With companies taking advantage of Free and Open Source Software far more often than they contribute back, and harming users in the process, is it even worth working on anymore?
Free Software is, and has been for the last 40 years, about the “four freedoms.” Those four freedoms are no less important today then they were back then. Copyleft was about ensuring every user had those four freedoms. It wasn’t really about “forcing companies to give back” and it certainly wasn’t supposed to provide an exclusive right to monetize “your product.”
I think the author of this article has a few legitimate points (it is horrid how open source maintainers are treated by proprietary software developers who feel entitled to free labor, not just the log4j maintainers but e.g. the core-js maintainer) and some shaky arguments (if anything, Audacity being free software was a good thing because it allowed Tenacity to happen; and while it’s obviously bad that TikTok infringed on OBS’s copyrights and violated the GPL, it doesn’t really negate the good that OBS does for the free software community). I also would not refer to copyright infringement as stealing, even when it involves free software; this is the sort of language that intellectual property advocates use to suggest that making a copy of something is equivalent to actually stealing a thing (e.g. “You wouldn’t steal a car”).
He’s also right about one other thing: I, and some others, would definitely refuse to use his product if it’s proprietary; but I’m not sure I would have used it regardless.
Free Software is, and has been for the last 40 years, about the “four freedoms.” Those four freedoms are no less important today then they were back then. Copyleft was about ensuring every user had those four freedoms. It wasn’t really about “forcing companies to give back” and it certainly wasn’t supposed to provide an exclusive right to monetize “your product.”
I think the author of this article has a few legitimate points (it is horrid how open source maintainers are treated by proprietary software developers who feel entitled to free labor, not just the log4j maintainers but e.g. the core-js maintainer) and some shaky arguments (if anything, Audacity being free software was a good thing because it allowed Tenacity to happen; and while it’s obviously bad that TikTok infringed on OBS’s copyrights and violated the GPL, it doesn’t really negate the good that OBS does for the free software community). I also would not refer to copyright infringement as stealing, even when it involves free software; this is the sort of language that intellectual property advocates use to suggest that making a copy of something is equivalent to actually stealing a thing (e.g. “You wouldn’t steal a car”).
He’s also right about one other thing: I, and some others, would definitely refuse to use his product if it’s proprietary; but I’m not sure I would have used it regardless.