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0 pointsrobertlagrant2y ago0 comments

There are many OSS companies. I think what the OP is (correctly) complaining about is people writing OSS and then getting upset when others sell it, or sell things based on it. I see this attitude creeping into e.g. articles on The Register. If you want to licence your software so anyone can use or resell it, don't be surprised when they do.

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pydry2y ago

It sounds like OP is getting upset when people write OSS and then relicense it in such a way to restrict unfettered usage to provide or maintain a revenue stream.

E.g. Elastic search vs. Amazon (elastic search does run upon the Linux kernel after all)

TheNewsIsHere2y ago

I think it’s worth grading this sort of thing.

In my business we derive fantastic value from FOSS, and a huge part of that is the absence of countless other layers of profit between us and the upstream developers. So it makes sense for us to give a piece of that business back. More or less, the core of the business is all sitting atop FOSS projects.

But we’re small, so any contributions reflect that. And we do cumulatively use more FOSS software in our stack indirectly than we can sanely evaluate, so we probably won’t be seen contributing funds to every single one.

The Amazon ES shenanigans is a good example of a different “grade” of this situation, where they’re just money grubbing.

imtringued2y ago

This criticism only applies to the economic rents being extracted aka charging too much and not giving the economic rents to the producer of the economic rent. If you build a product and charge based on the incremental value you provide, there is hardly reason for criticism.

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