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Seeing big companies take advantage of BSD or MIT licensed projects without sharing their contributions will always pain me.
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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Someone biulds a thing and puts it on the curb in front of his house with a sign:
Then someone else comes along, takes it, and sells it.
I fail to see how the inventor was taken advantage of. They presumably thought about which license they want to use and specifically chose this one.
Taking without giving is always viewed negatively in social settings.
Maybe "taking advantage of" is wrong but then again, it is a dick move anyway.
If I'm putting BSD or MIT license on something, I'm explicitly saying you can use it however you want, you can change it however you want, you don't have to share back, I just ask for credit for my part in it
It's not taking so much as being given freely
Exactly this. I have a couple of small projects that are MIT licensed specifically because I don't care how people use them or what they use them for. If someone finds it useful then they're welcome to do whatever they want with it.
This idea that I'm being somehow hoodwinked or taken advantage of because the thing that I explicitly said could be used freely is being used in a way that doesn't align with the values of some other completely uninvolved third party is beyond absurd.
I've always found it funny that GPL is considered "free as in freedom" but you don't have the freedom to use it in your own way if it's proprietary code.
I think you are missing the point. I am not saying it wasn't. But if you makes a gift for your friend's birthday, and they don't bother at all to return the favor/attention, would you be upset as you would think it is kinda a dick move?
That's kind of a different thing. But no, I would have no issue if I gave someone a gift and they didn't give one back. A gift is a gift, not an loan they didn't ask for.
It isn't about it being a loan. It is about attention, care and respect. That is why I wrote favor/attention. You won't be friends with someone who doesn't in any way show you that they care/respect you.
Edit: just to be very clear, the gift is an example of you expressing care, in my example. It is not necessarily a gift, it could be helping them move, or anything else that expresses some level of care.
You don't expect me to care for you, so you are probably not upset when I don't hold open the door for you when you are 4 steps behind me. But if your friend would do the same (assuming that they know you are there) you could take it negatively.
With software there would be infinite copies of that free item for everyone to get. So the dick move is to sell it to people who are unaware that they could get it for free.
It's a little different than that, isn't it? More like: " look at what I built, here's a step by step guide that makes it work. Do with it whatever you want." Some people want to use it for their job. Others might use it for personal use, or to build more open source projects.
This person takes advantage of people who are unaware that they could just get it for free as well.
However, if this person is putting in an effort to sell this item (like advertisement or creating a platform to distribute this item more easily) then I don't see anything wrong in charging money for that.
That's not really a common situation though. Sure, people might use the BSD license on something they did as a hobby, or just to learn things. But, the scenario described here is more like:
A group of people all have the same little problem, and they work together to come up with a solution for it. They solve the main problem, but their solution has a few rough edges and there are similar problems they didn't solve, but they're not motivated to keep working on it because what they have is good enough for their current needs. So, they put out some flyers describing how to do what they did, and inviting anybody who's interested to keep working on improving their fix.
A company comes along, sees the info, and builds a tool that solves the problem but not quite as well, and for a small fee. They spend tons of money promoting their solution, drowning out the little pamphlet that the original guys did. They use as much IP protection as possible, patenting their designs, trademarking the look and feel, copyrighting the instructions, etc. Often they accidentally(?) issue legal threats or takedown notices to people who are merely hosting the original design or original pamphlets.
Maybe the original inventor didn't get screwed in this scenario, but you could say that the public did.
This is perfectly fine to do under GPL as well. I don't see the problem.
There are companies that sell Linux distros on a DVD or USB drive.