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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

If you are trying to monetize your software, the biggest factor is whether or not your customer trusts you.

MIT and source out on GitHub is the easiest way to build trust. You will find that some people simply "steal" your work in this arrangement, but much like with movie piracy I don't think they ever intended to compensate you or anyone else.

So, we wind up alienating all potential customers because we are so worried about preventing ideological crime.

People will steal your ideas and they will get away with it. The more you react to this in first order terms, the more it will destroy you.

Most money in software is made with support contracts, not the initial sale.

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After many years of thinking about this, I have arrived in the exact same place. I think the SQLite team learned this in the early days, and have done very well for themselves, giving away all of their source code for the product itself, free of charge, and then having folks pay for consulting and enhancements, which they remain particularly strong at because of their closed, comprehensive regression test suite.

>MIT and source out on GitHub is the easiest way to build trust. You will find that some people simply "steal" your work in this arrangement, but much like with movie piracy I don't think they ever intended to compensate you or anyone else.

You've chosen the license which allows "stealing", why did you do that if you don't like that? Nobody forced you to do that, I hope.

How can I trust the person who published their code with the strict legal terms, but becomes sad when other people use their code exactly as the author said it could be used?

Every once in a while I read discussions about licenses, and puzzled every time why the author of the software chooses free license when the freedom of copying and distribution is seem to them as pirating. If the license is not suitable for you, why choose it?!

Licenses are about legal possibilities. You're looking for social/moral terms instead if I understood you correctly (something like CoC).

How does MIT build any more trust than a copyleft licence like AGPL? At the very least AGPL stops people "stealing" your work without contributing back their changes?

AGPL does not do anything to force people to contribute their changes back. They have to make the changes available, however that's very different from actually contributing back. It is not hard to make a low quality contribution that the upstream would for very good reason refuse even though it 'works'.

The poster child for this is chromium which is GPL because it has clear and obvious roots in the old KHTML code of 20 some years ago. In theory you can contribute to Google movement and I suppose some people do but realistically Google controls it completely and they will do whatever they want. even though the source is available it is effectively not a contribution back.

By "contribute back" I was referring more generally to the commons.

The chrome example actually proves my point, the KDE project, or anyone for that matter, can take the changes Google made to their code. If KHTML was MIT it's likely that wouldn't be the case

Practically though, there is no difference. The KDE project has lost control over the web browser, even though they started it. It's an all or nothing. They can take all of chrome or they can take nothing. There is no in between. If KDE and Google disagree on the direction of the web browser, Google wins. There is no control. There's no advantage to open source, other than it's free. It may as well be a closed source project for all the good it does.

You can't be stealing what is given away for free. Developers that choose copileft license want to see al changes shared under the same license. Developers that choose permissive want their code to be of use to as many developers as possible for whatever they want to use it for.

Almost no business relationships builds trust based on source code. It's based on whether you deliver what the other side wants.

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