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0 pointsgizmo6869mo ago0 comments

A decent part of my job is open source. Our reason for doing it is simple: we would rather have people who are not us do the work instead of us.

On some of our projects this has been a great success. We have some strong outside contributors doing work on our project without us needing to pay them. In some cases, those contributors are from companies that are in direct competition with us.

On other projects we've open sourced, we've had people (including competitors) use, without anyone contributing back.

Guess which projects stay open source.

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OkayPhysicist9mo ago

We have a solution to this. It's called the (L)GPL. If people would stop acting like asking for basic (zero cost) decency in exchange for their gift is tantamount to armed robbery, we could avoid this whole mess.

ilc9mo ago

The GPL doesn't do anything when the project is just used internally by another company.

They never trigger the distribution clauses, and they own the copyrights of all the work being done. So if you NEVER distribute binaries outside your company's walls. The GPL is a giant nothing, for most practical cases.

That's why we're starting to see the AGPL more now. But even then, for INTERNAL applications. It's still a nothing.

The GPL doesn't cure people being greedy. It just changes how they are allowed to be greedy.

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