And when the opensource maintainer changes the license to adapt to the economic situation, the OSIsts rush in to tell the maintainer how evil they are.
I personally think some types of openly developed software projects should have a strict non-commercial license: if companies aren’t willing to contribute back to the source IMO they shouldn’t be granted permission to freeload & have volunteers fix issues their paying customers run into
Donations are possibly a bit of an exception here - there are quite a few companies that still do this, albeit growing slimmer by the day.
Another big problem IMO is the subset of users that start attacking maintainers and volunteers because their “free app stopped working” etc. I see that a lot, mostly in the arduino community, but especially egregiously on the Zabbix project - I imagine a lot of those users are companies who aren’t even paying/donating to the project
if companies aren’t willing to contribute back to the source IMO they shouldn’t be granted permission to freeload & have volunteers fix issues their paying customers run into
I agree with this although it does make me wonder what the world would look like if things had been that way since the beginning. Would the current opensource environment exist? Regardless, the times are different now and opensource is becoming more and more recognized, companies are massively freeloading and a few privileged developers get to make money on their opensource projects.
From my understanding, companies that use open software in paid products are charging for their services and support and not the software itself. Correct me if I’m wrong, as I may well be. I just know that’s how companies like Elastic and what not get away with primarily using OSS in their products.
It’s an explicit “opt-out” by the OP, such that their content cannot (legally) be used to train LLMs or such (Chat GPT, Github Copilot, etc)
Well, that’s what I assumed until i read the license terms. It doesn’t explicitly mention AI or LLMs, but it does say
You may not use the material for commercial purposes
Which i assume has the same limitations for AI training, for commercial AI
(I am not a lawyer)
Also not a lawyer, but my understanding has always been that a license grants permissions, not limits them. No license means no permissions granted. Most sites have terms that you agree to (by posting to the site) that tell you what they may do with your content, and I don’t think a license you tack onto it can change that (though it can grant permission to others).
As for scrapers and such, they were never granted any permissions to use anything. They just don’t care. A license is also unlikely to change that.
I think licenses on posts are pointless and tacky, personally, but I could be missing something.
