People are a blend of attitudes with regard to this. You will encounter many people who are incensed that the software they wrote and gave away for free is being sold as part of a product and making someone else lots of money.

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."

try releasing something under an open-but-not-open-source license as a solo developer or small team. there's a lot of established developers (presumably earning high salaries) that will very vocally badmouth the license choice. i'd seen this happen over and over again eg here, and when i've asked other developers why they open sourced their products they've said the same, and it was one of my concerns when i approached launch

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

You're being disingenuous.

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

one of us is being disingenuous, but i don't believe it's me (username on point ;)

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 higher

My thoughts were posted in Mastodon: https://chaos.social/@ChuckMcManis/112429390169387783 but the TL;DR is that writing code adds value, and that value will be realized by people who take it for free, even if you don't want them to. From my perspective (not saying its the right one, just one that I've reasoned to) that is theft.

That’s about as much theft as me baking cookies, putting them on the street with a sign „free to take“ and people eating them is theft. Who would expect other people to add cookies and call everyone else thieves? You open source license doesn’t say „you can use it if you contribute“, it says „everyone can use it (as long as they attribute or fulfill some other requirement). How is that theft? You can’t be a thieve if you take something someone else is handing out for free voluntarily.

To use your metaphor, let's say you baked a batch of cookies and put them on the street with "free to take", and then later when you noticed they were all gone and went to your local coffee shop, in their case it had "fresh baked cookies $5 each" and you saw that it was the same cookies you had put out earlier.

Does that feel like theft to you?

That’s not exactly what’s happening though, because they aren’t selling Wordpress, they are selling Wordpress hosting.

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.

The cookie example has implied social expectations with the intent of doing nice for individuals of the community.

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.

Counterpoint for this. How may of the packages in your node_modules folder have you contributed even an issue to, never mind a patch? Do you even know what packages are in there?

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.

Agreed.