How so? Are you saying open source itself is not a good thing, and if everything was proprietary, things would be better?

No I think open source has its place, especially for foundational stuff like compilers and OS kernels.

I’m less sure about the marginal benefit of more open source in the future. IMHO it tends to create an expectation that all interesting and challenging work should be uncompensated, and the role of most software engineers should be to just cobble together open source components to make some clueless SaaS founder rich.

Not saying I know what the solution is though.

> IMHO it tends to create an expectation that all interesting and challenging work should be uncompensated

The more significant contributor to that expectation is large commercial vendors using open source as a loss-leader or goodwill marketing. Look at the all the assumptions these days that maintainers are customer service, not just people doing their own thing in a workshop with the doors open.

Well, we could add commercial use prohibition into our OSS licenses.

You can add whatever you want in your license and none of it matters unless you are prepared to go to court. Even then, you might have a hard time getting the company to respond if they aren’t based in the same country as you.

For example, Onyx is a Chinese company that makes a line of e-ink tablets (Boox) that are based on open source software. AFAIK, they have refused to honor the terms of the GPL and release their modifications.

> You can add whatever you want in your license and none of it matters unless you are prepared to go to court. Even then, you might have a hard time getting the company to respond if they aren’t based in the same country as you.

It still matters for all practical purposes, IMHO. "Willfully violating terms of a license" results in very very different reputation for the brand than "Adhering to the terms of the license".

In practice, Amazon isn't going to take your "free for non-commercial use" software and try to sell it back to you even though they know you won't sue them!

Sure, some companies will do that, but lets be honest, if they are prepared to violate the license for FLOSS products, they'll violate it even if you didn't release it as open-source.

IOW, pirates gonna pirate; the license terms are irrelevant because they are pirates.

I think the main discussion here is big SaaS companies using peoples' FOSS without giving anything back, either feature or cost-wise. No solution is perfect, but at least this would give you the ability to push back on a company that is trying to "sell your own product" back to you.

Things would be better in the sense that markets would operate to determine the value of things. This is how the meatspace world works outside of software, and also how the software world worked prior to Linux and OSS. I remember paying for DOS and paying for Borland Turbo C and paying for WordPerfect and paying for Lotus 123.

> Things would be better in the sense that markets would operate to determine the value of things. This is how the meatspace world works outside of software, and also how the software world worked prior to Linux and OSS. I remember paying for DOS and paying for Borland Turbo C and paying for WordPerfect and paying for Lotus 123.

In an alternate reality, where there isn't, and never was, free software, the tech space would look very very different: for one, you wouldn't have a trivial product pulling in a tech stack of 20+ other products, because it would be too expensive to deploy if your TODO-ish application had to pay license fees for an OS, a VM inside that OS, a container, a manager for containers, a RDBMS, an interface to the RDBMS (few devs use a RDBMS directly, anymore) a VM (JVM/CLR/Beam/V8) and/or runtime for the language (glibc, etc), extra services (S3, OIDC, etc) a dev-env for the language (compiler/interpreter, IDE+LSP), libraries (+5000 npm deps), source control, CI, CD ... and maybe all those crap little YAML-based tools to do what Make does at various stages of development.

What we'd have is tight little software running with very few dependencies and a slick deployment that probably has no dependencies.

Of course, it would take longer to write, so we probably also wouldn't have 300+ similar TODO-ish applications. New Development would coalesce around actually useful products if producing an MVP took longer than 5m.

I think about this a lot. If all software cost money, would users be more willing to pay for it? If everything was a $50-$100 utility app, $300 for a professional tool, and say $1,000 professional software package like Photoshop, would we have better software? instead of having to find some weird way to fund app development, like advertising, you could just write good software and people would pay you for that directly.

I don't know that we'd not see dependencies though. It's sometimes better to pay for a good tool than home grow one, especially if that tool is outside your area of expertise and developing one would require a significant amount of resources. Eg a featureful VM hypervisor.

I use uncountable amounts of open source components that should cost me a minimum of something. If anything, at least enough to fund a project’s VPS hosting or annual ___domain costs.

have you looked into funding platforms for those projects? most projects on github have a "sponsors" tab that links to a variety of platforms most prominently github sponsors itself, but also tidelift, etc