This one is something that were brought up a lot by developers including me who are very weary about corporations profiting off of our work for free and this basically put us off from contributing to open source in general.
We get a bunch of dialogues about this such as:
Developers like me: “Many of us who create are concerned about our work being exploited. The possibility of corporations profiting from our open-source contributions without giving back to the community disincentivizes us from participating in such endeavors.”
Open-Source Advocates: “The AGPL exists to mitigate such concerns. It requires derivative works to also be open-source.”
Developers like me: “While I appreciate the intention behind AGPL, there is a loophole - a ‘condom code’ if you will. Even though Linux Kernel prevents such strategies by refusing to merge these changes and that it’s difficult for a singular corporation to force an adoption of a forked version of Linux Kernel, a corporation can fork our much smaller project however and introduce such legal bypass to the copyleft restrictions. This bypass can be justified by them under the guise of extending the software’s capabilities with a plugin interface or an interprocess communication protocol layer, similar to how PostgreSQL allows User Defined Functions. However, I must caution that I’m not well-versed in the legal intricacies.”
When bringing up on non-commercial clause for licensing
Open-Source Advocates: “Disallowing commercial use of your project contradicts the principles of open-source.”
Developers like me: “Well, then perhaps we need a new term, something like ‘Open Code Project’. We can create projects that encourage collaboration and openness while also restricting commercial exploitation.”
So I created this post, because we do need to discuss on a path forward for Open Source in general knowing that corporation can shirk around this restriction and discourage developers like me from participating in open source or open code projects.
Edited to add:
I really want to thank you all for discussing a rather contentious topic and adding your own thoughts to this. I really appreciate everyone’s thoughts into this. I clearly have a lot to do on researches.
It hasn’t been tested in court yet in the US as far as I know, but non-commercial licenses can potentially be more restrictive than you intend. As such, I don’t contribute on projects with non-commercial licenses and I know others who do the same.
That said, I understand the frustration of big companies using your code for something big and you not getting a share of the profits. That frustration though, either as a frustration of capitalists benefiting from your work or from you not getting profit you feel you may deserve, seems like a nothing-burger to me. If you weren’t planning on selling licenses to your code before-hand and them using it doesn’t affect the maintenance burden that you have, then what is the problem? It functionally changes nothing concerning the time and effort you were planning to put in.
The power of open-source licenses is in how they allow for quick and painless sharing of software for the collective benefit of others. There are tons of ways to get paid while using open-source licenses. Non-commercial licenses are unnecessary bloat that could gum up the works.
Correct me if I’m mistaken. What I read from your post sounds to me like you think that we should accept that a company will inject a revenue stream into the process that we all were working on as an open source project. We weren’t expecting to get paid, so why not allow the company to get paid, regardless of the downstream impacts for other projects that once relied on the project being completely free and open. Do I understand that properly? I don’t want to misrepresent your intent. I feel like I must be misunderstanding something.
I’m a socialist. I believe at a societal level that it’s messed up that companies can turn exploited labor into profit for capitalists instead of distributing it fairly among workers.
On an individual level or individual project level, how would a company using your code for profit on their own project affect the availability or accessibility of your original version?
I’m happy to be proven wrong here, but my understanding is that FOSS is an important tool to combat the consolidation of technology into the hands of a few capitalists, and it generally relies on the free altruistic labor of people for the good of the commons. All else being equal, it would be a much better world if that work was always paid for, but I don’t think we can have that in a capitalist society without sacrificing the best parts of FOSS.
I think we may be talking about two different things with regards to corporate control. I’m saying that, in the case with Redhat specifically, that their injection of a fee to access the source code now no longer makes the code freely available to downstream repositories. If they comically charged a billion dollars to access the source code (with a GPL) it would practically become closed source, so I’m curious why any entity can charge any amount to access open source software. And if it’s totally legal with this type of license, doesn’t that mean that we should be avoiding GPL at all costs?
Yes, we are talking about different things. I don’t know enough copyright law to know what to think about the RHEL situation yet, i.e. source available vs. open source. I’ve been talking about a theoretical open source project that you control and a corporation downstream using it for profit.