this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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I wonder if he has a donation page. We need to get him some money.
I agree we should support him, but you know who should be more concerned with giving him and other open source maintainers money? The billion dollar corporations that rely on these critical projects and use them absolutely for free. Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, Google, Siemens, Motorola, God knows how many more.
But when open source projects go dual license to try and get paid people lose their minds.
This!!!!
This!!
People, stop celebrating "freeing" software of maintainers that want to prevent being exploited.
Seriously. If you're not a business why do you care?
How many of these dual license solutions have donated to xz maintenance?
They wouldn't have to if xz had a dual license.
But none of these for profit companies that are dependent upon xz have funneled any of their gains in there?
Because that's ~~a bad~~ not even a solution.
What about a license that would require every company with a market cap above 25 B that (indirectly) uses the software to contribute X amount (like $1000 a year) of revenue back?
I think if that caught on then companies would call it undue burden to sift through all the dependencies they use to make such small payments.
It is a difficult problem. But on the face of it your suggestion seems very reasonable.
Maybe that force them to just donate to every dependency, probably cheaper on their level. And better for project.
GitHub has a tool built-in to show all dependencies, it's not that hard to write a little script to check the
LICENSEfiles in the repositories. I'm sure one of the biggest companies in the world has the ability to do that.One of the biggest companies in the world used Copilot to give its users code scraped from GitHub projects without telling them it came from GitHub and that it's under various licenses that need to be followed.
https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/case-updates.html
If dual licensing was standard the software that uses things like xz would pay down the line so everything was funded.
I mean this is already a thing to certain degrees right? Virtualization platforms I use both are free for personal use, but not business use, or at least certain feature package use isn't permitted. What's the difference? Putting the software under a different license/eula?
Yes, but the proposed license would also be free for businesses except for the largest in the world.
Why limit it? If you're actively making money, or you are a licensed business attempting to do so, people actively helping you build business deserve to be compensated. If a developer just happened to live in your area and said "I could make your business better by making this thing for you," would they be worth hiring? What's the saying, socialize the resources, privatize the profits? Size << Intent