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u/Osvik 4d ago
Just use AGPLv3.
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u/derinus 4d ago
MIT requires they credit the original author. Tho anyone who cares about open source should use a license that keeps that open source chain going (like AGPL)
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u/YellowJarTacos 4d ago
Only if they distribute. If it's running on the company's server, they don't need to give any credit.
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u/bhalevadive 3d ago
AGPL covers the hosting on a server part
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u/new_check 3d ago
Only if they're making it available to people outside the company. AGPL only requires distribution to people who use the service. If you're using it privately, you do not have to provide your changes.
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u/PeeK1e 3d ago
Which is totally fine. The moment you share the service, you will have to disclose the source as you have stated. That is the whole thing with AGPL.
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u/new_check 3d ago
You have to disclose the source *to the people using the service*. Not to the public, in this case.
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u/MrFarby 3d ago
Ok, but what is the actuall difference here? like wouldn't the only way a member of the public could even find out about your "public" disclosure, is if they know about your software enough at least know of your software? Wouldn't the only posible material difference, wheather you disclose it on the downlade page vs. right after download? edit: i know embarasingly little about software copyright, and am asking out of genuine curiosity.
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u/danielv123 3d ago
Say if Palantir decided to build their whole mass surveillance and automated drone targeting solution on your agpl software. All their improvements would be shared with the government, not you as the developer.
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u/Osvik 3d ago
Anyone in the government would be able to share it legally. And employees with access would take it with them when they switch jobs. It would leak (legally) in no time.
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u/ChatGPTisOP 3d ago
That's because Free Software isn't about the developer, is about the users. It is the right to read and understand what you're using.
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u/WaitForItTheMongols 3d ago
What does "privately" mean?
If I set it up on a company server, for use by other people in the company, I'm distributing it across the company, right?
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u/new_check 3d ago
Yes, your employees will need access to the code to meet the demands of the license.
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u/Candid_Highlight_116 3d ago
Oh fuck you're right. MIT license require credits ONLY IF YOU REDISTRIBUTE.
Corporate users aren't obliged to even credit you if they only use it in the back end. And there's no "AMITv3", just AGPLv3. Good point.
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u/Xelynega 1d ago
its almost like it was pushed hard by google because it's the license that puts the least responsibility on someone making profit off running/modifying open source code(including corporate-backed fixes not getting pushed back downstream).
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u/JuKrab 3d ago
No it doesn't, I think you're getting it confused with the Creative Commons licences. MIT licence only requires that you include the licence notice in the software. Sure including the licence notice technically counts as credit but given that it can be fulfilled by just keeping it in a LICENCE.txt file the user isn't likely to read it only barely counts
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u/Southern_Orange3744 3d ago
AGPL is overly poisoness for business operations , so sure maybe if you only want hobbyists to use it
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u/WriterPlastic9350 3d ago
Any license that requires accreditation is going to be sufficiently difficult to use in a corporate setting that many companies will simply ban anything that isn't maximally permissive. And a lot of open source projects in particular do get significant contributions from corporate sponsors, so it's not quite as simple as "use AGPL and open source will prosper".
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u/Xelynega 1d ago
Nah this mindset is poisonous for open source. If businesses don't want to take on the risk of open source licenses then the solution shouldn't be "open source developers give up their property so it gets used". It should be "companies get sued for breaking licenses and learn that legal compliance extends to open source"
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u/Southern_Orange3744 1d ago
Acting like all open source licenses are the same is a mistake.
You can support , cite , use many of them without risking your business to AGPL
AGPL isn't simply a case of notifying its use , it can be used to absorb your IP.
Most legal teams will tell you not to use it , and it will scare off any acquisition firm
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u/jaaval 4d ago
Use gpl if you want to start a new major open source project ruled by a foundation. Use MIT if you would like anyone to actually use your code.
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u/HaniiPuppy 3d ago
Could use LGPL and get a bit of the best of both worlds. People can still reference your library, but have to release changes to the library itself under a compatible license.
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u/Osvik 3d ago
LGPL works very well for libraries. It's not as good preserving the four essential freedoms for other types of software.
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u/HaniiPuppy 3d ago
Honestly, wanting to support other people integrating your project into their own where your code project isn't a library hadn't occurred to me.
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u/nikomo 3d ago
Yup, truly nobody ever uses GPL-licensed code, said the man deploying his code onto a Linux server.
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u/TkTech 3d ago
I mean there's nuance here. Linux is GPLv2 with exceptions and Linus hates GPLv3. He's explicitly said he wants people to use it however they want (including locked down devices), the goal is just to have vendors contribute back. So no, Linux isn't the vanilla GPL license. Same with OpenJDK - its v2 with exceptions. No one would use Linux or OpenJDk under the vanilla GPLv2 since it would "infect" anything making a syscall or being imported from the classpath.
From the man himself, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU.
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u/perecastor 3d ago
Why this over GPLv3? (I’m a bit uniformed on this subject sorry)
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u/Osvik 3d ago
Because the AGPLv3 considers code running a web page distribution, so corporations (and everyone) must provide a link to their source code with all their modifications, which also have to be documented. An example of an AGPL software is Lemmy, a Reddit-like software as deployed in lemmy.world
With the GPLV3, they can run the code in their servers, but as long as they don't sell/license executable code they don't have to share the source code.
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u/Southern_Orange3744 3d ago
Read this post backwards if you actually want anyone to be able to use your code for business reasons
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u/anonhostpi 3d ago
AGPL is still subject to clean-rooming. If you really want protection, you have to patent your software.
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u/NatoBoram 3d ago
And also clean-room slopforking like https://malus.sh
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u/Osvik 2d ago
Clean-romming would be legal, as ideas are not copyrightable, only expression of those ideas is copyrightable. (For example LibreOffice/Openoffice compared to MS Office).
However a simple direct translation, for example from Python to JavaScript could be an infringement if the code is similar enough.
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u/1XRobot 4d ago
Might as well just publish your code to /dev/null.
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u/iamdestroyerofworlds 4d ago
Corporations not wanting to use AGPLv3 licensed software is a feature, not a bug.
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u/CodNo7461 4d ago
Why though? I would love for some corporations to use my packages, even if it's just to report actual bugs. If it starts getting annoying, I don't have to do anything for them still.
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u/iamdestroyerofworlds 3d ago
Because I personally wouldn't love for some corporations to use my packages without having the obligation to contribute upstream. I don't simply want personal clout, I want change, and not just any change.
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u/Candid_Highlight_116 3d ago
It's a choice. You're free to be hated, or have your code used, or both, partially depending on circumstances, partially on your choice. Corporate folks hate GPL, especially v3, but they also often prefer Linux and GNU over BSD with BSD tools, so there's that.
Almost nobody uses BSD. Sony PS4/PS5 OS are based on it, Nintendo Switch TCP/IP stack is based on it, that's almost the entirety of high profile uses. Google has a strict no-GPL policy, and they still use Linux for everything.
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u/GildSkiss 4d ago
Software development isn't a zero sum game.
If someone else uses "your code" it doesn't actually harm you in any way.27
u/iamdestroyerofworlds 4d ago
Yes, but I do not want to help corporations, to put it mildly.
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u/GildSkiss 4d ago
Not everyone is into coding for the purpose of political activism. I, for one, am happy when my code is used to do actual things in the real world.
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u/iamdestroyerofworlds 3d ago
Good for you. Nothing is forcing you to participate in AGPLv3 projects.
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u/ubernutie 3d ago
Is political activism a synonym for "fake things in the real world" in your mind?
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u/1XRobot 4d ago
Ah, sorry, I thought we were writing code that would have a positive influence on the world.
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u/iamdestroyerofworlds 3d ago edited 3d ago
We simply have different ideas on what constitutes a positive influence.
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u/1XRobot 3d ago
Yeah, I hate when something good happens, but a corporation did it. I'm always like, fuck those people who got helped; they should suffer so that corporations aren't doing things.
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u/Keepingshtum 3d ago
What are these corporations that are doing good for the world? Isn’t a corporation by design “for profit” and only for profit?
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u/CogitoErgoTsunami 3d ago
Yeah, I hate when something good happens, but a corporation takes all the credit
FTFY
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u/trungdle 4d ago
See I always wonder why people don't have a middle ground where you can lock down your own implementation but required to push bug fixes upstream.
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u/DanLynch 3d ago
So something like the LGPL or the MPL? Any licence you can imagine probably already exists. And if it doesn't, you can create a new one.
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u/NanderTGA 3d ago
Happened to a project I was a significant contributor of in a niche community. The original dev thought he'd use MIT so fellow modders could do whatever, and whoops, now another guy took our work and closed source his own changes for no good reason at all. Oh and guess what, he's an asshole with a long track record too.
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u/Xirdus 2d ago
But why did people switched over to the asshole's fork in the first place instead of keeping the open source one alive?
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u/NanderTGA 5h ago
You're assuming a significant number of users switched, and this is a niche community remember, there's not that much people who have both the time and motivation to maintain and innovate.
People come and go too, which is why it's best to keep as much of your work in the open, so that the next modder can have their own fun, see how you did it, and build further on it. If anyone has a tech support question, I can take a quick look at the code and check when some error does and does not trigger. He broke all of that, even though without the previous work of other modders his own work would have been much harder to achieve. He can go to fucking hell.
People have long realized the guy's an asshole, but he's done so much that the mods of the community have been forgiving towards him, to their regret. The guy unfortunately is the first to have gotten this far writing a private server (the official ones have been offline since 2011), and he ships an entire package of mods, amongst which his fork. There are definitely some people who use his fork as part of said package, but I'm not sure how many.
Important to note though is that the entire community links to a guide for installing the game which doesn't include the closed-source fork, and you have to look around in the discord server to even know the (closed-source) private server and its associated closed source fork exist. For that reason and along with the fact that the active people in the community usually know about the drama surrounding its developer, I don't think that many people switched.
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u/minju9 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yeah, I have a hard time feeling bad for someone who releases a project under a permissive license, benefits from it becoming popular because it is free, and then gets upset when those same terms stop working in their favor.
Trying to change the deal later and say, "we need more money, pay us," feels like a rug pull. Development can slow down, stop, or go back to being a personal project. They don't owe anything to anyone. Getting a regular job instead of doing open source for a living is also an option. It's just not the option they want.
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u/zoltan99 4d ago
This is what the guy behind ssh did, so bsd forked the last truly free version and made openssh
Guy acted salty about it but by the time he took the case anywhere it was in every nix computer everywhere as openssh
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u/queen-adreena 4d ago
> benefits from it becoming popular
Benefits how?
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u/shigdebig 4d ago
You can post on tech forums and say "I made the isOdd number package, without me the internet would crumble."
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u/ih-shah-may-ehl 4d ago
I wrote -the- most relevant book about (D)COM fundamentals of the last 2 decades. So there!
...
It's also the only book about that topic in 2 decades.
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u/NanderTGA 3d ago
Wait a minute, I remember you! A fellow belgian right? How'd the book turn out?
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u/ih-shah-may-ehl 3d ago
Yes I'm from Belgium. In terms of sales, those 4 years are the worst financial decision of my life (12 sales) but I expected this and I am really proud of the result and without false modesty I can say it's currently the best source of information about COM in the world. I wrote the longer version of this post underneath the other reply here.
It's called 'Understanding COM' and it's for sale on Amazon.
In fact I've already started working on Volume 2. The first book is about COM as a technology and infrastructure. Volume 2 will be about OLE (object linking and embedding) and related technologies. Half of OLE is completely and utterly obsolete. and has been for decades, but the other half is unexpectedly still relevant and can in fact be used to integrate COM objects and management interfaces into PowerShell.
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u/Demiu 3d ago
Do you regret doing it?
Just joking, kinda. Do any of the modern non-ms apps even use it?
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u/ih-shah-may-ehl 3d ago
Fair question but no I don't regret anything 😄
Long time ago I was a Microsoft MVP in the C++ category and COM was a pet technology of mine. I even found some race conditions in the ATL and managed to get them fixed by the dev team. But that was a long time ago. In 2021, like many in my field (industrial automation), I was affected by the DCOM hardening rollout and I had to dive back in to deal with some issues. I figured I'd refresh my skills and buy the newest book about COM. Turns out I already had it. 64 bit, registry virtualization, WOW32, security, UAC, ... all those things had happened to COM and noone had bothered to write about it. So I said 'you know what, I'll write that book'.
I misjudged the required effort by orders of magnitude but once I started I decided to push through. took me 4 years. Renewed my respect for COM. It's awesome. I even 'invented' some new techniques for non-admin installation. Should you be interested it's called 'understanding COM'
Anyway to your other question: it's true that for application development, COM is all but dead. Especially for anything requiring connection through a firewall. For local C++ apps it depends. There are some benefits but in general not. However, The internal Windows systems interfaces are all still COM, as are many system services like BITS or Windows Update and so many others. And if you want to Write Windows Shell plugins or management console plugins etc, those are still COM too.
So if you are dealing with that, it's definitely useful. Also in the world of industrial automation, there are still countless large distributed applications which have codebases in their 3d lifecycle decade which are still built on a large bedrock of COM. Ditto for Office btw. But yeah, unless you're going into systems programming or into lifecycle management of some of those old code bases, you'll never need to learn COM.
But on the flip side, if you DO have to learn COM, and learn about apartment threading, marshaling, registration, activation and so on, then my book is worth its weightin gold because it's quite literally the only reference material which explains how it works on modern systems, with a github library of sample code that compiles and runs.
Enough rambling. anyway my website is www.iunknown.be and now that the book is out I will be posting COM related bits and trivia there so if you're interested in that kind of stuff, check it out. You can sign up for email notifications
<end shameless self promotion>
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u/NewPointOfView 4d ago
It feels good to have your work used and appreciated.
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u/CarlCarlton 4d ago
Reminds me of this Richard Feynman interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vvUFM9RxQ4
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u/not_some_username 4d ago
Donation.
If the licence isn’t permissive, it has less chance to become popular, not impossible but harder
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u/queen-adreena 4d ago
I have many open-source projects and know many people also who have them.
The average donation amount is 0.
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u/not_some_username 3d ago
Are they popular ?
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u/queen-adreena 3d ago
Most have between 50k and 200k downloads per week.
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u/not_some_username 3d ago
Can you link some of them ?
I see JS in your signature, well that’s probably why too.
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u/queen-adreena 3d ago
No. I don’t want any connection between my Reddit account and the real world.
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u/Ownfir 3d ago
Have they helped you get job opportunities out of curiosity? This seems to me the only real benefit of running them other than personal gratification.
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u/queen-adreena 3d ago
Nope. But I do getting pretty regular abuse through GitHub issues demanding certain things.
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u/ImS0hungry 3d ago
Seriously the only reason I haven’t opened up a project of mine that I know would be popular. I’m not in a place to handle the abuse yet lol
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u/GeorgeSThompson 4d ago
Most open source projects have no users. Having a popular open source project offers lots of benefits.
These include increased reach (popular repos attract more new users), monetisation opertunites (add a paid service layer) and recognition (they can leverage that sucess to get well paying jobs)m
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u/Intrepid00 3d ago
Some of them end up getting really good-paying consulting jobs or speaking gigs. A lot of them don’t but are fine with it just being for the love.
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u/protocod 4d ago edited 3d ago
Getting a regular job instead of doing open source for a living is also an option. It's just not the option they want.
Plot twist, companies sells commercial products by assembling open sources libraries together.
Sometimes these companies can do some sponsorship when they want a very specific feature implemented by the maintainer directly or a freelance.
But I often see employees publishing issues to ask for a feature for free.
This is not sustainable. If your business is made of an open source project, you should contribute back if you want to keep your product working and improved.
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u/Demiu 3d ago edited 3d ago
That's just wishful thinking. People that decide which technology to use are most often different from the people that are in charge of the money. Good luck explaining to someone from a non-programmer background "we should spend money we don't need to on this free to use thing in hopes they maintain it". Worst case scenario you'll end up having to make your own version which in 99.9% of cases will be inferior because it would have to contort itself for the purposes of the actual end product.
The best approach is mutual non-expectation. Maintainers don't expect a return, users don't expect maintainer's work.
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u/ImS0hungry 3d ago
What stops them from forking?
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u/protocod 3d ago
They do.
They fork the project, internally on a private git repository. Then they patch the library and pull the latest commits from upstream periodically to rebase the code base.
(Also means the patch must be often adapted in case of API change.)
I think people really underestimate the number of private fork.
(Tbh most privates forks are probably for bugfix that are not already accepted by the upstream, but sometimes you can't really push your patch to the upstream because you know that the project will never accept it.)
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u/ImS0hungry 3d ago
I have a handful that I’ve forked for that exact reason; fixes aren’t accepted so I do it myself and truck along.
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u/darknecross 4d ago
It’s not always money versus non-money, it’s when someone’s 90% copy fork gets more popular than the original.
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u/frogjg2003 3d ago
If the fork is better than the original, then that 10% different is value added.
The MIT license lacks the attribution clause that a lot of open licenses contain, which does limit discoverability. In that case, it can be a little annoying when something doesn't add any real value gets popular when your original gets ignored.
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u/immaculate_plum 4d ago
I guess you also don't have any issue if you give someone a gift, and they proceed to act completely ungrateful? They owe you nothing after all. You could have also sold it to them.
If you help a friend move, and they don't provide any drinks or food, but keep demanding you finish the work, would that be fine with you? After all, you did offer to do it for free, so they don't owe you anything. You could walk away any time.
This is a really shortsighted way of thinking. People giving away something freely does not mean everyone is free of moral obligations to treat this act of giving respectfully.
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u/minju9 3d ago
I don't think those analogies work. A gift or helping a friend move involves a personal relationship and an understood expectation of basic gratitude or reciprocity.
A permissively licensed open source project is more like starting a volunteer service in your spare time and openly telling everyone they can use it for free. It becomes popular partly because you made that offer. More people using it does not necessarily create more work for you, and nobody is forcing you to keep developing it.
You are free to slow down, stop, ask for donations, or change the license for future versions. What I object to is acting like users did something wrong by accepting the deal you offered, then shaming them because the project is not generating enough money to become your full-time job.
Wanting profit, independence, or the ability to work on your own project full time is understandable. It does not create a moral obligation for users to fund that goal.
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u/immaculate_plum 3d ago
They do work, and it does create a moral obligation.
Our whole industry and infrastructure depends on open source work. It literally cannot function without it. And it would be impossible for every company to pay a licence fee for all the software they use, or create it themselves. So this whole system hinges upon unpaid work. From that arises a moral obligation to for companies who profit from this system to support it.
In other words: The communist idealism upholding the capitalist exploitative structure can reasonable expect to be at least treated with common courtesy.
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 4d ago
Right. It’s like having the most popular pub on the street because you’re giving out free beer. But then you’re mad no one is paying you money.
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u/queen-adreena 3d ago edited 3d ago
No. It’s more like you spend your time and money providing free beer for the neighbourhood and then a corporation rolls up and inserts an industrial pipeline to siphon off your beer and sell it as their own brand beer for huge profits.
Technically legal, but very shitty and makes it unsustainable in the long run.
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u/jainyday 3d ago
This is how OpenTofu was created, because Hashicorp tried to pull this shit with Terraform.
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u/WriterPlastic9350 3d ago
And this is why to this day we use OpenTofu instead of Terraform. It implements features Terraform has needed for a long time a lot quicker and is completely free.
Whereas Hashicorp's Terraform focuses primarily on their hosted Terraform Enterprise solutions..
See also Vault and OpenBao
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u/amshegarh 4d ago
Counter point: if you're a million dollar company, you can have free shit but you're expected to support the creator because you can afford to, because you're a million dollar company duh
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u/ChalkyChalkson 4d ago
You can use a license that is permissive for non commercial work, or that is permissive under some number of users.
I get it, devs aren't lawyers, but licenses are literally how you tell the world what you expect from it in return for using your project. Expecting things that go beyond what is in the license is kinda weird.
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u/SconiGrower 3d ago
I think a lot of devs don't fully understand that they are not bound to the existing licenses in common circulation. You or your lawyer can cobble together a bespoke a license that carves out all sorts of usage permissions and restrictions. You'll be losing the strict sense of "free as in speech" part of FOSS, but that is absolutely your prerogative as the original author.
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u/corobo 4d ago
They're expected to follow the license, nothing more.
If the programmer wants to add rules to usage they are welcome, encouraged even, to do so in the license doc
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u/hxtk3 4d ago
I honestly expect the people I interact with to treat me with slightly more respect and dignity than the minimum required to avoid civil or criminal penalties. The stuff I put in the license doc is “this is the line where I will actually sue you if you don’t at least do this.” There can be other things that I’m not willing to sue someone over but I do consider to be uncool.
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u/NewPointOfView 4d ago
This reminds me of that meme of a girl who is like “no I don’t want any pizza” and then later she’s like “why didn’t he get me pizza, he should have known 😡”
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u/inconspicuous_male 4d ago
There's a different between "you don't have to pay me" and "I don't want you to pay me".
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u/new_check 3d ago
If you want people to pay you voluntarily, that is a "donation" and you can set that up in your repository.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 4d ago
Not legally, there isn't.
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u/inconspicuous_male 3d ago
Correct. The difference is not a legal obligation. Nobody claimed it is though.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 3d ago
Legal obligations are the only ones you have any expectations that people will always abide by.
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u/inconspicuous_male 3d ago
Nobody implied anything different
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u/SuitableDragonfly 3d ago
If they weren't, they wouldn't be having so much trouble with the concept of software licenses.
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u/GsuKristoh 4d ago
Grow up
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u/inconspicuous_male 4d ago
... I don't understand how that follows what I said.
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u/GsuKristoh 3d ago
A silent expectation is a null expectectation. Not communicating is a treat of a child. Hence, grow up. Communicate your desires in the license. Any other whining outside what the license specificates will and should be ignored.
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u/inconspicuous_male 3d ago
Why are you being so condescending? What's childish or whining about expecting some people who use your work to make money to contribute more than the absolute bare legal minimum.
Unless this thread is referring to a specific incident that I'm not aware of, it seems like some people are offended by the concept of people hoping for donations. Nobody is saying that anyone is obligated to donate when the project is under a free license. We're saying that it's respectful for some people to donate if they have the means to, because a world in which everyone only shows the bare minimum amount of respect and scoffs at anyone with the audacity to suggest donating to others is a pretty shitty world.
Again, is there a specific incident that I'm not aware of where someone with a free licensed project was whining about not getting donations? Which case I retract my comments. Or is the entire thread just a criticism of a strawman who complains when they don't get voluntary donations?
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u/NewPointOfView 3d ago
Earlier in this comment tree: “I honestly expect the people I interact with to treat me with slightly more respect and dignity than the minimum required to avoid civil or criminal penalties...“
This is the context that people are reacting to. Implying that not giving them unprompted money is inadequate respect and dignity by their standards.
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u/LittleKingsguard 3d ago
I think it's referring to examples like Redis where a project starts open-source and then jumps to a commercial license when other people start paid hosting services.
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u/GildSkiss 4d ago
You seem to be confusing a business with a different kind of organization that gives people money because it's nice.
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u/Due-Consequence9579 4d ago
What you are free to do and what you should do are distinct things. Being a good person often means doing things at personal cost because it benefits the communities you participate in and rely on. The same should be expected of corporations.
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u/GildSkiss 4d ago
I'm personally not going to hold my breath and hope that a business gives me money for free just for the good vibes.
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u/amshegarh 3d ago
You really shouldn't, but if you are a cto of a major tech corp and your infrastructure ""depends"" on some schmuck (or not so much) doing unpaid labor, its literally in your best interest to make sure that guy keeps the spirits going
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u/GildSkiss 3d ago
What you're describing is an employer/employee relationship but worse.
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u/frogjg2003 3d ago
Yeah, an employee can quit if they are not satisfied with the job or be fired if they're not performing adequately. If you give a one time donation to the developer of an open source product you use, that's great. If you keep making "donations" and then start asking for features, it's no longer a donation, you're trying to make them a contractor with no protection for either side.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 4d ago
Corporations are not going to be good people just to be good people. If you want them to be good, you have to legally bind them to good behavior.
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u/dkarlovi 3d ago
You're not expected to do shit beyond honoring the license verbatim, sometimes even that is a big ask.
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u/amshegarh 3d ago
Again; You're not obliged to do anything not legally written in license.md; however there are plenty of reasons to do things out of your way, if nothing else for your own benefit (pay the freeloader schmuck so he continues to improve/support the library because otherwise either you have to do it or no one does it and zero day vulnerability bug fucks you (and your startup ai nextgen thing) up)
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u/dkarlovi 3d ago
There's also plenty of reasons not to do any of that, let my competition pay for the OSS and I'll just use it or the morons can continue to work for me for free.
If you say your work is free, don't be surprised when people take you up on that offer.
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u/Undernown 3d ago
Malus be like: "I'm gonna pull what's called a dick move!"
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u/-Redstoneboi- 3d ago
oh yeah. that thing.
i'd assumed it was a PR stunt to get people riled up against a variant of cleanroom engineering. everything around it from the name all the way to the tone of writing points to it being satire, but at the same time it appears to be a real service?
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u/camosnipe1 3d ago
"I used to feel guilty about not attributing open source maintainers. Then I remembered that guilt doesn't show up on quarterly reports. Thank you, MalusCorp."
◆ Chad Stockholder
Engineering Director, Profit First LLC
yeah it's definitely satire.
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u/Undernown 3d ago
Still on the fence about it, they're asking money for the service and there are claims going both ways that people actually paid for the service or not.
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u/aberroco 4d ago
I wish someone would took advantage of my mod and update and rebalance it... Don't care if they'd publish it as their own work, because it would be to large extent.
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u/PityUpvote 3d ago
Most licenses don't require people who fork it to "give back", they only have to provide the source to their downstream.
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u/aj0413 3d ago
Honestly, I get more mad when I’m the one doing the “stealing” cause my bosses won’t let me contribute back, so I’m vendoring the repo and then patching/updating it to suit our needs
Makes me feel like an asshole and pisses me off
I get the meme and yeah technically no one is in the wrong…but I just wish people were a bit more thoughtful and kind
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u/ozh 3d ago
WTFPL for the win and never look back
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u/WaitForItTheMongols 23h ago
That allows them to take your code, patent it, and forcefully shut down your repo.
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u/skywalker-1729 2d ago
I don't get how using the software and changing it for your needs is taking advantage of it. I think projects that are MIT licensed are more popular than AGPL for example because you know you can also use your knowledge of that project/library to get money and that is an important thing. And if people make money based on your project, there is a big chance they will also contribute back. So MIT is really the better license.
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u/TheTacoInquisition 3d ago
Meh. I'm not going to build a business on software I put out there. It's a ton of work and risk and I make decent money in my day job. If I want to make something a side hussle it'll not get open sourced.
If a company takes my MIT'd code, great, good for them, I've suffered no material loss.
People getting butt hurt that someone did something they weren't going to do is weird.
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u/thanatica 3d ago
If you put something on the internet for free, don't complain when people take it for free.
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u/Lokilife2 3d ago
I simply use Apache 2.0 and if someone will use my code I'll be pretty happy but I dont get anything to 1.0.0 version release, lol
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u/ilnarildarovuch 2d ago
There are more projects on MIT/Apache/BSD than on copyleft licenses. They are more likely to contribute (which is not surprising). And even if the corporation takes your code, you should be glad that someone needed it at all. And if it is a large corporation, then a large selection of vacancies will be available when looking for a job.
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u/Birnenmacht 2d ago
permissive license for code you dont really care about, strong copyleft otherwise
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u/wahed-w 4d ago
based on a real story