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by sergiotapia·10mo ago·view on hn ↗
I think it's totally normal and correct to have a license where a company like Amazon can't come in, steal the volunteer work of hundreds of developers, slap their logo on it and sell it.

I'm sure open source purists do not like this, but the world is the 1980 anymore. It's been 45 years. Things need to adapt. Open source needs to adapt.

2 comments
Yeah we really need to normalize licenses that protect against that. Even GPL doesn’t because everything is SaaS now and companies will just isolate the GPL code to one micro service. AGPL might prevent this but there aren’t a lot of cases that have been litigated. And if they don’t modify the source then then it doesn’t do much IIRC.

But “open source” was in control of big business from the start. The open source consortium was a late 90s attempt to co-opt the free software movement and turn it into something business friendly.

Tim O’Reilly funded it to start and now it’s funded by big tech companies.

> I think it's totally normal and correct to have a license where a company like Amazon can't come in, steal the volunteer work of hundreds of developers, slap their logo on it and sell it.

Why shouldn't this to apply to every company - including the one ostensibly shepherding the open source project? I would argue that employing a bunch of core developers doing 10% of the work doesn't entitle you to be the sole entity to monetize the work of the other 90% of the community, but I don't think anyone has come up with a proper license to defend against that yet.

Open source indeed needs to adapt, but I don't think the source-available or open-core models we are seeing these days is the right solution. If you really want to prevent third-party entities to profit off your work you'd need to go for something like the AGPL, but that is for obvious reasons not exactly a popular choice.

> Why shouldn't this to apply to every company - including the one ostensibly shepherding the open source project?

Because that's simply not how copyrights and trademarks work. The licensor doesn't need to abide by the terms of the license, by definition. The purpose of a license is to grant rights from the licensor to the licensee.

> employing a bunch of core developers doing 10% of the work doesn't entitle you to be the sole entity to monetize the work of the other 90% of the community

Very few of these cases are 10% company / 90% community. If anything, it's usually the other way around. Not to mention the huge amount of time spent on code review and ongoing maintenance of third-party contributions.

> I don't think anyone has come up with a proper license to defend against that yet.

That wouldn't really make sense; a software license isn't going to remove rights from the licensor. More realistic solutions are things like intentionally not having a CLA (effectively preventing the project creator from relicensing) and/or reassigning copyright and trademarks to a foundation.