Pluralistic: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing” (08 Dec 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.net

The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you’ve already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.

  • psud@aussie.zoneEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    Popularity opens other ways to make money. Open source is profitable for GNU. Cory Doctorow does fine.

    • poopkins@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect every commercial product to find profitability through exposure. I can attest to this first hand as I had published an open source Android game that was republished without ads. This led me to ultimately make the repository private, because I could not find a way to remain profitable while offering the source code and bearing the costs of labor and various cloud services.

      On the flip side I guess I can take credit for the millions of installs from the other app… except they didn’t publicly acknowledge me.

      • psud@aussie.zoneEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        Was it under a “copyleft” licence (like GPL) that forces the other one to also be open source? Did you use a licence that requires you are acknowledged?

        If you did the first, you at least pulled someone else into open source work