I don’t get why big companys are afraid of open source software.
I know that monetizing open source is hard but in exchange they would have 8 billion programmers ready, for free!
Even if they do like redhat , as controversial as it is right now, they would be better off than just closing the source.
I would be willing to pay to have the license to modify my own software even if I couldn’t redistribute it afterwards.
Not only anti-customer features. Any kind of product monetarisation becomes much harder in a FOSS project.
Say, you built this cool piece of software/hardware/product.
You can either keep it closed source and sell it. Anyone who wants to clone it, needs to put in a similar amount of R&D to what you did. If you have patents, you can even stop them from copying your stuff all together.
Or you can open source it. That means, you need to spend more money to get your product open source ready. The design files need to be good enough that someone other than you can use them. You need a good documentation, so that others can actually replicate your work. All that is not cheap. And then someone else will come along and copy your stuff. Since they have no R&D attached to it, they can easily sell the product cheaper than you did (or even give it away for free, see e.g. CentOS).
If they are super anal about that, they even add your Github page as the place to put feature requests/bug reports. Happened e.g. to a game console cartreader project where I contributed.
Do the math: Which option gives you better return on investment?
Tbh pirating closed source software is as easy, as installing forked code. Maybe you could add a non-competition clause to a new open source license, so that the original FOSS software company has the legal high ground over anyone that undersells them.
Well you could, but then it wouldn’t be open source anymore. You could still call it ‘public source’ though. The threat of competing forks is one important mechanism keeping FOSS projects on the straight and narrow, imo.
It doesn’t matter how hard pirating closed source is. It’s illegal and thus no major company will do it. While a lot of companies will take FOSS and sell it in their product.
For example, my car’s media display runs on Linux. They just took some light-weight Linux distro, slapped the FOSS disclaimer in the “about” section of the UI and be done with it.
They would have certainly not pirated Windows to do the same thing, because as soon as anyone found out, they’d be in serious legal trouble.
For the non-competition clause, that would probably not really work. So the approach many projects take in a situation like this is a non-commercial clause, but then again why even open source if you do non-commercial?
I mean the source code of Windows got leaked multiple times, but the teams working on Wine and ReactOS would still rather continue to reverse engineer the Windows APIs and never touch Microsoft’s code, in order to avoid violating Microsoft’s copyright. Most FOSS licenses are made to be easily (ab)used.
Linux especially does not want to adopt newer more “hardcore” versions of GPL, in order to keep professional Linux widely used everywhere. We now live in a situation where huge for-profit companies are actually among the biggest contributors of Linux (both money-wise and code-wise).
I do think you could run profitable businesses through selling open source software. Most open source licenses are just not made with this in mind. I don’t see any reason why a non-competition clause would work worse than a non-commercial one.
I see this happen a lot. Another in the same vein, Shattered Pixel Dungeon which is a popular rogue-like mainly for mobile (but has a PC version as well) got flagged for a security issue on F-Droid. The sole developer doesn’t upload to the F-Droid store, but always gets flooded with tickets every time something like this happens for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
Maintaining FOSS is actually expensive, costs tons of man hours, you give up control and FOSS advocates can be rather demanding. It’s only really cheap for the users. I’m pro-FOSS but lets not deny the inherent difficulties of running a FOSS project.
Totally. I am really happy whenever a FOSS project crosses my path, and I try to give back with contributions. But, no illusions here, FOSS is super difficult and FOSS devs earn hardly any to no money at all for their work.
That’s why I personally only FOSS on hobby projects where I don’t expect to see a cent from them.