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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

The model where company makes money off of someone else's work without paying them should be illegal. Currently you cannot hire someone as an apprentice and don't pay them - you need to give at least the minimum wage. OSS is sort of a loophole where companies can obtain work without payment. I think this practice should be illegal and regardless of the license company adopting OSS solution should pay its contributors market rates - that is the amount of money it would take AWS to pay to create such product.

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I appreciate the underlying sentiment, but I disagree. When I contribute to OSS it's my choice to and I want the right to let anyone do whatever they want with code even if I never exercise that right.

Personally, I think OSS licences should be changed to prohibit unpaid use by any entity that has a single stakeholder worth more than a billion dollars. That way the startups and medium sized businesses around the world can benefit and the tech lottery winners pay something reasonable ($1m a year, say) to support OSS.

There is the same argument that people who want apprenticeship use. They want to work for a company and learn, but company won't hire them because they don't have money to pay for "idle" worker and the overhead to teach them. But this is for the greater good. In the past you had companies who used their market share in particular city to drive wages down and people had a choice either work for them and starve or move to different city. Minimum wage stops this, at a cost of some people being unable to work for free. I can accept that.

There will be projects for sure that would love their software were used by AWS and other companies without paying them, but that will only create a race to the bottom. We should stop exploitation of engineers by these giant companies.

> The model where company makes money off of someone else's work without paying them should be illegal.

So, once an author is dead, it should be illegal to sell anything they created? Or should ownership rights in content for the estate last forever?

Your idea is terrible when examined in detail.

This is an edge case, but for sure they would have family members who would inherit the titles and in an event of absence of such people then the state should take ownership.

Wait, I should be forced to give the state control over my creation, instead of being able to make it free to everyone, forever? Monstrous.

You want to make permissive licenses illegal or what? That's ridiculous.

Pick something like the MariaDB or CockroachDB license if you don't want Amazon to provide a hosted version of your software.

Yes it should be illegal to use OSS in SaaS platforms without paying the OSS contributors.

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