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pocksuppetyesterday at 5:52 PM7 repliesview on HN

In particular, if you license it MIT, and it's useful, expect Amazon to make a fork, not give you the source code, and each tens of millions of dollars from it while you don't get a cent.

There's writing code for charity, and then there's this. Charity wasn't meant to include hyper-corporations.


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nananana9yesterday at 7:01 PM

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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atlsyesterday at 6:17 PM

AGPLv3 attempts to solve this problem, by forcing SaaS providers to open-source their modifications.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

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frizlabyesterday at 8:19 PM

And whatever license you use, expect it to be crawled by AI, and have AI provider make millions on it.

Andrexyesterday at 6:02 PM

Maybe Stallman had something of a point...

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smegger001yesterday at 9:22 PM

> if you license it MIT, and it's useful, expect Amazon to make a fork, not give you the source code,

thats why the gpl family of license exist.

MIT/BSD family licenses are do whatever you want with this,

if you want to make money off of you pet opensource project I recommend multi-license it with a copyleft with copyright assignment required for contributions and offer other licenses with a fee.

mkehrtyesterday at 6:24 PM

I don't understand your point? If you write code with an MIT license, this is what you would expect.

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gowldyesterday at 6:20 PM

So? I am not about to create AWS. I'm glad people can use my free software on their own machines, on rented servers, or hosted by an expert.

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