Another opinion about how it’s OK for mega-corps to reap the benefits of opensource without contributing back and how we should just suck it up because of principles.
I understand he’s a big contributor to ansible and other IaC, and most (all?) of his stuff is opensource. It’s cool that he has the money to sustain himself and that he can stick to his principles with the money he has, but IMO either he lacks empathy or understanding for those in a place trying to make a living from opensource or in his opinion companies just can’t be trusted with opensource if they have a CLA.
He’s entitled to his opinions, but I don’t share them.
I don’t really understand the connection between the blog post and your comment. Could you expand on the connection between his stance against CLAs and your paraphrase about mega-corps and how we should “suck it up because of principles”?
From a company’s perspective, if they want CLAs or if they want to use an anti-open-source license, they do not care about your freedoms. They’re protecting revenue streams. They’ll often talk about freeloaders, whether it’s Amazon building a competing hosted solution, or some startup that found a way to monetize support.
But in the end, even if you have GPL code and you charge people to get it, it’s not truly free as in freedom, if the company restricts how you can use, modify, and share the code.
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Freeloaders are part of open source—whether they’re running homelab or a competing business.
I agree, I don’t like CLAs, but the handwaving of the distinction between freeloaders is what gets me. There’s quite a big difference between somebody running your opensource service in private and not making any money from it vs a business actively competing against you with your own code, creating support tickets, and not contributing back code (or minimally at best).
The argument is basically one of principle. “It’s not libre / free as in freedom so it’s wrong”.
I guess I read his point more as being that it’s effectively impossible for a license or CLA to distinguish “good” freeloaders from “bad” freeloaders, so it was inevitable that businesses would start doing license “rug-pulls” like the examples he gives.
Another opinion about how it’s OK for mega-corps to reap the benefits of opensource without contributing back and how we should just suck it up because of principles.
I understand he’s a big contributor to ansible and other IaC, and most (all?) of his stuff is opensource. It’s cool that he has the money to sustain himself and that he can stick to his principles with the money he has, but IMO either he lacks empathy or understanding for those in a place trying to make a living from opensource or in his opinion companies just can’t be trusted with opensource if they have a CLA.
He’s entitled to his opinions, but I don’t share them.
Anti Commercial-AI license
I don’t really understand the connection between the blog post and your comment. Could you expand on the connection between his stance against CLAs and your paraphrase about mega-corps and how we should “suck it up because of principles”?
It’s the freeloading part of his post.
I agree, I don’t like CLAs, but the handwaving of the distinction between freeloaders is what gets me. There’s quite a big difference between somebody running your opensource service in private and not making any money from it vs a business actively competing against you with your own code, creating support tickets, and not contributing back code (or minimally at best).
The argument is basically one of principle. “It’s not libre / free as in freedom so it’s wrong”.
Anti Commercial-AI license
I guess I read his point more as being that it’s effectively impossible for a license or CLA to distinguish “good” freeloaders from “bad” freeloaders, so it was inevitable that businesses would start doing license “rug-pulls” like the examples he gives.
That seems like a more reasonable interpretation.
Anti Commercial-AI license