My sense is only a very small percentage (way less than 1%) of software developers think that proprietary software by definition is unethical. Am I wrong to think this?
In a hard sense maybe from selection bias and counting only full time and far fewer who don't pay the rent. Maybe uo to like 5% or so if you can count academia among developers.
There is a sizable chunk who would prefer to work with non-properietary software if only for the ability to take a peak. The likely winner by raw numbers would be the "apathetics" who go wity whatever works.
What other sense is there? Or more specifically, what makes proprietary software innately unethical? It just seems like you have to radically distort the meaning of "proprietary" or "ethical" to make any sense of the concept and at that point you are just playing with semantics and not communicating clearly.
It would be welcomed if those ethics would be used to pay for the tooling as well.
Instead we keep getting posts on HN from companies that either go dual licenses, or completely proprietary to stay on business, or just switch business altogether.
At least now there is growing recognition that there is a problem. Given that opensource simply makes sense for many categories of software, I am hopeful that a solution that is fair to both users and developers will be figured out eventually.
Well, it depends what kind of companies. I will happily concede that it's hard to sustain a Bay Area "unicorn" company purely on FLOSS development and support - unless that company happens to be named Red Hat.
