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carlosjobim

1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.

2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything.

3. Now I'm really angry! I should have gotten some money from them!

4. The government must force my neighbours to pay a salary to me!

5. Continue to work for free making open source code for giant corporations, so they can profit.

How about instead?:

1. Don't work for free or give away your code. Instead charge a fair price for people to use your code or software.

2. If your code is good, people and corporations pay you for it.

3. Now you're really happy! You got money for your labour.

4. The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary.

5. You can continue to work for money and make more money.

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I'm not agreeing with the OP proposal, but with LLMs today, no matter how you license your code and no matter what ToS or other prohibition you put on it, there does not seem to be any way to prevent LLMs from absorbing and using it to implement a replacement based on your code unless you choose to only do closed source code - there's no "opt out" for someone's source code, let alone an opt-in (again, unless we give up open source). (A very different situation from the AI companies themselves, where companies such as Anthropic make Claude Code closed source, and their ToS provide strict prohibitions on using it to work on something that could compete with them - can you imagine if Windows or MacOS's ToS prohibited people from using their OS to work on a competing OS, of if the VSCode ToS prohibited people from using VSCode to work on another editor?)

> The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary

Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly that's it includes levying taxes, so that's pretty much a meaningless characterization.

Let's put it in more concrete terms: if the US government passes a law to raise taxes to fund UBI, that probably wouldn't even make the last of the top 100 most oppressive things it's done to innocent people in the past year. If the strongest objection to this policy would be "I don't want to pay taxes to fund things for other people", it's in pretty good company.

> Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly

Yes, and that's why great care and respect should be applied to how the government uses the tax money which they have raised from oppression.

Paying somebody to work for free for a giant corporation is not a justified use of that money. Those corporations should pay for their labour themselves.

I can't think of any worse oppression than taxes, bare forced labour. When it's done to pay for an army to defend ourselves against enemies, for the justice system to protect all citizens, or for healthcare to save lives, then that's palatable. As well as for a myriad of other things. But to pay a programmer so that he can make server infrastructure so that Amazon doesn't have to pay him? That's not palatable.

>I can't think of any worse oppression than taxes, bare forced labour.

Really?

Not among the standard things which every government always does. Are you thinking about crimes against humanity and such?

For example, I am a very strong supporter of free speech. And many or most governments oppress free speech. But I still think that taxing labour is worse than suppressing free speech. I still think taxing labour is worse than oppressing the population with curfews, which is also something almost every government engaged in during the covid pandemic, and which I am against.

> I still think that taxing labour is worse than suppressing free speech

I guess we're just not going to agree on any of this then, because that's pretty much the opposite opinion of mine

I think you've missed the point again, it's more like this:

1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.

2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything.

3. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.

If you can't go to step 3, then you are doing it wrong and need to change step 1 from "giving it away for free" to something like "giving it away for free to the common people and at a price for corporate."

Which you could say "but that's not open source!" and you'd be right, which is exactly my point here: I don't think you want to do fully open source software, you want to do software and get paid for it somehow. If you do open source and get paid eventually and non binding, that's a nice little bonus, but it's not the main goal, never was with open source.

Agree completely, that's why I don't understand these people who demand payment for open source code after having given it away to the world.

Although I agree with your overall point, there is a middle ground here: (commercially) non-free but open source software.

I believe that's where the biggest disagreement ITT lies. There are currently good ways to do FOSS, proprietary closed-source and free closed-source software development. But if the OSS is worth charging for (commercial) use, devs are left with asking for donations, SaaS or "pay me to work on this issue/feature".

There arguably should be better mechanisms to reward OSS development, even if the largest part of an OSSndev's motivation is intrinsic.

I'm sorry, but in my mind, open source and commercial don't mix. What would a license for that even look like?

I'm not saying going commercial is bad, go for it. I'm just saying that when we are talking open source, we are not talking money, that's all. Money is just one of many things in life, sure it's important, but not by itself.

And everyone can get stuck with big corporation proprietary software that they have no idea how it runs or what it does under the hood

You can then make your own software. Nobody owes you free software.

You're not wrong, but I think it is increasingly harder (and perhaps socially taboo) to stay far away from proprietary software while still being part of a functioning society.

FOSS zealots love to dunk on capitalism, but unless you're prepared to go off-grid and live in the woods, and try to convince other people to be poor along with you, you might be very lonely.

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