this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Programming
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I don't understand this blend of comment.
If you purposely release your work as something anyone in the world is free to use and change to adapt to their own personal needs without any expectation of retribution or compensation, why are you complaining that people are using your work without any retribution or compensation?
More to the point, why are you singling out specific adopters while leaving out the bulk of your community?
It makes absolutely no sense at all.
There's generally an understanding (the GPL folks think it's naive -- and this makes their case) that if you use open source software you should give back to it.
And yet fuck all people do. Ever.
If you're random Joe Schmoe who happens to need a database, I don't expect you to contribute. But when you're of the largest tech firms in the world...
People, maybe. Corporations though? They absolutely contribute:
https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
Oracle, AMD, Google, Intel are all well represented.
Absolutely not true. I know this is just my experience, but I've worked with plenty of devs who've contributed prs and/or donations back to OSS projects in the past, and all my former employers have opensourced at least some of their software
The GPL people are naive too because GPL doesn't always prevent it either.
It does, AGPL for servers, GPL for applications... If you make changes they have to be made available or you're breaking the law.
You only have to give back if yours literally redistributing a modified version of the thing.
If you use the software without modifying it directly (such as building on top of it, or building something that uses it), then that's allowed.
Also if you make use of the software commercially, without necessarily distributing it, then that's also allowed. For example, Google could (I think they actually already do) modify the Linux kernel, and use it all across their company internally. They don't have to give back, since they don't distribute it.
And last, if you don't modify the software but charge people using it, that's completely allowed.
(IANAL)
Not in the case of AGPL (use over the network ~~and IPC~~ counts as distribution -- presumably proxying the request is insufficient to disable this clause) and even in the case of GPL that's a very problematic position to put yourself on. You're basically talking about invoking a foreign process from your primary process to avoid licensing constraints and that comes with a lot of limitations as to what you can do.
You can modify the GPL program to support more things via IPC but then if that program needs to touch a customer's computer, you have to contribute at the very least those notifications and any related improvements you made to make that possible or any new feature which makes more sense to be in the tool you're calling than your tool building on top.
Yes, but who's paying for that? If it's a server hosting company, they'll pay the hardware rental fee, fair enough. However, you can't reasonably sell that software itself, people will just build it themselves.
They shouldve releases redis under agplv3 if they really want those corpo to give back to community.
I won’t require you to upvote my excellent comment, but I sure expect it!
Paragraph three is solid on Wiki: reciprocity - we needs it!
can guarantee that if redis was closed source from the beginning, Amazon would've just made their own clone internally just to avoid paying someone else.