alt Hacker NewsFor FOSS I personally prefer Apache 2.0 license, as 10 years from now I have no idea what people will need for their projects.
Personally, it makes me happy if people can make a business using a bit of my work. Just don't redirect commercial support tickets onto community projects, or get neglected customers to contact authors.
The way I see it... is symbiotic commercial relationships are important, as people can get their time sponsored to work on FOSS code. Also, having community projects form reliable long term infrastructure opens additional opportunity for people to work with FOSS options.
Telling people how they should have fun is always lame... whether it is Sony/Microsoft... or just some disillusioned dude convinced their work won't be obfuscated by an LLM in 30 seconds. =3
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I think people getting time sponsored working on FOSS is quite rare. Would like to do that myself, but instead I just develop in my free time.
> it makes me happy if people can make a business using a bit of my work
It's an idea as old as any:
The freedom to restrict the freedom of others, is it really a freedom?
It is a tiresome debate. People can argue about it until the sun sets without reaching an agreement. Better to be clear about which kind of freedom you mean, and respect the choice of others.
Plenty of businesses have been started around free software without necessarily restricting the freedoms of others. It is often argued that this constitutes a better approximation of a truly free market than the entry barriers intellectual property law can put up.
This, for some reason, has become a controversial idea — as evidenced by your comment being downvoted.
I don’t understand what angle people are coming from, when they disregard the community effects of open-source software entirely. If your main goal is to make money, there is absolutely nothing wrong with building a business instead.
>Personally, it makes me happy if people can make a business using a bit of my work
Copyleft doesn't say that they can't, it says they have to make their changes available