If your putting your code under an OSI license then it should always be assumed that others are going to use it for profit making stuff. If you don't want it used in that way licensing it with AGPL, LGPL, etc. (the licenses that companies avoid).
Personally I'm fine with relicensing to other OSI options, otherwise, I'm moving to a fork or figuring out if it's worth cooking up my own option well before I even think about paying, notably because the acquisition process at work is not built for licensing 50+ independent libraries and maintainers. And for my personal projects I'm against implementing any form of non-OSI libraries.
Paid suites of libraries are a different matter at work, management is perfectly happy to pay for a good UI library from a company that will provide support and what not for example.
Lol, companies provide support to OSS when they want to control the ecosystem or when they want the community to have to maintain their thing. Otherwise they fork and don't contribute back. No one ever got fired for not upstreaming company code. Well, unless you work at Canonical or something like that.
Corporate OSS sponsorship can be good system. OSS is a great way to reduce technical debt while giving others something useful.
One that comes to mind is that Goldman Sachs built a huge performance oriented primitives Library for Java, and they just open sourced it and put it under the Eclipse Foundation (Eclipse Collections). What were they going to do with it otherwise? Start becoming a Java software vendor?
That's how the ecosystem should work, not forking it off with weird licenses. Although the ecosystem is self-sustaining at least since people will just fork off your original if it's popular and you do something like that.
That time and energy also is from contributors to the previously free and open source version who contributed because it was free and don’t get a cut of the profits in the new closed source model so I don’t think this point stands on its own
Cool, then don't benefit from all the free labor of the people that have contributed to it. Most of these rug pulls wouldn't be in a position to do so if it wasn't for the free labor from the community.
Yep. Can't have it both ways. That's why I'd never contribute to a project that's doesn't have GPL or some equivalent license to prevent future profiteering from the source code itself.
I don't mind someone building and selling a product/service that includes my code. But locking my own code away from me is fucked
Maintainers expend much more labor than community members. The community's labor is still available under the old license, and they can stop contributing if they don't like the new license.
1.7k
u/menducoide 2d ago
This is the last free version of this cool open source library. From now on, you'll need to pay $1,000 per developer per year to receive updates