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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
In our increasingly politicized world, it has become popular to chant "all software is political." Software builds the systems that free or constrain us, the thinking goes, and so we should withhold it from bad people. This is the thinking that has led Microsoft employees and others to decry contracts tech companies have with ICE (US Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement), insisting that their software only be sold to people they like.
[...] Over the years we as an open source community have experimented with all sorts of stupid ideas, like efforts to block anyone from using code for commercial purposes unless they pay. Each time, we've realized that as good a goal as it is for developers to get paid, for example, the destruction caused by closing off the code to uses we don't like ends up ruining the foundations upon which open source rests.
This is dramatically more important, however, when it comes to attempts to politicize open source software.
As developer Chris Cordle stated, "Nobody wins" and the "whole idea [undergirding open source] dies" ... "if an author arbitrarily picks and chooses who can and can't use it based on whoever Twittersphere is mad at this week." It doesn't matter if there is tremendous cause for that anger. Open source dies when it becomes politicized.
Source: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-politicizing-open-source-is-a-terrible-idea/
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday September 12 2018, @07:03PM (4 children)
Of course it is. :)
FTFY. We did very well following this path. Our competitors, however, were unable to benefit from our work, which kept them from using our own efforts to cut our income. That's good when putting food on the table and keeping a roof overhead are priorities. Commercial use has different goals than OS goals. I've written both kinds of software; I'm well aware of the different benefits provided.
In point of fact, the software I give away now is only possible for me to create because during my working career the focus was completely on producing commercial products in a competitive space, a focus that resulted in considerable income and my present ability to do whatever the heck I want to.
No, not at all. We had 100% access to our proprietary code. It was our competitors that didn't have access to it. No only that, but I still own all that IP inasmuch as I either wrote it or paid for all of its development, and now it's being used to make free stuff for others. Isn't that great? :)
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday September 12 2018, @07:23PM (1 child)
>We had 100% access to our proprietary code
Certainly. And you'd have 100% access to your own GPLed code - the GPL does nothing to limit your use of your own code. We're talking about using *other people's* code.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday September 12 2018, @07:37PM
It did nothing to limit the use of our code by our competitors, either, which made it straight-up toxic WRT food and shelter.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Thursday September 13 2018, @12:22AM
Proprietary software is only better for owners. Perhaps you're an owner/coder, or perhaps the coder equivalent of an "uncle Tom"... too closely aligned with your corporate masters. If you're the latter, just realise they'd happily sack you and your coworkers before the next quarter and allow "your" codebase to rot if it made short-term financial "sense". For the rest of us : we're free to work for whichever employer pays the best, often on the same codebase - noone is holding our codebase hostage.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:30AM
could we have some details about what this amazing, mind-blowing code does?
some people are curious, what kind of super-portable, super-optimized, innovative algorithms the open-source world has lost, by being greedy communists who do not allow innovation from poor, huddled corporations?