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My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]

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931 points sohzm | 4 comments | 04 Jul 25 02:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.738s | source
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tombert ◴[04 Jul 25 03:25 UTC] No.44460923[source]▶
Things like this are why I have become disillusioned with Open Source, and why latest projects have been closed source. The GPL is a good enough idea but it is basically impossible for anyone to realistically enforce. If a corporation is selling an optimized binary, then it can be almost impossible to prove that there was any violation of the GPL without viewing the source.
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rfl890 ◴[04 Jul 25 03:32 UTC] No.44460940[source]▶
Well, if you're writing open source because you want to write open source, then none of this matters. If you are worried about corporations stealing your work, that should drive you away from OSS. OSS should stay "hobbyist" for the individual developer.
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tombert ◴[04 Jul 25 03:41 UTC] No.44460972[source]▶
Sure but it sort of devalues labor.

If a corporation is stealing your OSS code (and violating a license) then that implies that they think your code has value, they might have paid a person to write that code but instead some hobbyist built it for free and a corporation steals it.

A few months ago, I made a pull request to LMAX Disruptor, which was merged. I was initially excited because even if my PR was simple it’s still a big project that I contributed to. But after a few minutes it occurred to me that I just did free labor for a for-profit trading company. If they merged in my code then must have thought it had some value, and I decided to dedicate my time to saving this multi million dollar company some money.

My PR there was pretty simple and only took me like 30 minutes (if that), so I am not going to cry too hard over this, but it’s just something that made me realize that if a company is going to use my work, they should pay me. I don’t think it’s wrong or weird to want to be compensated for my labor.

I am still a hobbyist. Turns out you can still be a hobbyist without sharing everything you’ve ever done on GitHub.

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1. rfl890 ◴[04 Jul 25 15:18 UTC] No.44465292[source]▶
That's the caveat, the contract you sign when you start an open source project. You have to have the mindset of simply not giving a fuck about who does what with your code and how much they make from it. Then you can be at peace. If you don't want to (or can't) adopt that mindset for a particular project or at all, that's completely fine and normal. OSS is not for you. As soon as you want compensation for your work, things start to go south. See the whole core-js situation and what went down for an example.
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2. tombert ◴[04 Jul 25 15:43 UTC] No.44465507[source]▶
That’s exactly my point though, it’s exploitative. Companies will abuse the fact that you “don’t give a fuck” and make money from it without compensating you for your labor.

I am not trying to really convince anyone of anything, do whatever you want. I am just explaining why I have become disillusioned with FOSS.

3. immibis ◴[05 Jul 25 13:57 UTC] No.44472844[source]▶
Or use AGPL.

There's a reason some people call permissive licenses "cuck licenses".

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4. tombert ◴[05 Jul 25 14:58 UTC] No.44473208[source]▶
I am arguing that even if the language of the license is perfect by any criteria we define, enforcing them is unrealistic, especially for smaller projects.

I know there's been cases of big projects successfully suing companies that break the license (e.g. BusyBox), but if I just make some small utility on Github, even if it's licensed with AGPL, I don't have a ton of recourse. I don't have the ability to audit every project that might be violating it, and even if I did I don't have the capital to pay an attorney to sue for every possible violation.

If you're working for a company and that company is paying you to work on a project that they decide to FOSS later, great, you're being compensated for your work and I have no objection to that. Hobby projects are generally not compensated and as such I think it's better to keep them closed source.