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Comment by yreg | Hacker News Reader

If you have such expectations then clearly state the rules.

- individuals and companies under $a yearly revenue can use the product for free

- companies under $b have to pay $x

- companies under $c have to pay $y

Pretending that something is free to use and then getting disappointed when someone rich indeed uses that thing for free and fighting with them doesn't help anyone at all. (This is not specific to Wordpress.)

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I feel like there could be little need for rules if people had a little common sense, then if you have targets, other start doing the bare minimum, I'd rather have parasites like WPEngine put off

I agree, if I would making bookoo bucks off of someone else’s “open”platform, you could be 100% sure I would be feeding the golden goose some grain to build some rapport. If I’m playing with it in my homelab, maybe not so much but try occasionally to donate if it’s an OSS project that $10-50 makes a difference for.

And if you didn't want to do that it would be appropriate for the OSS project to retaliate?

It's not retaliation to revoke free access to your web resources.

If I scrape some website, I could be IP banned at any time. That's just how it goes.

It's one thing to use web resources on a small scale, as a user. It's another to milk them dry and practically DDOS their servers. That can, and will, get you banned. Open source or not.

It is if they get mad you sent a cease and desist.

Of course it's retaliation. Wordpress.org said as much in the announcement - they don't like WP Engine's business model, don't think they contribute enough upstream, etc. And therefore they cut off access to the wordpress.org update servers. Nothing about "practically DDOS" of the server.

Yes, retaliation for using web resources without paying.

> wordpress.org update servers. Nothing about "practically DDOS" of the server

Yes, when you have hundreds of thousands of users this is expensive. What you're describing is expensive.

WPE doesn't maintain these servers, presumably because it's hard and expensive. You can't expect to hit someone's servers with, I'm guessing, hundreds of thousands of requests a day and not pay a dime. If you did that, you would be banned. From just about any free service.

Wordpress.org wrote a whole public post about why they cut off WPE and their reasons are just what I said. I don't understand how you can so confidently assert that the real reason is something different.

in this case the "rules" you're talking about are licensing terms, so I have trouble interpreting your statement as anything other than "licenses wouldnt be needed if everyone would just use software the way the author wants"

How is WPEngine a parasite? If you don't want people to use your code don't release it GPL

Has absolutely nothing to do with the license, the code was and is GPL-2.

GPL-2 doesn't force you to allow free access to web resources. This is a separate problem altogether. You'd get banned even if they were closed source.

Does that mean every successful company needs to start financing Linux, curl, Postgres, Python, etc which are undoubtedly powering who knows how much internal infrastructure?

Either you are a free license or not.

What you describe constitutes an ideal scenario, frankly. Similar to paying taxes for using roads for deliveries.

I would actually say yes, they should start doing exactly that.

Its not a crazy concept , the real world non-idealized version of your statement is called tax. We pay taxes for access to free public services.

It is a crazy concept, because taxes are coerced by governments under the threat of violence, whereas the freedoms of FOSS software are intended to be entirely non-coercive. To require compensation of any kind for access and the right to use and distribute code is contrary to the spirit of free and open source software.

If people want to do that, then fair enough, just don't call if free or open source. And don't license your code under free or open source licenses if you care about getting credit or compensation or anything but maximizing software freedom.

> It is a crazy concept, because taxes are coerced by governments under the threat of violence, whereas the freedoms of FOSS software are intended to be entirely non-coercive.

In doubt, you will have to enforce the freedoms of FOSS by going to a court (i.e. use the governmental "violence enforcement system"). On the other hand, if you pay your taxes "voluntarily", you won't be coerced by the government.

In other words: in both cases threats of violence are involved.

There is already the shared source model.

What people call things is a marketing phenomenon. You can complain all you want.. and you should.

Ok but taxes that are invented on the spot by an all-powerful ruler, and imposed by surprise, under immediate threat, do not have a great history in modern society.

I have no clue how you extrapolated all that from my claim that free public services aren't free and are, in fact, paid for by taxpayers.

Free public services are a finite resource. Already existing software is not.

Software maintenance is a finite resource too.

Software maintenance is not already existing software though.

It’s not incoherent. It’s a rule that could be made and adhered to for a project.

It’s not possible for GPL projects to restrict the code this way, but the peripheral assets like trademarks, servers, conference slots, board seats, core contributor status could be restricted.

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