I don't care about monetization or $BIG_CORP's fascination with it. I developed this thing to stay open. It's not up for grabs.
If your stuff is complex enough, then it should be easy to outcompete any improvements made by organizations. SQLite, for example, has multiple proprietary tests [1]. Corporations can try to improve on SQLite, but without these tests and the knowledge of Richard Hipp on their side, it will most likely fail.
To maintain open source over a long period of time, some durable competitive advantage is probably required yes. With such a moat, competitors can be beaten. Luckily, being open source is also a small moat since it avoids vendor lock-in and some businesses need vendor lock-in to survive (I'm looking at your SAP).
> If Richard gets hit by a bus, and the community tries to keep the project alive according to free and open-source principles, then they’re going to face all the same barriers that a corporation would :/
The project sits inside Richard's company and the company has some other engineers working there.
Deploy if you dare: https://github.com/readthedocs/readthedocs.org
Personally I go the (A)GPL way all the time.
Yes.
> There is nothing inherently wrong in both positions.
Also, yes.
Hope more people understand this clearly.
> Personally I go the (A)GPL way all the time.
Me, too.
Nor requires them to give anything back.
Putting your code in MIT license is basically slogan "take all of it and give nothing back". Which is why so many corporate developers push for it, no lawyer to talk to when you take MIT-licensed code to use in your project.
> much unlike open-core GNU licenses that promote CLA-s and thwart any competition.
There are no "open core GNU licenses". It is just perversion of the idea and abusing the fact some of them are not restrictive enough that you can still have paid parts that are closed source
The copyleft licenses don't require to give anything back either, they only require to give source code forward to downstream users, who may or may not contribute back upstream to the original project.
Most commercial products just write some useless statement like "this software may use open source components" or include a generic MIT license without the original copyright holder statement inside.
Who is telling these companies they are doing it wrong?
Very rare when someone ever does.
These kind of things take several months of efforts by deep expert, when it is done by normal open source developers who think they know about licenses and compliance, it tends to result in poor results even if the output looks "big" from a surface view.
xGPL family of licenses force contribution back of improvements, and rightfully, it's not about developer freedom, but user freedom.