thought about which license they want to use and specifically chose this one.Taking without giving is always viewed negatively in social settings.
Maybe “taking advantage of” is wrong but then again, it is a dick move anyway.
