Comment by jpc0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpc0 | Hacker News Reader

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> Companies cost money to run. Google and AWS exploit open source work for profit, and don’t contribute back enough to ensure its support.

I don’t understand this take, if Google/AWS/Microsoft decide to host your service and some vulnerabilities are discovered then you got free Security Research done, your product would either have remained vulnerable or someone else would have filed the same bug.

You own the code so you can decide only certain people can commit PRs and can choose to close any feature requests issues.

If one of the cloud providers decided to use your product it’s because they deemed it reasonable as is or they can fork / contribute upstream.

That is what OSS is, by definition.

Hell you can post the code with a license like MIT and then never touch it again, and if someone else can monitise that code kudos to them.

If you are an existing company and open sourced your code, Facebook/react, then you presumably already make enough money to support development yourself or intend to stop development.

If you open source code that is your core business and somebody “steals your lunch” your learnt an important lesson and hopefully won’t make the same mistake twice. If you then decide to relicense and the community abandons you and causes uproar on the internet you are reaping the rewards of your actions, accept them.

Look, in principle I don’t disagree with anything you said.

However, I think OSS is a net positive to the industry, and would like to see it remain that way.

The classic way to monetize OSS has been to provide hosting and support for a price.

Now the internet giants are taking that entire pie for themselves.

If we agree that we want OSS to be a viable option going forward, and we agree that you need money to hire devs to maintain a successful large scale OSS project, then what do you suggest be done?

> and we agree that you need money to hire devs to maintain a successful large scale OSS project

Therein lies our disagreement, you don’t need to. If you are amazon and upstream is willing to accept requests then amazon can hire devs, and if someone eats their cake then those devs will eventually migrate to the new location.

As someone who did the initial work for OSS I put the code out there, if I dislike the direction a fork is taking I can ignore said fork and keep working on my own version, why do I need to use the version they are using.

It boils down to why did you even start an OSS project, if the intention was to make money or hire other employees you fundamentally misunderstood the assignment.

If you made a project that serves your own need, decide someone else may benefit so you publish it as FOSS online and it gets massive traction how does that change your need, you probably have no reason to make it commercially viable, it is still serving the same need it always has for you.

Now if it gets forked and the fork proves to be of better quality and still serves your need then switch to the fork for your own personal need and now someone else is doing the maintenance, so you end up being the “freeloader”.

And I’ve already discussed the “burden on the maintainer”, if it’s such an issue close access to issues and pull requests. No more burden.

If Amazon had to do enough maintenance work they’d just fork it and do it on their own proprietary version. They have literally done that.

This goes back to my original point. You’re living in fantasy land.

I don’t see the problem with that. Good for them. How does that affect you?

What exactly is the nature of this fantasyland? I have to have said I wanted or expected something for that to make any sense. You make silly claims based on nothing. That is not an argument.

In fact it's the other way around. Expecting to enjoy both the benefits of OSS and the benefits of collecting rent at the same time for the same thing is the fantasyland.

The fork is typically closed source so you do not get to benefit from it and neither does the public good.

This of course means that you should never use permissive licensing since it doesn’t provide many key benefits of what people thought oss would do. You could use copyleft but i guess with llms it kinda amounts to the same

The issue is that hyperscalers will not host your product. They will fork it, close source it, and you get no benefit not even security research.

And if you use copyleft, nobody uses your product (or asks flr a commercial non FOSS license)

You confuse open source with a permissive open license.

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