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Comment by pryelluw | Hacker News Reader

The point about open source being charity really resonated with me. It's like volunteering at a soup kitchen that cooks the best food in the world that then gets repackaged by a third party and sold at a huge profit and none is given back to the soup kitchen. WTF.

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Here's a solution to that problem:

https://kartick-log.blogspot.in/2016/11/a-commercial-reuse-l...

I thought that this is supposed to be whole point of open source. Once it is out, it is out and people can freely do what they want including profit. Open source people spend a lot of effort in trying to convince business that using open source is safe.

The alternative is to sell licenses.

No, it selling putting you recipe up for grabs and reaping the benefits of anyone making it better and more elaborate. What's to stop you from repackaging it yourself by they? With the official seal of approval from the makers on the package?

It's not always charity, some opensource to have co-maintainers, some opensource to show his achievement and put into his resume. Some opensource because then they can build something together as a community so he can also use it in the next-release (..instead of patching his version). etc.

You are right. My soup kitchen metaphor still stands (IMO).

This is why Copyleft exists.

That's what the theory says, but in practice you get a net loss since entities like Apple and the FSF will never stand on the other's ground effectively resulting in a deadlock.

Except that in a cloud world, you can run modified GPL'ed software on your server and not release a single bit, since you are not redistributing the software.

(The AGPL being the exception here.)

Has the AGPL ever been tested in court?

This is why companies like Apple and Google are ditching all projects that they can from their products, e.g. GCC is on the way out on Android NDK and Fuschia/Magenta almost doesn't have any (L)GPL related components.

Also why so many companies are happily making web apps, with everything behind server walls.

>Also why so many companies are happily making web apps, with everything behind server walls.

Which is why the AGPL exists.

I would rather have few people use my software than have it used as part of a distribution that is sold for profit by an organisation making use of extracted surplus value.

AGPL doesn't matter because unless someone that works for the company comes public and denounces the situation, there are very little chances to know how the server stack actually looks like.

What a negative attitude. You seem more interested in preventing others from benefiting than anything else.

I wouldn't have used the phrase "extracted value" because, unlike coal, using it doesn't deplete it. The world isn't zero-sum.

No, that's not true. Copyleft does nothing to prevent others from selling copyleft code.

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