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Simply put, anything not a viral license like GPL allows parasitization by companies effectively living off FLOSS devs, with absolutely nothing to gain. Human rights under GPL were meant to apply to humans, not '3 lawyers in a trench coat' (corporations).
They can make their decisions (snubbing a dev of code they deem good enough for enterprise). And you can make comparable decisions, punishing them for the sheer hubris.
It also reaffirms that my decision of AGPL for everything is the right one. They can contact for custom terms.
The author said he was proud of this outcome and nervous at how widely his hobby project will be deployed. That sounds like the ambition of many open source authors and a win. Might never have happened with GPL.
MIT license is absolutely not 'more free' than the GPL.
In fact, MIT means you give up effective ownership and control. You lose control and contributions.
And what do you get for that loss of control? Exposure. Or, in this and many other cases similar, you get diddly shit. Some company paracitizes your code, sometimes even demands SOC questionnaires and 'do this bug NOW', and other abuse.
> Not everybody has to be chasing money in all their activities.
Talk about missing the point! This was all about money. It was about a job at the company where the code is being used in a production manner. And they didn't even bother to give an interview.
And not many of us are independently wealthy, and can do things that we want with no monetary care. And, most FLOSS devs aren't that. Instead, they're being used as unpaid stepping stones so some overvalued AI hypesquad can vibecode (or slotmachine programming) faster.
> The author said he was proud of this outcome and nervous at how widely his hobby project will be deployed. That sounds like the ambition of many open source authors and a win. Might never have happened with GPL.
That's where I hope the author relicenses as LGPL and proprietary, and doesn't give Anthropic any more free professional work.
And if it never would have happened with the GPL, gasp, they would have had to pay developers to create it.
And until I'm independently wealthy, I too will license AGPL. If you're making money on my stuff, I want a cut. Simple as that.
A. So much for "Not everybody has to be chasing money..." as missing the point
B. What hubris to claim that just because you wrote something it is now "yours" in any meaningful way. The copyright lobby has infected everywhere.
I'm certainly not there.
Also more curious, is the AGPL doesn't affect humans doing stuff. It affects companies when they grab, modify, and host and not share contributions. Read about anti-TIVOization. That's why the AGPL. I'm guessing you know this, and why you're attacking my viewpoints as 'missing the point'.
And yes, copyright is everywhere. And the GPL has some of the sanest terms to reuse, as long as you follow the requirement. And the GPL also further grows the ecosystem, due to virality.
But Anthropic wasn't exactly submitting code either, were they? In my world, parasites get antiparasitic drugs.
It does affect humans doing stuff that isn't malicious, like if you need to solve a problem by modifying the code then now you also have to make that change public which is a hassle, I'd rather not have to track or maintain such things. I'd rather not have to think about that, and I care more about such nuisances than I care about the possibility of companies stealing it.
I've seen people with un-stressed about money with net-worths that are orders of magnitudes below those that seem to obsess about it.
Your motivations are your motivations, if you don't like the idea of someone using your work to make money without giving you a cut, you can do you, but why is it hard to understand that other people might just not care that much about it (or, gasp, even find their work being used more rewarding than the potential monetary compensation)
Isn't that what true freedom is?
You can argue that more freedom is a net burden for both the individual and society (tragedy of the commons), but that doesn't negate the aspect of it being more free to begin with.
>And not many of us are independently wealthy, and can do things that we want with no monetary care.
Indeed. But not many people contribute to any kind of OS community to begin with (regardless of the license). I would like to one day, but then the industry laid me and hundreds of thousands off in the last few years and those plans were delayed.
There definitely is a certain level of privilege in being able to provide knowledge to others on the side. Even morose if you're part of an organization that pays you to do so.
> If you're making money on my stuff, I want a cut. Simple as that.
It's clear that you're motivated by personal compensation for your work, which is fine, but it means you shouldn't license it as MIT. Other people are motivated by knowing that their work is useful to others, and those people shouldn't use GPL because it hinders that aim.
This has been debated a lot already. It depends whose freedom we are talking about. It is overly simplistic to define MIT as more free.
Since your replies below are focusing on compensation: have you actually made a nontrivial amount of money with that model?
I would expect that should be a prerequisite to reaffirm it was the correct decision, especially if you're giving unsolicited advice to strangers about how they should license their software.
All of this is built on exploiting the open source movement. Delineating between closed source ventures and Free community efforts is just good sense at this point. If they're going to take they must give back.
In all seriousness, good work. Sorry about the rejection, but it reminds me of the story about the Homebrew guy getting rejected by Google[1].
Also, that discussion gets pretty mean. Didn't feel like I wanted to send people there. I just wanted to give the guy a pat on the back, and bring some humor into it. Been there. Sucks.
It was just a kind of nasty conversation, and I didn't feel that it was appropriate to deliberately send folks there. I'm not really into the whole "Make the Internet Darker for Everyone" schtick.
I do the work because I see it as payback for all the great open source software I use all the time.
I’d like to see an attempt by useful freedom respecting software projects to deploy patents to combat non-free reimplementations.
A GPL license that grants you rights to the backing patent as long as the software you develop with it is also released under the GPL license.
Use the library for closed source software? Copyright violation. Reimplement the software under another license? Patent violation. Create something slightly different and call it the same thing? Trademark violation.
I’d provide links to some discourse of this, but honestly I think it’s better to search “can you patent software in the US” and do a brief read of various sources, because the terminology between them can seem somewhat counterfactual to eachother.
On the other hand, Meta was found torrenting terabytes of books and for them it's a nothingburger. The rules are really meant for commoners.
Something that isn't brought up enough in the "rewrite everything in Rust" discussions is that the API guidelines explicitly recommend MIT/Apache to "maximize compatibility" (i.e., corporate friendliness, or developer and user exploitation): https://rust-lang.github.io/api-guidelines/necessities.html#...
Your project has been around for a while, but it's crazy to me that anyone still open sources anything under MIT (or similar) in the era of LLMs. Are they that confident in their job security? Are they already independently wealthy? Frankly, even a proper copyleft license is likely to just be ignored, or the code laundered through an LLM-assisted rewrite, by these companies. I prefer to just keep anything I can't sell all to myself rather than release it, at this point.
Which is why my position is GPL > MIT..
GPL makes them share or pay to relicense, since you own the copyright. with MIT, they don’t need to ask. MIT just benefits big corps. GPL better protects the open-source spirit, and paradoxically, the ownership of your work.
One other model that can also work well is to dual license as GPL + commercial, so people who want to publish their work can use the GPL license but you can potentially fund the project from license sales to closed source users using the commercial licensing option. I see this a fair bit in the audio community I work within.
Yes, this is why people should use free not open , and GPL is more free when you report to the entire community otherwise you are in the famous case from a story where an USAian was claiming "Amerika is the land of the free, we are free to own slaves"
This has changed everything. AGPL and GFDL from now on.
A number of other people contacted me with offers so it looks like there will be a happy end to the story :-)
If I was you, I would probably feel similar "you used my project, you probably want to hire me!"
But there's a logical fallacy there.
Your creation being useful to a person or company ≠ you being a fit to work with/for them full time.
Still, you deserved human eyes on the question from their side.
Andrew@gambit.us
~~Have you considered a copyleft licence like LGPL?~~ Answered in a sibling comment
I wouldn’t say that’s exactly the case. Not to denigrate the author or anything, but this library is a relatively minor part of what Anthropic is doing. It’s a UI manipulation library, specifically one that simulates keyboard and mouse inputs. While something like that is certainly necessary for the project in question, it’s not anything that couldn’t be rewritten in-house without too much difficulty, especially since they’re only using a subset of the platforms supported by the library.
I’m sure that working on this project has provided the author with expertise in this area that Anthropic could benefit from, and so in that sense it’s still a shame that they wouldn’t give him an interview, but that’s really all that can be said about it.
Google is, but not from AI.
This is my experience, at every group I’ve been in. Extending the date a bit is much easier than involving legal for approving a new library.
The group I’m in now sunk a substantial amount of money into a lawsuit for a library that accidentally made its way in, so are now “No LGPL.” with some crazy loops and approvals required if there’s really no alternative (very rare). From their perspective, it’s cheaper and safer to rewrite than not be in compliance, unintentionally or not.
Expecting a reward from open source software is a recipe for disappointment. I have contributed code to projects by companies that say I'm a mentally-ill household object. I'm not going to change the license of my open source projects to get back at them, because the collateral damage against entities that aren't evil simply isn't worth it. (It's also somewhat unlikely that the people working on NTP servers at Facebook wrote those policies, so...)