Copyleft and community licenses are not without merit, but they are a dead end

Re:Copyleft and community licenses are not without merit, bu... by heyjudy on Friday December 21, 2018 @09:40PM (#18738593)

The challenges are:

0. Megacorps exploiting FOSS and not volunteering enough (a) money or (b) code back overall.

1. The limitations brought on everyone who's not a megacorp by authors trying to acheive 0a &| 0b.

As such, there are some difficult &| uncool ways around this:

i. A name-and-shame web app that everyone know about that impacts a company's sales and reputation if it cheats FOSS.

ii. Going micropayment commercial with intrusive license auditing to verify compliance.

iii. Begging harder from big companies that are known to abuse FOSS.

PS: Before OSS was popular, shareware/freeware with code hidden like it was some sort of arcane secret magic much as scientists did before the modern era.

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Re:Copyleft and community licenses are not without merit, bu... by SpicyLemonZest on Friday December 21, 2018 @10:08PM (#18738684)

But (0) is a completely neutral thing for most members of a FOSS community. Amazon starting up a new service won't stop me from merging code or change my (generally zero) income. It only hurts you if you're another company who also wants to exploit the software for profit.

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