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Comment by tlocke | Hacker News Reader

I work on a few Open Source libraries and they're used by companies that make a lot of money, and people often regard me as a mug for doing the hard work for free so that other people can make lots of money. The argument I give in response is that from an economic perspective, you can only make money from a unique advantage, and since Open Source can be used by anyone, it's not giving anyone a unique advantage. I'd put it this way, that any company that's not using Open Source is putting themselves at a disadvantage.

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Also, lots of open source software only achieves widespread use because they are open source. If e.g. Daniel Stenberg had decided to charge for curl instead of releasing it under a FOSS license, very few would have bothered to use it, and in all probability, some other person would have written a FOSS replacement for it.

I'd argue that most open source software only achieves widespread use because it is free (as in beer).

The way is solve this is that I release everything under GPL. Companies usually won't touch that, but everybody else might.

Same here, though I usually use the AGPL for extra freedom.

To me, it's not a problem that my code is used for commercial gain. I use the MIT licence (a permissive licence). The key thing for me is that it doesn't give companies a competitive advantage, rather it puts companies that don't use it at a competitive disadvantage. It's thanks to Open Source that I'm writing this on a system that uses 100% Open Source software (okay, maybe the BIOS isn't). A good thing about Open Source is that if a company uses it, they're more likely to report / fix bugs, which helps everyone.

> It's thanks to Open Source that I'm writing this on a system that uses 100% Open Source software

no, it's thanks to free software and the GPL. Thanks to open source you get Playstation and macOS which both use BSD to create the most proprietary system possible.

You might be looking at this wrong. The unique advantage could be first mover network effects and lock-in and then you are still being exploited. Your software isn't a unique advantage but no on else can break in and have use for it due to unrelated barriers to entry. This depends a lot on exactly what it is.

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