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Comment by nananana9 | Hacker News Reader

If you want evil megacorps to give you money when they use your thing, maybe say "if you're an evil megacorp you have to give me money when you use my thing" in the license?

If your license reads "hey, you can use this however you want, no matter who you are, and don't have to give me money", people will use it however they want, no matter who they are, and won't give you money.

Unfortunately, for decades, free software fanatics have bullied inexperienced and eager programmers, who don't know any better into believing that an actual sustainable development model that respects their work is evil and that we should all work for free and beg for donations.

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Exactly. (A)GPL tried to balance this, in ways that still partially work. MIT software just throws its hands up and donates itself to evil megacorps in anger. If you believe in charity for ordinary people but not for evil megacorps, you'll put something in the license that evil megacorps don't like, or that forces them to work for the benefit of everyone by releasing their work that builds on yours.

You can't write "Amazon may not use this" and still be free as in freedom, but terms that force sharing seem to work.

> free software fanatics have bullied and eager programmers

We must travel in different circles. I've been around a while, and I've never seen _any individual_ bullied for keeping their code closed source.

That said, I have an extreme bias toward only using open source code, for practical reasons, and I'm open about that.

> I have an extreme bias toward only using open source code

If you have eyes closed how would you notice?

> Unfortunately, for decades, free software fanatics have bullied inexperienced and eager programmers, who don't know any better into believing that an actual sustainable development model that respects their work is evil and that we should all work for free and beg for donations.

Silicon Valley hype monsters have done this, sure. And so have too many open source software advocates. But all the free software advocates I've read and listened to over the years have criticized MIT- and BSD-style permissive licenses for permitting exactly the freeloading you describe.

What if they simply use the code and don't give you the $$$? Are you going to sue them?

I agree that MIT may not be the best licence here in such a use case scenario. The question is why corporations think they can be leeches though - and the bigger, the more of a leech they are on the ecosystem. That's just not right.

> The question is why corporations think they can be leeches though

because they can be. They do not think they can be leeches, they know they can be leeches.

> That's just not right

I somewhat agree with you, but they do actually have permission to do it.

IMHO, this is the wrong way of looking at it. You can choose any license you like. Choose the right license, and that should be the end of the discussion.

> The question is why corporations think they can be leeches though

Because they can, they don't just think they do. Everything about the framework they operate in allows or even encourages them to do it.

> That's just not right.

As a matter of morality, you're right. This is something very few people or corporations concern themselves with just as soon as there's real money to be made by not concerning themselves with this.

Because the copyright owners give them explicit approval to leech by using those licenses.

The idea that software that is free NEEDS to be open source because "I don't want something running on my computer" but then will go and download the precompiled binary hurts my head alot

With the cloud, GPL won’t protect you either

AGPLv3 largely does, if you can and do enforce it in some way when breaches happen.

AGPL partially works. Can you think of any better terms? SSPL was a flop.

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