this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
33 points (100.0% liked)

Programming

17354 readers
612 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Kissaki@programming.dev 6 points 3 weeks ago

A strength of the GPL is that the community can fork projects, and "take them over" that way.

At the same time, and this instance is such a case, on a centralized platform, projects can be taken over instead of be forked.

They developed and published a plugin. Now it's been taken over by someone else, on the primary distribution and discovery platform, and they have no control over it. Worse than that, the takeover now offers their sold functionalities for free.

This makes the "open source but not free, but after two years true FOSS licensed" licenses look very useful if not necessary for businesses and developers that want to monetize. At the very least when they [have to] use centralized platforms.