I used to do OSS development full time, but it wasn't financially sustainable for me.
Any organization that uses software that is "as is" should have a plan to maintain that software themselves, or mitigate the risk in other ways. And many of the large players in this industry do exactly that, and their full-time employees are top contributors to many large FOSS projects.
It's well past time for getting rid of licenses that say "you can do what you like with this software", and replace them with licenses that allows you to sell as long as the original project gets a cut, without taking on any of the liability.
The idea that you just mark your work as MIT/GPL/CC0 may have made open source more popular, but it also ruins lives when that thing you worked on for years and never made you anything makes a random drive-by asshole more than your annual salary.
I'm very happy to have created a mildly popular permissively-licensed library. It's a contribution to a community with zero intention of profit. That is, for the most part, what open source is all about.
Open source licenses that in perpetuity lock you out of any form of gains from your own work, even when that work is the very backbone of someone else's non-open-source, for-pay product, are morally objectionable licenses.
> The idea that you just mark your work as MIT/GPL/CC0 may have made open source more popular, but it also ruins lives when that thing you worked on for years and never made you anything makes a random drive-by asshole more than your annual salary.
There's no reason this should ruin your life - your quality of living didn't suddenly decrease. If you are unhappy with this outcome, you probably didn't really intend to create open source software, and should stick to writing proprietary software.
> Open source licenses that in perpetuity lock you out of any form of gains from your own work, even when that work is the very backbone of someone else's non-open-source, for-pay product, are morally objectionable licenses.
It is simply false that open source licenses lock you out of any form of gains from your own work. They allow others the opportunity to benefit from it, as you yourself can too.
I won't fault them for expecting to get paid if they later realize the value of their work and know that it is generating significant commercial money. It is natural to feel like being taken advantage of by the commercial entity when they don't get compensated (even if that was their initial choice).
When someone says "you should have chosen to make it proprietary or use a more restrictive license from beginning", it might come across as a polite way of saying "Too bad, no backsies! You were foolish enough to chose a permissive license. So, accept the consequences".
If a developer wants to get paid for their work with something other than "feel good OSS points", I don't see many options out there. They need to solicit donations(which doesn't have good track record) or re-license.
I think as more products go through this cycle of permissive license, monetization by third-party and re-licensing, we'll be seeing a significant number of projects erring on the side of caution and use restrictive licenses from the start.
But in general, yes, I feel that the bigger issue here is a fundamental mismatch between the author's desires and their chosen license. It's not so different from signing a contract with terms you later regret.
Maybe we need better licenses.
Easy on the drama there. Nobody makes someone use a particular piece of software. Don't build your product with pieces that don't fit your plans.
[Citation Needed] (and a couple of questions)
1. How has this ruined someone's life? That mechanism isn't easy for me to see.
2. If the license allowed for it, why should any one see something wrong there?
3. Aren't you putting short shrift on the effort it takes to productize something?
https://web.archive.org/web/20120620103603/http://zedshaw.co...
> I want people to appreciate the work I’ve done and the value of what I’ve made.
> Not pass on by waving “sucker” as they drive their fancy cars.
A fair approach that provides a way of supporting the people making it and further development.
There's (many) different licenses - for a reason.
If someone makes a small game, wants users to enjoy all the freedoms its developer had, but does not want random 3rd party to include it in a product without telling their users about that, use a GPL style license.
If someone is working on a network protocol, an image format, or audio/video codec, and have that go everywhere to become a defacto standard is more important than other considerations, go for a BSD/MIT style license.
Some vendors don't mind their users looking under the hood. But still want to retain control. Enter 'shared source' (=not open source) or dual licensing (eg. free for non-commercial use, commercial users: pay up).
Documentation is different. So is hardware.
If you're a developer (or vendor): think about this, and pick appropriate license. Just don't complain when you did open source something, and a 3rd party runs with it.
We have seen maintainers burnt out. It takes work to write code.
My project is called reMarkable Connection Utility (RCU), and it makes about $2.1k MRR, selling ~200 copies/month. Some months are worse, some are better.
I've never purchased any advertisement. Its users advocate for it through online forums. That genuine attestation, to its quality and also to me as a person/programmer, helps it sell. That its users, too, are free to share their copy with friends helps people encounter the program who otherwise would not have purchased forthright.
I sell it from my personal website with links to PayPal and Stripe. The return URL is its download page. No JavaScript anywhere. I provide the entire Git history of the project, as well as binaries for all major distros of GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and macOS. I also provide two mailing lists -- one for all customers to be informed of updates, and another for customers to talk with each other, see my latest code patches, and talk about its general development and the reMarkable tablet.
You'll see a very similar thing elsewhere: illicit file sharing increases box office revenue and increases album sales.
Anyone who wants a no-fee copy of RCU can find it many places by searching. If someone ever extends my program with a cool new feature, their version must be released as AGPLv3+, and that means I can re-incorporate their improvements into my own offering. The market dynamics of free/libre software are such that since I have the reputation, the first-mover advantage, and the top search engine rankings, then anyone looking to compete needs to do so on quality of features -- which I have the license to copy, just as they copied from me. Anyone who wants to compete with me needs to compete with all that.
Anyone who shares my program ends up promoting it in the best way possible, by talking about it and telling others it's good and worth using.
I'm actually a paying customer of his RCU software (for managing reMarkable tablet firmware, backups, etc).