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Comment by yetanotherforg | Hacker News Reader

His whole point is: There is a lot of great free open source software being exploited by small technical teams to run faster. This means the people doing the integration deserve less $$ because they can do the same amount with less. Founders deserve all the money, everybody else should be happy to be employed.

1920s robber baron bs.

Ignore the ethics that every single startup would be impossible without standing on the heads of those who have dedicated many hours of their lives building this free software.

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I made this exact argument in the early 2000s when open source starting getting popular and many in the tech community thought I was ridiculous.

I think it's ridiculous that open source developers give out their hard work willingly and then seem to think big companies are 'taking advantage' by not hiring them or funding the project.

It has nothing to do with ethics. Startups didn't steal anything. The developers gave it out willingly.

This sort of attitude has soured me to the entire open source community. They want to be able to give their work out for free, but then have a say in who uses it and how it's used, which is exactly the opposite of free and open.

Open source software is often funded by big corporations once it hits critical mass because it's a nice way to stamp out competing small businesses who might be have been able to charge $ for a small chunk of software functionality.

  > those who have dedicated many hours of their lives digging their own grave

I fixed that for you.

Yep. Absolute suckers for giving out their work for free I guess.

You misunderstand their intentions.

“I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding things out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it - those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me.” -Richard Feynman

This assumes that there is no financial intent in the work. My favorite example of this is that many thousands of Google's engineers used an app (Homebrew I think), but Google wouldn't hire him, thus letting him share in wealth partially created by his life's work.

Did Richard Feynman struggle to pay rent?

Wasn't his work funded by the government?

OSS creators can choose their license. If I make something MIT licensed, I can't then complain that people are "stealing" my work. Just make proprietary software at that point.

Where does he mention open source? And using open source software is not standing on anyone's head.

Where do you think all of that automation comes from? I promise you, every single start-up you know of is violating somebody's copyrights on their open source. I've seen this in every company I've worked with for the past 30 years. There is always code inside of private applications which was copied and pasted from GPL'd code.

Unless that code is under the AGPL specifically and the software isn't cloud-based (and the vast majority of start-ups these days are doing SaaS) then there's no license violation there.

What are you talking about? There is not always code copy and pasted from GPL'd code. Giant amounts of open source software is not released under GPL, and automation is moving fast enough that there's a huge amount that's not released under GPL precisely because if it is then people don't use it.

Not every single startup.

It's not hard to read the licenses, and I have a fiduciary duty not to open up my company to unnecessary liability

Have you ever copied and pasted anything from StackOverflow? Did you ask them if they copied it, if they had permission to copy it, or where it was copied from so you could attribute properly? If so, my hat is off to you Sir.

I did have a discussion recently with some friends as to their ethical reasons against GPT and co-pilot generated code.

I'm not an engineer, so it's possible there are engineers in my company copying and pasting from stack overflow

Although we have a type system so they are probably adjusting things to fit

But none of our supply chain has restrictive licenses attached, and good faith errors are usually easy to correct way before they go to trial

I know because I have had to sign off on using worse packages when our use case doesn't comply with the license on the best in class package

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