This is why I don’t agree with the GPL. It’s perfect in every way, except for the allowance to utilize the licensed work or derivatives thereof for monetary gain. Fuck that shit. You got it for free, you give it away for free.
It only takes one paying customer to take the published FOSS code from the commercial software and re-distribute it for everyone to benefit from the commercial modifications made to it. That’s the point, a commercial use of the software can not make the source proprietary.
This is what Redhat recently found out when they tried to hide their RHEL source behind a paywall. Attempting to tie the hands of their customers with an additional license agreement forbidding distribution of the source is a violation of the GPL.
So wait, you’re saying that anything created or developed using opens source software should be given away for free?
Wouldn’t that basically kill all projects.
Part of the reason why I know Linux and open source software is because i can use it at my job and make money. If that isn’t allowed then i am basically forced to use Windows along with the rest of the world.
Not only that but a huge portion of linux code is contributes by people getting paid by these large companies.
Linux would be reduced to some weird hobby project no one knows about or really cares about and we would be all stuck on Windows or some other proprietary OS.
Linux definitely wouldn’t be stranded without corporate input. A.) A large portion of Linux has been written by volunteers, not employees of a corporation giving back to the project, and B.) The majority of the time these corporate contributions are things like drivers for their own closed source hardware to work with Linux. I’ve only ever contributed to open source voluntarily, with the exception of three pull requests that were written so that, surprise surprise, our corporate shit could work with the open source shit. I’m not saying there wouldn’t be disruptions if we axed all that code, just that it wouldn’t be the project-ending amount you suggested.
