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.
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.