Re:Zed Shaw: Why I (A/L)GPL
by thras on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @02:44PM
(#704330)
Zed's not special. People who write code should be rewarded for their work: "the labourer is worthy of his hire," after all. This is why BSD-style licenses in a world where multimillion-dollar companies make a killing off of the code you write don't make sense for the individual developer -- especially when you're a star contributor.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Not everybody who uses Mongrel is a multimillion-dollar company.
Maybe if it wasn't free, nobody would be using Rails and Mongrel - everybody would be on C# and Mono. There is always competition, so "should be rewarded" is really determined by the market. You can't just work on anything and then demand money for it.
Mongrel that costs money would be a different product from Mongrel that is free.
Not everybody who uses Mongrel is a multimillion-dollar company.
Yet they can afford to hire employees who know how to deploy Mongrel and Rails. Programmers and sys-admins aren't cheap, neither are executives, marketers, salespeople, etc. Even if you're running a tiny Web startup, you should be able to afford small donations.
edit: You can treat the donation as a "license fee" if that makes the accounting easier to deal with