Isn’t that why FOSS survives as a model and is encouraged so much, though, so there is something to enclose and charge bullshit fees for once you fork it?
It’s particularly popular for startups to use to bootstrap their tech company and build cred shortly before they reach the “we have to actually turn a profit” phase, at which point the bean counters try to squeeze every bit for a nickel. Once they have marketshare, they say, “we are helping the competition by releasing this!” and abandon the things they actively maintain.
There is also a direct benefit for open sourcing: you can get other people to debug and improve your software for free. They go the enclosure direction once they want to squeeze their customers for more money, e.g. closing the source code and charging $x per use of the software to their service clients.
Once they’re a monopoly, companies can swing back to the open source direction because they have no competitors to worry about and can just get free dev work and good will out of it.
Microsoft loves this. They bought GitHub for a reason
My best guess about their purchase is that they wanted to do a bunch of copyright infringement of code hosted on GitHub to train their language models. Are you thinking there’s also a motivation to get free dev work another way, too?
So, don’t mistake this as me telling you you’re totally wrong, because you definitely do have a point and it gets under my skin too (that’s why I believe licenses like AGPL and, dare I say, SSPL should be used), but many of these companies actively contribute back to the open source software they’re using.
and are hardly the only companies using FOSS; everyone from non profits to miliary systems use it. this meme doesn’t really work when you take the whole picture into account.
Regardless of how you slice it, foss devs don’t get fairly compensated for their work.
Closed licenses are arguably better for certain left projects, particularly self-contained ones. You can use bourgeois legal nonsense to stop corpos from using your work.
I’ve seen anti-war people write open source code that ended up getting used to help fly war drones.
Closed licenses are arguably better for certain left projects
What about licenses that restrict the software from being used in a certain way? I think I’ve heard of at least one open-source license that disallows the software from being used in the military industry.
I like the idea a lot but my understanding is that they’re unenforceable. I’d go with one of those if I thought they worked, though.
