this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
111 points (79.7% liked)
Open Source
29776 readers
730 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
- !libre_culture@lemmy.ml
- !libre_software@lemmy.ml
- !libre_hardware@lemmy.ml
- !linux@lemmy.ml
- !technology@lemmy.ml
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You can technically charge for FOSS, but that sort-of collides with the freedom to redistribute the software. You may have heard about that when the whole RHEL/Rocky Linux dispute happened.
Equal shares can also be kind-of unfair if your backend is using sqlx for the entire database communication and then you also use some small image-conversion library to convert the favicon from .png to .ico.
My last point may be a bit confusing, let's try to make it a bit easier to understand: In this case, you are a company, that is directly using a piece of code that is licensed under the license you've been thinking about, and you're also using a piece of proprietary software, e.g. some ERP-Software. The proprietary software is using a FOSS library that permits it to be used in a proprietary binary, let's say because it's BSD-Licensed. How do you know that the ERP-Software is using that library, and how would you determine how much you'd have to donate to them. You kind-of have to donate to them, because your ERP-Software wouldn't run without that library
The best use case for purchasing FOSS software is contractor work, specific modules for existing platforms and/or FOSS projects. I've done that myself in the past. The client pays for the custom software, it's written, and then they gets to do absolutely whatever they want with it. If the client wants to publish it, they're well within their rights. Most of the time it's too entangled with their internal company workflow to be useful to anyone else though.
I can see that this for some kind doesnt work with the current state of foss. Its basically free work for corpos.
I will therefore implement 100% agpl in my projects and make them incaccessible for anyone who tries to put into proprietary software.
The equal shares are just one possible solition and since this community is full of trolls who cant just discuss something (you and a handful peeps excluded), I‘m not really in the mood to think about this anymore. I‘ll just use the most restricted license and call it foss just to piss people off.
To your last point I dont know what the misunderstanding is. As I read it, you‘re saying the proprietary software includes a foss library. I wouldnt know or care because I bought a product not a library. My idea was for using the code not for the end user of a derivative work.