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FOSS is definitely not worth it if you are doing free work for a company. But its very much worth it if you are making something thats useful for normal people. Obviously its not always easy to distinguish the two, but the AGPL license is a huge step in the right direction.
Agree
Free Software is, and has been for the last 40 years, about the “four freedoms.” Those four freedoms are no less important today then they were back then. Copyleft was about ensuring every user had those four freedoms. It wasn’t really about “forcing companies to give back” and it certainly wasn’t supposed to provide an exclusive right to monetize “your product.”
I think the author of this article has a few legitimate points (it is horrid how open source maintainers are treated by proprietary software developers who feel entitled to free labor, not just the log4j maintainers but e.g. the core-js maintainer) and some shaky arguments (if anything, Audacity being free software was a good thing because it allowed Tenacity to happen; and while it’s obviously bad that TikTok infringed on OBS’s copyrights and violated the GPL, it doesn’t really negate the good that OBS does for the free software community). I also would not refer to copyright infringement as stealing, even when it involves free software; this is the sort of language that intellectual property advocates use to suggest that making a copy of something is equivalent to actually stealing a thing (e.g. “You wouldn’t steal a car”).
He’s also right about one other thing: I, and some others, would definitely refuse to use his product if it’s proprietary; but I’m not sure I would have used it regardless.
Free Software is, and has been for the last 40 years, about the “four freedoms.”
No, Free Software was about more than just the four freedoms since the beginning: building communities, encouraging reciprocity and cooperation, empowering developers and end users, sharing knowledge, acknowledging authorship.
People pointed out decades ago that the 4 freedoms don’t clearly spell out the importance of the other aspects.
Having your volunteering work appropriated and turned into unpaid labor is a legitimate concern.
100%. Everyone simply needs to clarify their reasons for using and working on FOSS. Last year I learned that building a community around a project is more important than the technical details. License matters as well because permissive means a company can take the code and compete with the community which is disheartening. Copyleft is therefore essential.
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aren’t there licenses that prevent people from profiting?
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It depends. FOSS is important, because it allowsto share ideas, new functionalities and advance in certain technological projects. But you have to differentiate between the areas where this makes sense, in new products and software it is certainly worth it, but not in products and software where there are already dozens or hundreds of different versions. Getting into the latter is making sure you quickly join the ranks of discontinued apps and products, if you don’t stand out in functionality from the rest and don’t have a good community of users. F.Exmpl. Nobody needs the nth fork of FF or Chromium, if they are not better as the original. That is valid for every soft, FOSS or not, if you are not better or more usefull as all the other apps, you are dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_web_browsers
Open Source is not a sustainable model under capitalism anymore.
Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but the cracks are beginning to show.
FOSS is about the trade-off of maintain-ability, and ethics. (Maintain-ability as in paying for only what you need for a project, to be maintained over time. (aka the deficit) If there’s two sides of this coin; Free Software would have no trade-off so have little maintain-ability, and tiny scaling, but have full rights to do whatever you want with the software. Or Proprietary Software which has no ethics but has easy maintain-ability, and can quickly scale up with profits earned. Open-Source Software is the middle ground with less monetization options than proprietary software, it trades quick growth for ethics that the everyman can benefit from, without smothering the ability to scale with slowly earned profits.
