So then why do I have to pay them if I'm using emacs and gcc and C++?

> Just because you get a given piece of open-source software for free does not mean that its development was done by volunteers in their free time.

Yet, in many cases, that's exactly what happened. And even when it isn't, if it's distributed under a free software license then it keeps them from screwing you over because any adverse changes can be reverted.

What??? They’ve admitted to a flaw in their method to get income, which is that they’re making it trivial for competitors to offer the same product. Their response is that they’re a believer.

I would have appreciated a response like dual licensing, or going into consulting for their app, or using trademark to enforce ownership over their version.

I have, yes. But currently it's my only source of income, and I need to maintain said income, otherwise I will not have the resources to devote to development of the app (both the closed source parts and open source parts).

If I could make the same amount of money (or more) by open sourcing the entire app, I'd happily do it. I know that theoretically at least, there are strategies to do so, and actually I'd like to take this approach if I can find one that works. If you have any suggestions I'd certainly like to hear them (and yes I'm serious).

I'm a strong believer though in the "hybrid" approach, whereby parts of a product are open source (and used by other products), and other parts are kept proprietary. KHTML (now known as WebKit) is a perfect example of this. If it was GPL, there's no way Apple could have built Safari on it, and the project would have continued to struggle as it had been for some time and probably gone nowhere. But because it was under a license that allowed Apple (and later Google) to build a proprietary product on top of it, both companies had a strong incentive to take the library and improve it. Granted, it was LGPL (not Apache), so they were legally required to contribute their changes back to the community.

A proprietary product that brings in money that can, in part, be used to fund development of the open source components of an application is something I see as a good model. But certainly there are others that could be made to work.

That is arrant nonsense. I am an end user - free software is important to me not because I want to fiddle around with the source code today, but because I may well need to have access to the source tomorrow.

Yes I am a programmer, but that's a lot less relevant than you seem to think. I'm not an iOS or Android developer - I'm sure I could learn those skill if I needed to, but I can always hire someone to do it for me... and of course that option is available to any user of the software, not just programmers.

To imagine that software freedom is about programmers satisfying their curiosity, or fiddling with their phone's UI is to miss the point entirely. It's about control. It's about my ability to control the device that I've bought, and the software that I choose to use on it. It's about me being able to get a new feature that I really need. It's about nobody being able to take away software that I've come to depend upon for my livelihood.

The problem with Apple's $100 per year is not the money. The problem is Apple's ability to take away my freedom to modify my device as I see fit.

I think this has made a huge difference, not so much if it is open source our not but how much things have become locked down. Before if you made a cool program you could hand it out to your friends on a usb stick and run it. These days you have to pay $100 to apple and go through a long approval process before you get listed on the app store. Its the same with all the platforms people use now. They have become more and more locked down pushing the regular user in to simply consuming content and only the corporations with large dev teams are able to make anything.

People don't adopt software only because it is open source. It also has to be useful high-quality software. Attributing the entirety of their success to a permissive open source license is nonsensical.

> Now they're trying to profit off that without reciprocating

Their products are still free to use and you can still read the code. They continue to improve the products. In what way are they not reciprocating? And considering this is a publicly-traded for-profit enterprise, why shouldn't they be able to profit off their work?

Unless your business is directly competing with them, how does the license change directly affect you?

> the rest of us would have the code, the comunity, and a little less poison in the well

At the cost of losing the creator and primary contributor of these projects, which tends to be a death blow to the software's long-term viability!

Hi, people have made money using my code and I also don’t care. I’m happy more people are using my software. I like the bragging rights and I’ve gotten plenty of work off the back of my opensource work. I understand this is upsetting to you. If you don’t want people using the software you write for free, maybe don’t write free software? That’s sort of the point.

There is a problem of freeloading in the opensource world - we need better ways to fund opensource code. But I don’t see how the GPL is a viable solution to that problem. Not at all. More likely, if I release my code under the GPL not only won’t I get paid, but also nobody will use my software. That sounds like a strategy which just makes everyone lose.

Sure, if your whole business model is “sell a SaaS”, then making the whole offering an open source product that is simple for other people to host and offer an equivalent (or, if integrated with other offerings you don’t have, often more compelling) service is a bad choice.

But people choose open source licensing for a reason, and against competing software, a proprietary license can be a negative feature which makes it harder to grow mindshare and prove out utility.

I'm a cheapskate but that's still pretty weird to me. Open source software is free because the entire idea behind it is users don't get excluded. It's more about being accessible than not charging money.

There was a dual licensed HTML component that I was going to use at work but the commercial licensing conditions (not the price) were pretty bad. Per user licensing with a strict upper limit for both active users and the number of apps even though we don't know how many people are going to use the software and most users are only going to use it for one hour per month and we would probably integrate it into a library that will be automatically included in every of our applications to maintain consistency even if the commercial component is not actively being used in every project.

Paying $100/month or maybe a little more for a commercial license with few restrictions that I can just plop in would have been a no brainer but since I'd have to constantly play license tetris it's going to cost my company more time than the product is worth in the long run. It's not a lack money that forced me to go with an open source project that also happens to be free. It's the massive headaches caused by the commercial one.

Nope, but I kinda thought the whole idea behind open source is that no one company or group of companies/licensees gets privileged access to or control over the software, including any company that happens to have the same name as the piece of software.

I realize that “open source” and “free software” and other related labels mean many things to many people, and some people have very strong opinions about what does and doesn’t qualify, so I’m not trying to be prescriptive about what these terms “really” mean, but to me this is a pretty important almost self-evident part of it. If you want to sell proprietary software just do that!

Was that the point of free software? I thought that the point was freedom: that users be permitted to use, modify & redistribute the software they use. Inclusion of BSD-licensed code in proprietary software fails at that: a macOS user is unable to use macOS without paying for it; unable to legally modify it; and even if he did modify unable to legally distribute those modifications.

BSD-licensed code is awesome for vendors of proprietary software who want a head start; it's not so great for users.

Then it has failed miserably at it. For almost each open source project, there is a closed source that has more users. Windows, iPhone, Photoshop, etc.

Making money is a great way to invest in marketing, and reach a broader audience.

Remark that I'm typing this on my Linux desktop, so I'm definitely not opposed to OS.

In my opinion, the biggest benefit is that you have more ownership, because you're able to make modifications and improvements without being blocked by 1 company. I for one, will always avoid closed sourced libraries. I had way too many blocking issues in the past, so I prefer libraries where I can fix things as fast as I want to.

Because code isn't a good that spoils. When someone shuts their door to my favorite restaurant, the presumption is that they were losing money, and needed to close the doors. When my favorite SaaS service shuts down, it's the same deal.

This is different. They're just being selfish because they got some money, giving the middle finger to everyone. That same code is still sitting in a git repo somewhere, and that's frustrating as hell to anyone that trusted them. It would be no sweat off their backs to at least scale down support over a year to let people transition.

But let's not place the blame on them. It's probably not their choice to fuck over all of their users. I guarantee this is coming from Apple, and you should all remember that when you line up to buy this new fancy 1 port macbook: Fuck Apple, they don't give a shit about open source. They're embrace/extend/extinguish just as Microsoft. They just operate on Unix so it feels like they give us more.

It's okay though. Someone inside will realize they're sitting on a goldmine of information on how to make good software, they'll leave the hellish work environment that is Apple, write an open source version, and it will be superior.

>We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow.

There is no "short of that". Demand open source for everything you do. It's not unreasonable. The modern computer ecosystem IS open source.

You are very much overstating the similarities from open source developers disappearing and a closed source software company leaving you up to dry. One can live on, and one has no hope.

I use a lot of proprietary software too, but I don't see any point or reason to demand that I should be able to use the proprietary software the way that I want.

If you want freedom to use software the way you prefer, use open source software. I write open source software because I think open source is both important, and because it is beneficial both to myself and others.

I run proprietary and open source software side by side. And software that lives forever is the exception not the rule in either case.

Whether you pay with your money or your time, almost all software has an end of life at some point. For any number of reasons. Sometimes it's an open source developer that stops maintaining the software and noone has the time nor capacity to pick up the work. Sometimes it's the company behind a proprietary piece of software that goes bankrupt, or the company is acquired and the developers put to work on something else. Or... any number of reasons.

About the only thing that you can really do in the end, if you want ultimate control, is to develop the software yourself. But that has a huge cost too, which is the amount of your time that you put into it. Or, we can use the software that others make and admit to ourselves that we are not in control of the future of that software nor how we will be able to use it. And in the end we all have to do so with a lot of software that we use, because no one single person is able to maintain all of the software that they rely on, from the OS to the apps and across devices – it's just way too much code and way too much of everything.

And this brings me to the point which is to say, factor this into the consideration when making decisions. Buy a piece of software because it provides value given the current state of things. And be wary of to what extend you allow yourself to be locked into any one app or platform. Don't keep your data on their platform only. Export data to a neutral format and neutral storage medium regularly, so that you have access to it in the future. And if the software makes this impractical, decide which is worth more, the immediate benefit, or the future. Sometimes the answer is immediate benefit, but I think we are susceptible to appreciate immediate benefit even in cases where we should be considering the future more.

I use a MacBook Pro M1 and an iPhone because they provide value to me. They provide a platform that is comfortable to use and which suits me. But my files and my life is not tied too strongly to Apple, and my desktop computer runs Linux and my servers run FreeBSD. And if a piece of software does not fulfill what I need it to, I find an alternative piece of software or I find a different way of doing things.

That might be a new license, but it is by definition not open source. And, no, companies like Google won't “automatically” buy commercial software with that style of license; from their perspective it's worse than regular commercial software since it has all the downsides of traditional commercial software plus gives a competitive advantage to upstart competitors.

EDIT: How about instead a “new” license that, if you feel the software isn't maintained adequately for the needs of your organization, allows you to hire whoever you want to maintain it to your requirements, instead of impotently raging that other people aren't supporting it?

What if I don't care if other monetize my work?

An example: People monetize BSD all the time, -yet I rarely see them discussing licensing changes out in the open at least.

To take it even further: it seems like even if the source code is completely free companies gives back.

As for now my only reason to go with AGPL would be if I wanted to provide a dual licensed library, with AGPL for open source version and a separate commercial version.

I think for the time being I'd actually feel bad if I made a brilliant libary and only released it under AGPL. Why? Because it could have been even more useful to humanity if everyone (including other developers of commercial software like me) could use it.

As someone who has been dedicated to OSS since I started writing software and also wrote some proprietary code for the health care industry (which was not open sourced mainly because there was no point since it would have been a code dump useless to people because hardware patents were involved), I have this feeling:

I would rather good code be reused by proprietary stuff, because someone is going to put that code in systems where failures kill people and it is better that they reuse good code to prevent deaths. It is ridiculous to embrace a philosophy in software licenses where people dying because of your decision to deny good code to people writing proprietary software is okay. The OSS versus proprietary debate should not be done in a manner that causes fatalities.

It used to be this way (at least in the companies I was involved in back then). In the 90s there was plenty of open source but it was generally a huge no-no to use it in commercial software (even when the license was permissible).

Incorporating an open source library (just one!) to our product in the 90s meant months and months of meeting with company lawyers to get that approved. And it meant we (the team developing the product) were 100% on the hook for all fixes.

While I'll admit it was a pain, in hindsight there was a lot of benefit from that approach. It discouraged importing random libraries unless there was a lot of value in them, so we had to be selective. It made it crystal clear that open source is not free, there's a lot of cost and liability.

While it's convenient today to import a library that brings in 700 other libraries, none of them vetted, any one of which might be full of malware, maybe that's actually not so smart.

I increasingly feel we need to go back to explicitly admitting that we (the company) are 100% responsible and liable for the code we ship. If we import it from open source, no matter, we're still on the hook.

Huh, that’s an interesting way of looking at it. I’d tend to be allergic to that type of product I think; I love vim, but I wouldn’t have become reliant on it if it was proprietary, I think. If someone could revoke a license key and cripple my brain, that would be too stressful and uncertain an existence.

That said, open source devotees aren’t typical so I guess my case doesn’t tell me anything about the theory in general.