There has been a lot of talk about companies and individuals adopting licenses that aren’t OSI opensource to protect themselves from mega-corp leechers. Developers have also been condemned who put donation notices in the command-line or during package installation. Projects with opensource cores and paid extensions have also been targets of vitriol.

So, let’s say we wanted to make it possible for the majority of developers to work on software that strictly follows the definition of opensource, which models would be acceptable to make enough money to work on those projects full-time?

  • jlow (he/him)@beehaw.org
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    6 months ago

    Yeah, very good points. A while ago there was talk about some kind of foundation where maintainers could bill their hours and people and big tech companies could donate. Not sure if / how that would work …

    During the xz incident I also talked about this on Mastodon and someone suggested that big tech could just employ maintainers without them having to do anything for the company directly, just work on the project / library the company uses. Again not everybody would want to do that …

    I’m afraid there’s no easy one-fits-all solution here.

    • onlinepersona@programming.devOP
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      6 months ago

      Do you believe breaking away from the strict OSI opensource definition would be acceptable? It could allow things like:

      • royalties for commercial instances
      • service fees for commercial instances
      • no commercial use

      not all at one of course

      Anti Commercial-AI license