Hacker News Reader

Comment by disordinary | Hacker News Reader

Well, it gets added to your CV too. But, theoretically the company contributes back to the codebase for any enhancements they require making the code better for all users.

View on HN

Isn’t that weird though? A for profit enterprise profits off of your code and all you get is a CV boost?

What should happen is the company also contributes libraries back to the community, although Nintendo doesn't seem to https://github.com/Nintendo. The reason that the internet is as big as it is and as accessible to small and scrappy development teams is because of open source. A lot of the internet is built on code which is given away by companies like Google and Facebook so there is a bit of give and take in this.

Weird as in exactly what you allow by assigning an open source license to your code? I'm not sure when the mentality of "the little guys can use my code but companies better pay me" crept into common discussion around open source, but it's never worked that way. If Nintendo didn't find a library up to their standards, they would have just created their own (likely not open source) version.

>> I'm not sure when the mentality of "the little guys can use my code but companies better pay me" crept into common discussion around open source, but it's never worked that way.

Yeah that's weird. I think it's partly people realizing the difference between MIT/BSD and GPL (or even AGPL) licenses. Or the diff between some ideal "how open source works" and what the licenses actually say.

This is a good thing. People may realise that the choice of license actually matters.

The GPL and AGPL still allow for monetisation of open source without contributing back financially to the project. Most of the recent complaints seem to be about contributing back money rather than contributing back code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com