I've always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let's change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway?

I’ve always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let’s change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway?

  • @1984@lemmy.today
    65•5 months ago

    The real outrage is big tech clouds like amazon taking open source software for free and bundling it up in AWS services that cost a lot of money.

    If they would contribute back to the authors, they would become rich, but of course not…

    • 𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒆𝒍
      4•5 months ago

      it’s not only clouds, everyone uses open source and like whole secure WWW etc. is using openssl, every site uses some kind of open source js library, should they all go proprietary because they don’t pay?

    • ⸻ Ban DHMO 🇦🇺 ⸻English
      4•5 months ago

      This is why the GPL is so important. It doesn’t require them to donate, but it does require them to release any bugfixes they made or software they made using it

      • @CosmicTurtle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1•5 months ago

        Which, by itself, is fine. But their contributions to open source are very one-handed and pale in comparison to how much they benefit out of it.

        Hell, my company is no different. They allocate one day out of the year as “open source day” where devs can contribute back to open source projects on company time. But it must be something we already use.

        No personal development. No non-essential libraries.

        We make literally millions off of these libraries and we don’t even contribute monetarily.

        If these companies gave even 0.01% of their revenue to these essential libraries, they’d never even have to ask for money.