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Comment by wood_spirit | Hacker News Reader

Changing from an open source license is a kind of tech product spin on enshitification.

Even if the product continues to get features and active development, like Oracle poured into MySQL after its acquisition, a database or framework going less open source is still a death knell.

The mainstream programmers will move on and use something else. Anything else. Who who has heard that the license can change would now pick it for a new project?

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I'm confused. Does SSPL not require more sharing of source code than GPL and the like?

I've always thought the "we're just hosting a server with our modified version of this OSS code, so we don't have to share the source" argument was trash.

It's not even being compared to GPL. The original licence was BSD. You're right, these licences are meant to make things more free. It's incredible to me that even software engineers can't see beyond local optima and convenience to the bigger picture. BSD is like saying "you're free to do anything including throwing shit over your neighbour's fence". Individual freedom is basically irrelevant. It's community freedom that matters.

Pay up or roll your own. Nobody owes you free labor.

Nobody owes you free labor, but it's a world of uncertainty. People don't like uncertainty. Will this labor be priced reasonably, at around the same level that I value it, or will they pull a vmware and ask for my first born?

There’s no greater certainty than rolling your own and building your own stack.

If you want perfect reliability, use the standard library of a language and nothing else. It’s actually possible.

Ironically, the best open source projects are the ones that have no other dependencies beyond the standard library.

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