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

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.

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.

There’s a million reasons to want to write open source. A lack of attribution in particular is a killer for motivation.

i love open source because it feels like a kind of donation i can't make financially, so in a way, i'm trying to make up for that

but yeah someone claiming it all falsely isnt good for the motivation

Wouldn’t this still be accomplished with a freeware model? That way hobbyists could still get your stuff for free but a corporation would have a slightly more difficult time directly stealing it.

yeah, 100%. although there's strong propaganda to specifically make it open source (capital O and capital S)... the conspiracy-minded part of my brain thinks that it's probably because they can then use it.

But yeah, I've pretty much come to the same conclusion myself too - ship source, but ship it under ARR.

I think there's another innovation which hasn't really been explored yet - an "anti-copyright" cartel-style licencing, where you only have permission to use the product to make something dependant on the original product itself, and whatever you make can freely be used by the original creators and all the other participants in the cartel

The effect would basically be creating a "closed" ecosystem encouraging innovation inside it but protecting it from people stealing shit from the outside...