• HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Somewhat tangential hot take: I REALLY think the scope of free as in beer use of open source projects should be limited to personal and small scale business use only (when the business makes below a certain yearly revenue). It’s infuriating how the biggest tech companies openly use open source software as the base of their products while giving NOTHING in return to those open source projects, and in fact only bash them when they show the least bit of resistance to whatever evil profit driven change they demand the project make. If you’re making billions in revenue using open source software which has saved you R&D money, why shouldn’t the open source project itself be entitled to even half a percent of that which will more than cover all their development costs? I’m so sick of companies seeing open source as free outsourced labour they can exploit. There are also existing licenses that only allow free as in beer use of the software if it’s for personal use or in a worker co-op, which I think is also an interesting approach worth considering.

    Alternatively, I think we should seriously explore even more copyleft licenses than AGPL. I think it was either Elastic Search or MongoDB that tried to implement a license requiring every software that depends on the open source version of their software be open source as well? Everyone, including the OSF bashed that decision when it came out, and as far as I know there were indeed a lot of problems with how that license was written, but people also denounced the very concept of going beyond AGPL which I don’t get.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      4 hours ago

      I would like to see a commonly used “Not Free For Corporations” license. Something a bit like the GPL; this is my copyrighted code, I’m offering the source code for others to examine, use, modify, redistribute, if you redistribute it it must have these same license terms. I would add it is free of charge for personal, educational, and small business commercial use, it is available on a per instance subscription basis for corporations. My work may not be used for the profit of shareholders unless I get a hefty piece of that pie.

    • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      The open source movement was corporations trying to have their cake and eat it too with the things the free software movement had done. That means organisations calling attention to open source without mentioning free software will always push against copyleft as their goal is to get free labour and testing for things megacorporations use while reserving the right to take future development private.