logoalt Hacker News

phendrenad2today at 3:27 AM0 repliesview on HN

Let's say you accomplish your goal of dissuading "big corporations" and "bad guys" from using little auth middleware library, and you get a bunch of other open-source maintainers to do the same.

The "big corporations" will shrug and throw a few more tens of thousands into their R&D budget and will assign a few devs to create an alternative, and when they release it as open-source, they'll use it an opportunity to self-promote, it'll have a slick website, and "X by Big Corp" will become the go-to library.

The "bad guys" will just shrug and steal your code. Al Capone was brought down on tax evasion but I don't think you're going to get him on copyright infringement.

If you can somehow convince the majority of non-corporate developers to not use corporate-sponsored open-source, then that might be interesting, but not by much, because there aren't many of those.