Yes, charity. That's exactly what these trillion dollar empires think of those open source maintainers. Microsoft pulled this same stunt multiple times on os maintainers.
Open source has been hijacked by trillion dollar hyperscalers.
It's time we switch to "fair source" or "equitable source".
Put MAU/DAU/ARR/market cap limits in your license. Open to everyone with a market cap under $1B or revenues under $100M. All others, please see our "business@" email.
Place viral terms like the AGPL that requires that all other systems touched by your code to be open - especially the backend/server components that typically remain hidden.
We're giving away power to these companies for free, and they use their scale and reach to turn our software into a larger moat that ensnares us and taxes us in everything else we do.
Your contribution of open source in one area might bubble up as Microsoft or Google's ability to control what you see or how you distribute software to customers. It's intangible and hard to describe these insane advantages and network effects big players like this have to lay people, but I know we as software engineers understand this.
Open source has been weaponized against us. They get free labor and use our work to tax us, pin us down, out compete us, and control us. We need to fight back.
I’m still tweaking the execution of the license, but in principle my thinking is, “if you’re using my software to make money, and you’re making a lot of money, you should probably be paying me to use my software”.
It still boggles my mind that people don't understand this. The FUD and misinformation that's been spreading about the GPL and the FSF the last decade almost seems like an intentional campaign brought on by exactly those who benefit from you using a "permissive" license the most.
The key is that "permissive" is passive voice. It's more permissive for corporations in that they are allowed to use it to tie their customers even tighter to them. Compare this with "restrictive" (for corporations) AKA "copyleft" which ensures that users' freedom is maintained, by restricting how corporations can limit them.
Then the company just re-implements your project; they have the resources to.
Most software isn't hard to reverse-engineer, and most people aren't exceptional; if a group is big enough to create a GPL-licensed product that competes with Microsoft's, they're big enough to create an MIT-licensed product that competes with Microsoft's.
I like GP’s comment “don’t discuss anything in private and/or offer priority support without being paid”. Also:
- Ensure you get attribution, and support others who deserve attribution
- Develop open-source alternatives to paid programs
- Donate to others who write open-source
I disagree that open-source contributed much to companies becoming so rich. I believe it was more that people gave them (money and) private data, e.g. made posts and interactions that only exist on their locked-down platform. I doubt a lack of open-source and accessible development tools would’ve prevented Google and Facebook; if anything, they would've been founded by richer or more networked people. And it certainly won't prevent them now.
Those companies can produce legal abstraction hacking solutions faster then you can develop shielding ones. You needs something poisonous ,costing money or work with each usage preventing mass adoption without a complete rewrite .
Open source will inevitably succeed, but only in the long run. In the short term VC (or tech giant) cash will dominate any conversation. There's absolutely nothing you can legally do from preventing reimplementation (which is a good thing, because it means over the long term we will reimplement everything as free software).
I don't understand why we don't just lean into the "osi = corporate, copyleft = good faith" model that's worked perfectly well for the last thirty years.
Wait what? I didnt realize this was the case and I say this as a huge alpine fan. Will look into whether there is an option to setup a recurring donation and will do so if its the case.
We don't need yet another license, especially not a use license. Just use a GPL, the version (LGPL, GPL, or AGPL) depending on what you are concerned with.
> Open source has been weaponized against us.
This was always going to be the case. We Free Software advocates have been saying this for decades.
And you're not even to the most important part: this isn't about you, me, or megacorps. It's about users.
Getting someone who worked on the thing or someone close to the author to be hired by your company and bumped to a high prestige position probably has more effect on law than a license (just an intuition).
"Hey, that guy worked with the author, and he was hired and now is a super top dog there... he must be the true genius behind it"
I mean that for ideas, not materialized code. You guys are so focused on small text files and miss the big picture sometimes.
The WRT54g led to a variety of user-serviceable firmware worldwide, including dd-wrt and openwrt. It gave, and continues to give, new life to otherwise wifi devices that shipped with a abandoned propeietary software. It was a revolution in wifi router firmware, and still is.
It was created because Linksys shipped GPL code to customers but didn't provide the source.
My work is with DSLs: ___domain specific languages. The work is in the idea realm (most of the time is spent there), not the source code implementation, which is often trivial once the language is developed.
The gratification also is different. Seeing others use the language is the best one can hope to achieve nowadays. Maybe publish a book about it, but that sounds more trouble than it is worth (judging by how books on patterns, a similar realm, are often misquoted and misused).
That's why all this talk about licenses sounds like nonsense.
Ideas are not copyrightable, so you can't prevent anyone from using them without keeping them secret, and even then folks might come up with the same idea independently.
True, although software patents aren't supposed to be a thing in some places, so your success in protecting software ideas might be ___location dependent, or time dependent as case law changes. Thats probably why I forgot about them.
That's incompatible with why I do OSS. For me OSS is the ratchet for humanity, the way we fight enshittification and force companies to innovate and compete with each other to make better things. As soon as you abandon that mission and split it into fiefdoms, you're now just the thing that true OSS has to disrupt in order for humanity as a whole to get better software.
A shame though it is, helping everybody the same amount is not likely to get your much gratitude from anyone. But that's the job.
There seems to be no stable consensus on which LLM one should have used, to get good results. Which is somewhat natural, things are moving quickly - and evaluation methods are immature (and the little we have, actively gamed).
But a lot of the arguments seem on the surface to be of "No true Scotchman AI" form. Or "you are just holding it wrong" (ref Apple).
No question, the openai gpt marketplace/store was a birth failure and doesn't make much sense in hindsight anymore. I just don't understand why they don't pull the plug and admit it's a failure.
It's not about having another tool in your arsenal. This thing is meant to replace you - the developer (role). Others are correctly pointing out that developers can be really really dumb by assuming that this A-SWE will be just below their skill level and only the subpar humans will be replaced.
> It's not about having another tool in your arsenal. This thing is meant to replace you - the developer (role).
You realize that it's what I am saying? Having the tool in our arsenal means being able to do another job (prompt engineering, knowing how to evaluate the AI etc...) in case we are made obsolete in the next couple of years. What happens after that is a mystery...
All my colleagues think like this hypothetical developer. As others said: developers can be really, really dumb, no matter how long the've been in the game
Thanks, most people don't understand this fine difference. Copilot does RAG (as all other subscription-based agents like Cursor) to save $$$, and results with RAG are significantly worse than having the complete context window for complex tasks. That's also the reason why Chatgpt or Claude basically lie to the users when they market their file upload functions by not telling the whole story.
True. Matches my experience. It takes much effort to get really proficient with ai. It's like learning to ride a wild horse. Your senior dev skills will sure come handy in this ride but don't expect it to work like some google query
