Excellent article, and a topic I myself have a draft in progress about. I think we are clearly seeing the business world getting wise to the massive wealth of free labour they get by leveraging open source. And we have little dialog about their moral obligation to contribute financially to those projects.
Compound this with increasing financial pressures on average workers and the ability of maintainers to work for free is going to keep shrinking.
We, the OSS community of users, contributers & maintainers, are in an unsustainable situation, but no one seems to be talking about it. Phase one is a golden age of profit for corporate use of OSS. Phase 2 is going to be a tidal wave of burnout by maintainers.
We need something better. Where licences require graduated compensation. Ex free for individuals, education, non-profits, and solo businesses. Not-free for government & corporations.
And absolutely a means of preventing immoral use of our code.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
Excellent article, and a topic I myself have a draft in progress about. I think we are clearly seeing the business world getting wise to the massive wealth of free labour they get by leveraging open source. And we have little dialog about their moral obligation to contribute financially to those projects.
Compound this with increasing financial pressures on average workers and the ability of maintainers to work for free is going to keep shrinking.
We, the OSS community of users, contributers & maintainers, are in an unsustainable situation, but no one seems to be talking about it. Phase one is a golden age of profit for corporate use of OSS. Phase 2 is going to be a tidal wave of burnout by maintainers.
We need something better. Where licences require graduated compensation. Ex free for individuals, education, non-profits, and solo businesses. Not-free for government & corporations.
And absolutely a means of preventing immoral use of our code.