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Comment by cutierust | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to dictate morals for others. How about let oss be voluntary and thank people for giving what they did in the past?

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Build a free bridge across a river, which allows a town to grow on the other side, then shut down free access to the bridge. The builders are entitled to do this, but doesn't make it the right thing to do.

What is the problem with wanting to be paid for your labor?

I don't understand how your question leads from my comment. I didn't say anything about there being something wrong with being paid for labor.

The example is flawed. What really happens in open source is that the users contribute bug reports and fixes, then the project maintainers privatize the use after extracting value. Should the users who contributed code and issues be paid as well?

For better or for worse, the success of many large open source projects is driven by a community of evangelists that just wouldn't exist if the project weren't open source in the first place.

Could update the example by saying that the villagers have been contributing to bridge maintenance before it went private.

O&M of a thing, often outweighs the initial cost of bootstrapping it in the first place.

The longer it runs, the more this is true.

So you mean everyone that contributed when the project was FOSS should be paid for their labor when this ceases to be FOSS?

I really don’t understand how licensing works, but doesn’t the Apache 2.0 license essentially mean “anybody can do anything they want with this code”?

If that is the case, wouldn’t that right also apply to the primary maintainer/owner of the copyright or is it just the users that have that privilege?

If I were concerned about somebody eventually monetizing a product that I contributed to, I wouldn’t contribute to anything.

Build a free bridge across a river, leave it in place and invite others to maintain it. Build a separate toll bridge.

Nothing was taken away from the town and the people on the other side of the river. You can still use the free bridge. The license change only affects future new bridges but anybody is free to use the before-the-license-change-bridge exactly in the same way as they used to.

More like putting an elevator in a building then cutting power when someone is in it.

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