How can it be wage theft when people voluntarily contribute to it? If you don't want others to use your software, don't write open source software.
sadly, my market fit was so bad that nobody ever looked at the license ::karma::
note: i have no problem with someone choosing not to use a product with a license they don't like (i do the same). it's the dissing of others that would use it that potentially crosses the line. i'm not even saying it *is* theft, only that there's a valid argument to that effect
There are 2 reasons freemium shared-source-style licenses are bad mouthed:
1. The products get advertised as open source; inviting people to look at it and contribute, the problem being that they are legal minefields, copyright or patents lawsuits that are waiting to happen. This was the biggest complaint against Microsoft's Shared Source initiative back in the day, and it's just as true now.
2. Some companies made their product popular via Open Source, like MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, took all the contributions and the free marketing, then switched; such instances being a bait-and-switch. Elasticsearch in particular is interesting because what they wanted was to withhold security patches from the OSS version, and Amazon got on the way by pushing PRs for patches.
All these cases are more glaring examples of value extraction, benefiting from unpaid labor.
There is nothing wrong with developing proprietary software, but you need to be honest about what you're selling.
- me: solo dev or small team
- you: microsoft, mongo, redis
i agree with both your examples being bad. for #2, they required one-sided CLAs while "open source". the alternative to signing the CLA was to fork, which is rarely well-received by the community, ie the same basic issue i raised
FLOSS is great in that it can facilitate collaboration and adoption, but at the expense of greatly limiting the business models. and even then context still matters - eg there's big difference between the kernel with 1000s of independent contributors, and mongo with one party holding CLA rights to the entire codebase (FLOSS in name only, i'd argue)
- for me, what's ultimately important is that people are free and that people that do good work are rewarded
- software licenses are just a tool to help us get there
- non-FLOSS might enable much of that same good while scaling to more business models and software
- they might ultimately be good for society, but getting the details right is hard
- i'm no longer actively working on my own stuff, but my attempt was: https://github.com/db4j/pupl
- note: if i was doing this today, the core limit would be much higherDoes that feel like theft to you?
To align the analogy more closely to the Wordpress situation:
I put out leaflets with cake recipes which I give everyone for free. And then BakingCorp comes along, takes my recipe and sells the actual cookies they baked with my recipe in their store.
The difference is that they aren’t just selling what I made and gave out for free, they are providing an actual service based on my contribution.
And also, Wordpress copies don’t run out, so even selling the cookies for $5 wouldn’t exactly be immoral, because I would still give out infinite free cookies. If Wordpress engine just sold copies of Wordpress, people would just get it for free.
A similar example: someone is moving out and puts a huge pile of furniture and assorted stuff on their front lawn with a sign that says "free to take", and some thrift store notices it and scoops it all, quickly. The giver is delighted, because he didn't want it to be slowly picked at piecemeal -- he just wanted it all gone. He doesn't care if the thrift store profited $10,000 off of sales.
Free software is something that benefits individual developers (like individual neighbors) and big businesses alike. Unlike cookies, if a company slurps it all up, it doesn't mean the kid next door doesn't get a cookie. It's digital, so you just make copies. Everyone om noms. Nobody has to feel guilty for taking a cookie, or a thousand cookies.
So I urge OSS developers: if you have some expectation of an ethos of giving back, either embed it into the license as a requirement, or a non-requirement footnote, or be up front of it in the project charter. Don't make assumptions that everyone interprets things the way you do, because it will inevitably be wrong as these OSS stories show time and time again.
I'm still just getting familiar with this WordPress situation and haven't watched the video yet, but in general for cases like these, it just makes the OSS author appear immature, maladjusted, like they're throwing a tantrum because somebody took them up on their offer of generosity, and now they have some sort of envy/jealousy over someone not living up to their end of the bargain that they never agreed to. It often seems backwards, dumb, reactionary, flailing, vindictive and so on, in ways that jeopardize the tantrum-maker's reputation. I don't know all the particulars of this case yet and while I have used WordPress.org (self-hosted and 3rd party host), I'm not deep into the ecosystem or a fanboy of anybody, so I'm reserving judgment but so far I am leaning towards this being yet another over emotional tantrum that was not well thought out or executed, that misses its target and is probably a PR problem.
So enough about how bad it looks. What should the target be?
OSS should be about generosity, voluntarism, and constructiveness, IMO. So the target should be about establishing societal norms about how much companies should be contributing, (to the extent it even makes sense). But you can't do what appears to be borderline extortion (according to people here) for $40 million dollars annually, with abuse of position (RSS feed), and then expect to be taken seriously as a good faith actor in what is a high-minded plea about having a more generous ethical society. It may be a way to draw attention to the topic and rekindle discussion, but it also starts the discussion on a sour note. There has got to be a better way to do this than for OSS authors to expend themselves like a grenade.
Does that not make you or your company a thief?
If your argument is you don't use JS/node then answer the same question about your languages package manager / standard library / compiler etc.
You will find these folks want two things; One to generously give away something of value for others to use, and two for nobody to make any money off the thing they gave away.
When people who feel that way find out their software is being sold or otherwise enriching a third party, they feel like their effort has been "stolen."
It's not just rare, it's important to know that in many arrangements it's simply impossible. Once any company takes outside equity financing, every quarter is only looked at in terms of growth, and anything a company says should always be viewed in terms of "will this allow us to grow revenue." I'm not saying it makes all companies "evil", and there are a good deal of "do good" things that happen to coincide with growing revenue. But you can bet that if any principal requires going against growing revenue, it will be jettisoned in short order.
The only way to avoid this is to not take outside funding, and even then there is no guarantee what happens when the business is sold (and when a business is sold, the acquires are nearly always going to look at ROI solely from monetary returns).
Yes it is. If you're hollowing out your value prop you better be returning at least some, if not a majority, of that value back to your users in the form of price drops or increased service levels. We have all been Stockholm Syndrome'd into believing otherwise as our favorite products and services institutionalize themselves into nothingness.
Ownership and management are mere stakeholders in the business, equal with (and no more) than customers and employees.
Yes, I came to realize the same thing about open source, it was created with lofty ideals, but the practice is just the opposite. Of course, most people will not agree with this conclusion since the whole industry will tell them otherwise.
As I see it, that's part of the OSI's revisionist history they want you to believe. The "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" phrase was coined by Eric Raymond and _named_ after Linus, without it having been "the point" of why Linus chose to release Linux with the license he used.
I don't know if it was intended at the time, but it's an idea that's widely been used to sell value-extracive behaviour to businesses. The worst example in my opinion being project that rug pull the users/contributors when the close the permissiveness of the license after having built their project/product taking full advantage of those "many eyes". Yes I'm looking at you Mongo and Hashicorp...
As cwebber says: https://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/
Linux is perhaps the posterchild of that, but Apache was just some people patching NCSA httpd because they needed new features. Perl was Larry Wall writing a better language for generating reports. PHP was Rasmus Lerdorf's project to make it easier to build his personal website and make it "dynamic" and able to connect to databases. The vast majority of the commands and utilities in your Linux distribution were written by the GNU project and many of those by Stallmann himself.
Out of those (and many other examples most greybeards here could mention), probably only GNU/Stallmann were motivated by "lofty ideals", pretty much everyone else was doing what was called "scratching their own itch". The needed features or software that didn't exist, so they wrote it.
License-wise, Apache could only exist because NCSA httpd allowed it - it was explicitly released into the public domain (and later GPL-ed I think?). Perl was dual licensed, you could choose GPL or Perl's own "Artistic License" which was much more free, allowing you to sell stuff incorporating it so long as you still credited the original authors. Linux was originally licensed with something Linus wrote without lawyering up, which was basically "the source code must remain available" and "no money can change hands" because he was annoyed at having had to pay for Minix, but shortly after he changed his mind abut the money aspect, and chose to use GPL instead.
While from my perspective, Stallmann was the "lofty ideals" guy, and pretty much everyone else were pragmatists who were "just getting shit done", and sharing stuff so other people could get shit done better too.
It was Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens who hijacked the already in-use term "open source", and claimed to have invented it and went on to build a business-friendly brand and "industry" around it - and as you say those "industry people" will _always_ jump in with their revisionist history to "correct" you when you say otherwise.
So to me, OSI-defined "open source" really can be wage theft. It isn't always, but it's intentionally set up so it can be. (Probably not originally with malicious intent, I suspect back then many of the people involved were perfectly happy with the reputational payoff in lieu of monetary reward.) The existence of "Open Source Companies" like Mongo, Elastic, Hashicorp et al, and BSL-style licenses - seem to me to be closer in spirit to Linus's original license than anything the OSI approves. And I feel they are the result of a new (relative to the '90s) trend of people writing open source software for the sake to writing the software, instead of the old-school approach of people writing software to get their actual jobs done better or to scratch their own itch. Linus and Larry and Rasmus and Brian didn't write/release their software so they could become Founder/CEO of Linux PTY LTD or Perl Corp or PHP Inc or Apache GmbH. They did it because they wanted an OS they didn't have to pay for, or a better way to generate reports, or a better way to make websites, or a better way to serve the HotWired website.
Good you didn't write, or else I may have read it for free and did a wage theft.
There are many people who spend hundreds or thousands (or more) sticking up outrageous displays for halloween or xmas lights in their front yard, expecting no more payoff than watching people be delighted as they pass by. That's a great and admirable motivation. Even if it's largely done just to show Bob down the street how lame he is and how you can gather a bigger crowd than him - that's less great but still OK in my opinion.
I admit that most of those displays are only able to be paid for because the homeowner is getting that $5k/week at their big tech job or their finance job or whatever. Same as how Burningman's "free" art mostly couldn't exist without Bay Area tech millionaires funding it as they cosplay being an Artist.
As I mentioned to another commenter, FOSS licenses take away (steal) a right that creators have to arbitrate giving away their work. You can write software, keep it licensed, and give 'no cost' licenses to people who just want to use it for their fun stuff, but when someone wants to use it in a product, and it is code they would have had to hire someone to write otherwise, I think it is more reasonable for them to pay the creator the equivalent cost (at least). So if something would take a week to write, what is 40 hrs of wages you would accept to write that code? Let's say its $100/hr that is $4,000. So for a one time payment of $4,000 you can license your code for them to use in their commercial product which will make them, presumably, much much more than $4,000 over its lifetime. But with FOSS licenses, you can't do that. You can sue them (it's expensive) and after suing them the only compensation you can expect is that they publish their source code? Now the FOSS license has stolen not only your creative work, but your time you could have used to write more software, and the monetary expense of hiring lawyers. As a result FOSS authors don't have a lot to gain by suing scofflaws, the scofflaws know that and so they steal the value safe in the knowledge that it will be unlikely to cost them anything.
Over the years, I've watched them through a progression of management changes move from value of service to value extraction. Chipping away at costs while holding the price constant or raising it and extracting the difference for themselves. This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does, however I find the integrity around value extraction varies tremendously. From zero integrity Mackenzie type MBAs to high(er) integrity owner operators.
It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad.