Even so, if someone was seeking fame and fortune through OSS (a somewhat foolish mission, but whatever), I would still probably recommend they release their software with a permissive license as companies are far more willing to get on board with MIT/Apache licensed software. I mean just look at the incredible amount of hate Facebook got for having the gall to offer a free patent grant with gasp a condition that you not sue them.
The best way to personally profit from OSS is very oblique. Assuming you make a kind of software useful to businesses like Redis (not end user software), it can look very good on a resume, can help you land some speaking gigs, maybe a book deal, and so on. If you build up your reputation like that, it should be possible to land a cushy, high paying job at a tech company somewhere or high paying support consulting.
Later, after many years, the developer sees other companies making a lot of money using their OSS project but they themselves are basically broke; they're forced to work for other companies during the day and they still need to spend nights and weekends to maintain their OSS project on the side.
I'm in this situation right now but actually I'm very happy that companies are making money on top of my OSS project; I'm 100% certain that these companies would not have used my project if it wasn't MIT open source licensed.
Most companies who used my project had alternatives in the form of other OSS projects or third party services so they put a lot of trust in me and my project at the beginning. People underestimate how hard it is to compete at the beginning... Even if you're giving away product for free; it's really hard.
Just try to launch an OSS project on GitHub and try to get it to 1000 stars; I see lots of people try all the time but almost none of them make it.
Nope, instead they'd have hired you or a programmer like you — or figured out a way to make money from GPLed code.
The trouble with the MIT & BSD licenses is that they encourage corporations to freeload. That's why Google, Facebook, Amazon & Apple love them so much.
The great thing about the GPL is that it levels the playing field. We all get to share in a software commons.
The problem is that if tou want to make an impact in your industry, you need big companies to be using your project; to achieve this, you need to distribut your project under a license that they like.
They don't, though. They can simply stop working on it and say "pay me if you want updates from me."
It simply made the patent grant conditional on not suing them for patent infringement. i.e. if you want Facebook to pay royalties on your patent, you would have to pay royalties on their patents. If that’s not reciprocal, what the hell is?
- If you, as the licensee, sue Facebook on /any/ of their patents (not just on the ones that are subject to the patent grant), the license terminates immediately. - On the other hand, if Facebook, as the licensor, is only promising not to sue based on the /specific/ granted patents.
The "any" vs "specific" part is what people where annoyed about.
I suspect it's a lot easier to say "yes" to these questions when you're just starting out (and thus picking a license) than when you see a bunch of other co's profiting signficantly more than you are.
This seems to be an attempt to fix that mistake (I wonder if the Redis creators would call their license choice a mistake?). Like a train gone off the rails, there are probably only messy solutions that no one is super happy about at this point.