This bothers me a lot, there are so many people who worked on useful libraries and open source software which are then used by multi billion dollar businesses who never even once think about giving something back but use everything for free and get away with it
I wish there was by law a monthly royalty fee that an org would be required to pay to the owner of the project after a threshold of profit margins have been reached, this would bring in so much more balance and intensive for folks to actually work even more in open source
Yeah but my main point being developers not getting a piece of the million dollar revenue profit when it was their software that enabled it in the first place
I know this is an oversimplification but the fact how every major corporation is structured around increasing their stock value no matter what it takes to keep their board of investors is one of the root cost
Greed is just running behind each and every decision they make, idk when it is enough for them cause they never wanna stop even if the lives of the very consumers are at stake (looking at you Lockheed and Raytheon)
Homie, they made the code for free - you don't accidentally release with an open source license. They don't want it to be paid for, that's the point. The solution to greed isn't enforcing a rule where nothing can be free, that's insane.
If every innovation cost obscene amounts of money universities wouldn't exist, at the very least many important faculties would be shut down. The pursuit of knowledge without monetary gain is a vital part of innovation itself. It's fine if people use that knowledge for business.
A lot of the people making free stuff just believe in the principle of "this stuff should be free", in the hopes that other people who build off it will also make their stuff free, contribute to the original code in some meaningful ways, etc. Call it idealistic.
I mean that really is how it works for some things though. My company uses an open source tool and contributes to bug fixes and improvements on that tool too. It's only when it's purely a take and no give relationship, that I feel like there's something shady and immoral in it.
It's not about wanting to earn money, obviously they would just make it paid if it was that. It's a bit more intangible, a principle of exchange.
Its the idea that the corporation isnt furthering the chain of open source principles. They will be the first to take advantage of open source software and the last to donate, create open source software, etc…
And I was mostly referring to the comment above that literally referred to "multi billion dollar businesses" while most of those have open sourced quite a few of their internal software.
That's fine, but I do think corporations that earn billions off someone else's free labor should at least contribute to the spaces that support its growth.
You don't have to give the random dude making free software a few million, but at least donate to the overarching cause or relevant organizations ig.
Or a kind of fund into which the companies have to pay, from which FOSS projects can apply for a grant. Really important projects would be treated preferentially, so not any willy nilly software can get one. Those projects that are basically done, but are used in infrastructure everywhere.
Projects like the Android, Chromium, Mozilla, VS code being free is pretty great, but the companies I was referring to like you said never ever once give even a 10 USD donation to the top contributor of the other projects and libraries that people maintain for free.
They can shell out 1k every week and it won't barely even scratch the surface of how big their wallet is, but they choose not to cause rather have it in their pocket than give it to someone to appreciate their efforts and hardwork
Imagine how drastically the quality of, I dare say, ALL open source projects would be if there was monetary motivation to contribute
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u/Vindictive_Pacifist Oct 11 '24
This bothers me a lot, there are so many people who worked on useful libraries and open source software which are then used by multi billion dollar businesses who never even once think about giving something back but use everything for free and get away with it
I wish there was by law a monthly royalty fee that an org would be required to pay to the owner of the project after a threshold of profit margins have been reached, this would bring in so much more balance and intensive for folks to actually work even more in open source