Whenever people say that MIT or GPL licenses are a good idea I point out projects like this.
Only humans should have freedom zero. Corporations and robots must pay.
Whenever people say that MIT or GPL licenses are a good idea I point out projects like this.
Only humans should have freedom zero. Corporations and robots must pay.
I am not sure sudo is licensed under MIT or GPL, looks it's like a mix of licenses[1]. The end of the first license says it's sponsored in part by DARPA.
From 2010 to February 2024, it was sponsored by Quest Software according to the history page[2].
[1] https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/main/LICENSE.md
[2] https://www.sudo.ws/about/history/
> Corporations and robots must pay.
Greenpeace is a (non-profit) corporation. Unions are corporations. Municipalities. Colleges and universities.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person
Should they have to pay?
I used to volunteer for a local non-profit a few years ago.
From time to time, I would reflect on the fact that Microsoft and other commercial suppliers were getting paid for providing services to us, but I was expected to work for free.
Yes. Non-profits are more than capable of abusing the commons, the purpose of even small monetary requirements is to put a bound on that.
If Mozilla and Wikimedia can pay millions in salary to their CEOs, I'm sure that they can spare a few thousands for open source projects.
Yes. Not for profit does not mean they don’t have money.
With that logic why should non profits have to pay for anything at all?
For the same logic they are tax-exempt. There is a general consensus that their goal is the greater good (like developing sudo and such) and not the usual capitalistic good of generating more money.
Then again, you usual Friday outing of FANG engineers may have more money than some nonprofits too.
Yes.
That's a nice slogan, but how does it work?
Say, I clone sudo. Clearly, a human applying freedom zero. I use it in my projects. Probably still freedom zero. I use it in my CI pipeline for the stuff that makes me money... corporation or human? If it's corporation, what if I sponsor a not-for-profit that provides that piece of CI infra?
The problem is that "corporation or not" has more shades than you can reasonably account for. And, worse, the cost of accounting for it is more than any volunteer wants to shoulder.
Even if this were a hard and legally enforceable rule, what individual maintainer wants to sue a company with a legal department?
What could work is a large collective that licenses free software with the explicit goal of extracting money from corporate users and distributing it to authors. Maybe.
Not for commercial use without buying a license is a pretty standard licensing scheme. This has been worked out for decades.
The challenge is that this doesn't really work for community-developed software.
Let's say somebody uses this scheme for software they wrote. Would anybody else ever contribute significantly if the original author would benefit financially but they wouldn't?
Mediating the financial benefits through a non-profit might help, but (1) there's still a trust problem: who controls the non-profit? and (2) that's a lot of overhead to set up when starting out for a piece of software that may or may not become relevant.
And the shades in between account for the large number of new licensing schemes sprouting, with different restrictions on what is and isn't possible. (Not to mention the large number of "just used it anyways" instances). And it struggles for smaller utilities, or packages of many different things.
It's "worked out" in the sense that it still doesn't really work for a lot of maintainers.
What happens when the code is abandoned? Can I make my own changes whenever I want?
The problem with commercial software is the lock in.
The behavior of corporations is shameful.
After all, people in these companies don't work for free and are able to spend a lot of money for other services.
Haven't you just hit the nail on the head? Corporations do not feel shame even if people within them do; hence actions . . .
You can demand payment but it doesn't mean you'll get paid. These days companies will clone your work instead of paying.
As covered literally just a few days ago (IIRC), you absolutely can demand payment: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi actively works to detect MDM, and if found, demand payment.
Not open source, but an interesting counterpoint, I think.
Relevant articles are here
- https://lgug2z.com/articles/normalize-identifying-corporate-...
- https://lgug2z.com/articles/i-started-identifying-corporate-...
The post-open source space is indeed a very exciting space in 2026
That's not post open-source. That's dual licensing, an use-case FOSS has enabled and supported forever.
> any time someone says something is post-$thing it means what they are doing is in dialogue with and in response to $thing. “we were doing that before $thing” no, you can’t be in dialogue with something that hasn’t happened yet.
> this is like saying “what do you mean post-modernist architecture, architecture predates modernism”.
https://lobste.rs/s/kaftkn/i_started_identifying_corporate_d...
Releasing open source software and then “demanding payment” goes against everything about open source.
If someone expects to be paid for the use of their software, releasing it as open source is not what they want.
If a maintainer of a software project starts trying to demand payment or threatening to change license terms, it’s a reasonable response for a company to fork it or build their own solution.
And this is why all new projects by independent developers should seriously consider using a post-open source license before defaulting to corporate-friendly/corporate-first OSI licenses
I think they should expect payment from the job they're working, not opensource or "post-opensource" work.
Yep, this kind of attitude is even more reason to reject the broken status quo.
[dead]
The GPL is a good idea. It's our socieconomic system that isn't.
GPL is a response to the copyright law, which was created for the big corporations to extract rent from ordinary people.
It's copyright law which should go away.
> It's copyright law which should go away.
This precisely. What started out as a way of rewarding authorship (of text, software, or other things) has mainly become a way of extracting rent -- see the music, movie, and software industries. In the digital age, when the cost of making copies of such works is approximately zero, copyright law ceases to make sense.
Note that this does not mean you cannot make money selling software or software-related services. For example, game developers could still sell keys for online play on their servers even if they couldn't copyright the binaries.
Copyright law is hundreds of years old and originally was intended to prevent owner-operators of mechanical printing presses from printing and selling copies of some author's books without paying them or getting permission.
It was created when there was a scarcity of content, so state violence was used to encourage production of content.
But now we don't live in the age of scarcity of content. On the contrary, content creators are competing for a possibility to get into consumers' attention span and push their agenda (ads). Everything has changed.
Removing all copyright restriction will not decrease the amount of content available for a person through their lifetime even a few percent.
> originally was intended to prevent owner-operators of mechanical printing presses from printing and selling copies of some author's books without paying them or getting permission.
We agree that that was its initial stated intention.
However, what we have seen in practice is that it has resulted in the owner-operators of those machines banding together to restrict access to the machines unless authors sign exploitative contracts assigning their rights to the operators (which they interpret as "getting permission").
The world has changed substantially since the 1710 Statue of Anne; there's a thousand things that you could call the modern-day equivalent of mechanically printing a book, with myriad capital and operating costs and availability. Many ways an independent author or artist can publish their work are extremely cheap and effective. I'm relatively anti-copyright, but that doesn't mean that everyone currently benefiting from copyright law is rent-seeking in an exploitive way.
GPL is much more than that. It is distributing the means of production to the tech workers.
rms is the Marx of the 20th Century. GPL is freedom from corporate oppression.
No it's not. GPL is quite the opposite. GPL means that "you own what you buy", which is the foundation of capitalism. You own what you buy, including programs, which you can buy, replicate, modify, and sell.
Due to the nature of software, especially in the 80s, it existed in both text and binary form, which made it easy to perverse the nature of selling software from selling code to selling binaries, and big companies went even further in their collusion with the government socialists by making even re-selling even your own binaries illegal.
GPL is just trying to fight this madness with its own weapon. The GPL is an attempt to go back to capitalism of small business owners and individual service providers.
Going from the capitalism of small business owners to the market socialism of coops is a small step ;)
Well, none of the implementations of Marxism in the XX century worked like this, so I dare to disagree.
Of course, you can always say that America is exceptional, and she will have "Marxism with American characteristics", just like China switched from true socialism to "socialism with Chinese characteristics", but would still recommend avoiding the word which associates with GULAG and mass starvation.
Including the hangups people have about AI training as well.
Everything is a good idea if you assume a world in which it works.
Communism has entered the chat.
That, for example, would be a better system. One the GPL would work beautifully in.
If you can't explain why it did not work in the past, and can't explain how & why things will be different this time, you don't have a plan. History is a harsh mistress.
It works, but you need real human staff. And we learn from history that we don’t learn which can be harsh.
Communism worked in China, for some definition of "worked". Stalinism eventually failed in the USSR and elsewhere. An extensive literature explains these things, as well as explaining different forms and varieties of "communism", and things that people call "communism" but aren't.
Communism worked so well in China that as soon as they adopted something resembling free markets in some regions, thanks to Deng Xiaoping, their GDP per capita rose amazingly fast for 3~4 decades. Not exactly a stellar example.
China is still communist. Again communism has worked for some definition of "worked". This is an objective statement, not an endorsement of Chinese communism.
As a person who had a privilege to live in a commie-block half his life, no, it isn't a better system.
That was Stalinism, not communism. And there are many ways to implement communism, some of which are better than others.
If anything, Stalin-era commie blocks are better than the Khruschov-era commieblock I lived in. That particular brand of communism had a tendency to paperclip-optimize everything in a weird way. Like it's really the opposite of capitalism where you go from an MVP to a fully usable product, but in reverse. You would thing it's optimization, but then you regulate the temperature in winter by opening the window.
In terms of housing and speaking only from personal experience, European brand of social democracy seems to get it.
GPLv3 is a bit overreaching , especially in patent clauses. The GPL as idea is great but the license needs a little more refining
The constant fear of lawyers that using some GPL lib will infest entire codebase of their project with GPL is a real problem that stops many corporations from contributing in the first place.