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Comment by meiraleal | Hacker News Reader

What are you talking about? Corporations ruining open source is the norm in 2024, indie devs hiding their source code from corps takeover is the new free software.

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>indie devs hiding their source code from corps takeover is the new free software.

High power level take.

The Stallman ethos of Free Software simply hasn't played out the way idealists thought it would. Instead, libraries are standardized by megacorps to farm employees inculcated into their design patterns and get GitHub clout chasers to fix bugs for free.

Open source really needs something like the CC-BY-NC-ND* license. Code is open but you can't profit from it. Unmodified redistribution requires credit. You can modify the code for personal use but you can't redistribute it without permission.

This model at least eliminates the potential maliciousness of a lot of closed-source software while leaving room for indie devs to profit from their work.

*[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/]

There is a Fair Source model, driven by Sentry: https://fair.io

Didn't know about this, glad to know others are seeing a similar problem! I've definitely tried to monetize self-hosted projects that could benefit from Fair Core in particular.

The flexibility of the licensing text is also nice as it'd be very easy to modify the standard "two years to open source" timetable or drop in a different license type like GPL:

https://github.com/keygen-sh/fcl.dev/blob/master/FCL-1.0-MIT...

AGPL3 gets somewhat near this; if someone wants to profit in the cloud from it, they have to share all changes they make (and in theory then anyone else could go run a for profit or free service in the cloud or locally with the same new code).

Sharing code back isn't enough. AGPLv3 falls short in ensuring the profits from the tools get shared with the creators and maintainers

That sounds like the early 90s when you had to pay for all dev tools and even pay royalties for how many copies of your product you sold with that library. Most people had to roll their own crappy half-assed homebrew data structures because otherwise you'd have to pay for expensive libraries.

Interesting reference as more and more people long for the a comeback of the old days in tech.

I remember when c++ shipped with a standard library with data structures and I was very impressed that they were free.

Personally I care less about this, and more about someone else not ripping my code off outright and profiting.

I’m very much torn, because on the one hand, I can attribute my entire career to OSS. I learned from using and studying others’ work. OTOH, what I did not do is take someone’s work, and monetize it.

I have no issue with using a library; those are nearly always released with the explicit purpose of being included in a larger body of work. But if someone makes a full product, and releases it under essentially any OSI-approved license, absolutely nothing stops me from taking it as-is, throwing a splashy page in front of it, and making money (assuming it’s a marketable product, of course). This to me is the same as stumbling across an artisan making a product and selling it cheaply, only to turn around and immediately resell it for a profit, simply because they didn’t know any better. It’s legal, but it’s ethically gross.

> they have to share all changes they make

Only with users who access the service.

Mostly because many decided that to make money, they had to go with VC money and business friendly licenses, instead of dual license GPL + commercial.

> Open source really needs something like the CC-BY-NC-ND* license.

That seems akin to saying "vegan food really needs pork", since by definition a NC licence can't be open source. Not to mention such licences cause as many, if not more, problems than they solve.

https://community.oscedays.org/t/why-are-non-commercial-lice...

Notably the open source foundation tried and failed to trademark the term open source in 1999.

As such “by definition a NC license can’t be open source” is true only by certain definitions. Open source is a generic term, not owned by the OSI, despite the holy wars fought over it.

I realize my post is controversial and may spur vitriol from some. It is an uncomfortable truth for many.

"Vegan" isn't trademarked either, but has a generally acknowledged meaning, just as open source has a generally acknowledged meaning of meeting the OSI open source definition.

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