Context:
Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”) like the MIT license allow others to modify your software and release it under an unfree license. Copyleft licenses (like the Gnu General Public License) mandate that all derivative works remain free.
Andrew Tanenbaum developed MINIX, a modular operating system kernel. Intel went ahead and used it to build Management Engine, arguably one of the most widespread and invasive pieces of malware in the world, without even as much as telling him. There’s nothing Tanenbaum could do, since the MIT license allows this.
Erik Andersen is one of the developers of Busybox, a minimal implementation of that’s suited for embedded systems. Many companies tried to steal his code and distribute it with their unfree products, but since it’s protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.
Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did. But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.
I’m pretty sure that I got paid to work on GPL software, and I am pretty sure that said software would never have been developed if I wasn’t going to be paid for it.
What I don’t like is that the title minimizes the contributions of the MIT developers.
It’s not about the contribution. The MIT license still lets people study and share the code. It’s Free Software. The contribution is still there. The “problem” is that those contributions can be taken and exploited by large corporations.
The “problem” is that those contributions can be taken and exploited by large corporations.
You say exploited, I say used. Or on the other hand, you can argue that large FOSS projects like Linux distros are exploiting smaller projects they package, since they don’t share their donations…
IMO there is no issue if the wishes of the author are respected. The authors wishing for companies to use their code is just as valid as wishing to restrict it to FOSS.
There is no fundamental problem in working for free either. It’s second-order effects that we should worry about. Those who are “working for free” because they “just want have software being used by people” are diluting the value of the professionals and in the long term end up being as detrimental as professional designers or photographers who “work for exposure”.
If you ask me, the reason that is so hard to fund FOSS development is not because of bureaucracies, but because we are competing with privileged developers who are able to afford giving away their work for free.
I disagree. Sure, for some larger crucial projects, companies would pay. But for the majority of (small) projects, we would just handwrite an inferior solution from scratch rather than handle the bureaucracy. The result would be wasted additional effort, inferior features and more bugs.
And even if that was not the case and bureaucracy was not an issue, the question is how much better would the paid for “professional” FOSS software be compared to the free one. If it was so much better, that it justified the price, it would outcompete the free one anyway. And if it is not, then by definition it is better we use the free one.
