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Comment by getcrunk | Hacker News Reader

As for the trend of the bait and switch. That’s a fair point. But u can always fork and move on. And even then would you say that’s more of an issue or occurs more frequently then corps not contributing back at all?

Like when you factor in all the negative externalities what is worse?

As for the license, yea I mean that’s kind of the direction I want people to talk about.

We have foss absolutists, but there’s these emerging systemic issues now for a few decades and I think that the literalism surrounding the foss principles needs to address it more fundamentally then saying go non free.

The dichotomy is not effective anymore when there is so much bad faith.

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> so much bad faith

This is the part that I disagree with—to the extent there's bad faith, the bad faith is on the part of the for profits that pull the bait and switch, not the users.

Making your dev-focused project FOSS gives you enormous tailwinds that you can ride to dramatically increase your chance of success. That's the draw for these VC-funded FOSS projects. But those tailwinds come with expectations that you'll respect the license and not throw a tantrum when people actually take you at your word.

If you want to be the sole vendor for your project then you should make that clear from the beginning in the license, but people don't do that because then the tailwinds go away.

The key point is that there's no moral issue here (at least not on the users). You offered free stuff and people took you up on it. When you gave out the free stuff you got a lot of free publicity with that free stuff. You made a trade-off, and it's bad faith to try to convince your fans that the people on the other end of that deal are doing something wrong.

When a user uses some open source software, there is no negative happening. They are not accumulating some debt that should be repaid by "contributing back." If they make a million dollars on it, that makes no difference to the project. Agreeing to a license and then following that license is not "bad faith."

The only damage being done when someone makes money using open source software, is to the ambitions and ego of a developer who imagined that "open source" meant "give me your contributions so I can build an empire." Fortunately, open source is for the benefit of all of us. Nobody owes them fiefs.

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