In particular, if you license it MIT, and it's useful, expect Amazon to make a fork, not give you the source code, and each tens of millions of dollars from it while you don't get a cent.

There's writing code for charity, and then there's this. Charity wasn't meant to include hyper-corporations.

If you want evil megacorps to give you money when they use your thing, maybe say "if you're an evil megacorp you have to give me money when you use my thing" in the license?

If your license reads "hey, you can use this however you want, no matter who you are, and don't have to give me money", people will use it however they want, no matter who they are, and won't give you money.

Unfortunately, for decades, free software fanatics have bullied inexperienced and eager programmers, who don't know any better into believing that an actual sustainable development model that respects their work is evil and that we should all work for free and beg for donations.

The idea that software that is free NEEDS to be open source because "I don't want something running on my computer" but then will go and download the precompiled binary hurts my head alot

> Unfortunately, for decades, free software fanatics have bullied inexperienced and eager programmers, who don't know any better into believing that an actual sustainable development model that respects their work is evil and that we should all work for free and beg for donations.

Silicon Valley hype monsters have done this, sure. And so have too many open source software advocates. But all the free software advocates I've read and listened to over the years have criticized MIT- and BSD-style permissive licenses for permitting exactly the freeloading you describe.

I agree that MIT may not be the best licence here in such a use case scenario. The question is why corporations think they can be leeches though - and the bigger, the more of a leech they are on the ecosystem. That's just not right.

> The question is why corporations think they can be leeches though

Because they can, they don't just think they do. Everything about the framework they operate in allows or even encourages them to do it.

> That's just not right.

As a matter of morality, you're right. This is something very few people or corporations concern themselves with just as soon as there's real money to be made by not concerning themselves with this.

> The question is why corporations think they can be leeches though

because they can be. They do not think they can be leeches, they know they can be leeches.

> That's just not right

I somewhat agree with you, but they do actually have permission to do it.

IMHO, this is the wrong way of looking at it. You can choose any license you like. Choose the right license, and that should be the end of the discussion.

Because the copyright owners give them explicit approval to leech by using those licenses.

With the cloud, GPL won’t protect you either

AGPLv3 largely does, if you can and do enforce it in some way when breaches happen.

AGPL partially works. Can you think of any better terms? SSPL was a flop.

What if they simply use the code and don't give you the $$$? Are you going to sue them?

> free software fanatics have bullied and eager programmers

We must travel in different circles. I've been around a while, and I've never seen _any individual_ bullied for keeping their code closed source.

That said, I have an extreme bias toward only using open source code, for practical reasons, and I'm open about that.

> I have an extreme bias toward only using open source code

If you have eyes closed how would you notice?

Exactly. (A)GPL tried to balance this, in ways that still partially work. MIT software just throws its hands up and donates itself to evil megacorps in anger. If you believe in charity for ordinary people but not for evil megacorps, you'll put something in the license that evil megacorps don't like, or that forces them to work for the benefit of everyone by releasing their work that builds on yours.

You can't write "Amazon may not use this" and still be free as in freedom, but terms that force sharing seem to work.

AGPLv3 attempts to solve this problem, by forcing SaaS providers to open-source their modifications.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

Depends on the needs of the licensor. AGPLv3 solves the problem of other players taking the code, improving it privately, and not sharing those improvements. But AGPLv3 is not a silver bullet for people who write Open Source code and pretend to make a living from it. "Open Source is not a business plan".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095581

And whatever license you use, expect it to be crawled by AI, and have AI provider make millions on it.

Maybe Stallman had something of a point...

Nope. Stallman helped create this mess.

Free software underpins all the infrastructure of surveillance capitalism.

It underpins all software, and has wormed its way into Windows. I'm not sure this is as good a point as you think.

Stallman is always right, and HN always downvotes it.

He's a terrible communicator, and sort of repellent in person. Contrast someone like Cory Doctorow who manages to be right about stuff and actually communicate effectively.

I don't really share that point. If the message is correct, why would the other things matter? Due to "social norms"? It is a similar problem with Code of Conducts. In general I don't care about CoCs. That does not mean I act in the opposite manner either - I just don't feel the need for CoCs.

> why would the other things matter

Because on the other end of the argument is an audience of human beings, not a theorem solver. Pretending that delivery does NOT matter, or even shouldn't matter, is out of touch with reality.

because brilliant jerk is not acceptable

Publicly defending pedophilia arguably isn't “right”, but if you restrict Stallman's positions to software licensing, then I'd agree with you.

I keep hearing this.

Please quote Stallman's quote where he defends pedophilia.

Not a quote of someone else saying that Stallman defends pedofilhia, but a quote by Stallman himself.

He was wrong about refusing to make gcc more modular by fear that it would be used to insert proprietary plugins, which is why llvm is behind every new language or dev tool now and gcc is only relevant because the kernel still depends on it (for now).

His opinions on software have been largely out of touch for the past 20 years. People might yearn for his ideals, but it's just not the world we live in.

> His opinions on software have been largely out of touch for the past 20 years

I said “software licensing”, you're talking about “software”.

The only instance in which he's ever engaged in "publicly defending pedophilia" was in remarks he made 20 years ago about the innocuity of "voluntary" sex with minors. He has since retracted those statements and publicly espoused a different and more informed opinion. There's certainly a large amount of very low-quality journalism engaging in bad-faith interpretations of things he's said in other contexts, though these aren't serious characterizations, only hallucinations manufactured by professional scheisters to fulfill unspoken agendas. At this point dredging it up and holding it against him in-perpetuity is a bit wrongheaded.

Of course restrict it to his opinions on software licensing. I think that is the sort of thing people mean when they say he was right.

Lots of people made similar claims. Most notably The National Council for Civil Liberties (now called Liberty), the UK's leading civil/human rights organisation made submissions to parliament claiming that sex with minors was not always harmful, had a pro-paedo organisation as an affiliate and give them a representative on the gay rights subcommittee: https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/scotl... The people involved were unaffected, some reaching fairly high political permissions.

A lot of other people whose works are respected have actually had sex with minors. Eric Gill and Oscar Wilde for example.

None of that makes Stallman's opinions defensible in my opinion. On the other hand I am happy to ignore his opinions on that topic and still value his opinions on other things.

The entire point is of my post is that it's no longer his opinion.

> Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that.

https://stallman.org/archives/2019-sep-dec.html#14_September...

Both your point and my point are true.

Obviously I am glad he has abandoned his opinions.

I do think it is terrible that the politicians, activists, teachers etc. who held such opinions in the past did not suffer severe career consequences even if they subsequently changed their opinions. I think they cannot be trusted in those areas. However, Stallman is not in such an area.

Tell that to my spouse who, at age 14, was given his contact card by him directly.

I'm not following - are you implying that handing a contact card to someone is a sexual pass? Or is it only considered sexual when the recipient is underage?

I wish at 14 I had people of such integrity around me.

Wow, I'd be thrilled if I met stallman and got his contact card at age 14!

I don't understand your point? If you write code with an MIT license, this is what you would expect.

Totally agreed.

I find it strange that people use the MIT licence and then complain "big greedy corporation did not contribute back anything". Though I also agree that this leeching approach by corporations is a problem to the ecosystem. MIT just is not the right licence to fight that.

People are conditioned not to think about it.

So? I am not about to create AWS. I'm glad people can use my free software on their own machines, on rented servers, or hosted by an expert.

AWS can profit more from it than smaller organizations or individuals, making it even more untouchable by potential competition.

A market with little competition costs you too in the long term.

Are you still glad when AWS starts selling you software as a service and make hundreds of millions and you get nothing?

Of course, because I get the software as a service that I paid for. If I wasn't glad, I wouldn't buy it.,

My meaning clearly got lost when I droppen an r. Will you still be happy when they sell youR software, that is, the software you wrote, and make a lot of money while you get nothing.

> if you license it MIT, and it's useful, expect Amazon to make a fork, not give you the source code,

thats why the gpl family of license exist.

MIT/BSD family licenses are do whatever you want with this,

if you want to make money off of you pet opensource project I recommend multi-license it with a copyleft with copyright assignment required for contributions and offer other licenses with a fee.

There is even a software "law" related to this: https://www.hyrumslaw.com/

" With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody. "