We can only blame ourselves here. We knew that the companies would exploit it all along. Since before Free Software became a thing. Actually, this knowledge is the very ting that started Free Software. And we watched how Open Source came along to cozy up to businesses and bolster adoption. All this time we knew very well that no one’s going to pay for what’s available for free.
And even after we’ve seen it happening time and time again we keep insisting that FLOSS is the best thing out there.
We’ll have to move on to something else to see a meaningful change. I’d suggest excluding businesses from using software for free. You can keep your collective development, community building, and all the warm fuzzies. But you have to start requiring paid licensing for businesses if you want to stop the exploitation. You simply can not win on the moral basis in a system that has no strong moral aspect to it, such as free market capitalism.
Can someone remind me why large businesses using Free Software is a problem? If they respect the terms of the license and release their changes as Free Software, why do I, as the maintainer, care who uses it? Isn't the entire point of releasing Free Software to maximize user freedom?
The only problem that I've been able to see isn't a problem with Free Software as a concept, it's a problem with VC-funded companies that think "Open Source" is a business model that will somehow get their investors an ROI, but that's a problem with the motivations of VC-funded companies, not with Free Software.
Most FLOSS starts as a weekend project. Most end there, too. But some get big. Those big projects demand a lot of time and effort to deal with all the issues, PRs, mailing list/forum/IRC channel/whathave you moderation. So much effort that it in fact becomes another full-time job. Most people don’t know how to deal with that. They probably like what they’ve built, like all the attention, they try to be helpful. The obvious idea is to turn it somehow into a source of income so that they could continue doing what they like and what is obviously in demand.
I’m not talking about Reacts, coporate internal projects that get open-sourced. I’m talking about your Linuxes, curls, and WordPresses, for that matter. WP didn’t start as a business. The business part of it came a little later. And now that Matt saw the business is lucrative he does what any business does. And what is incompatible with FLOSS.
You’re right pointing out that the entire point of releasing Free Software is to maximize user freedom. But you also have to accept that user freedom is completely incompatible with any sort of sutainable development at scale. It can sort of work for small project that get a bug report every other week but it becomes untenable at a steady rate of half a dozen issues/PRs a day. Basically, unless every FLOSS user is a maintainer of their fork the whole thing falls apart.
And let me tell you, ain’t no one got time for that. Most people do not maintain their forks. Some just don’t want to, some don’t have time, but most just don’t have the skill. They either don’t know 120 languages to support every piece of software they use, or don’t have the domain knowledge that spans kernles, file formats, graphics subsystems, web dev, and a billion other things. There’s simply no way to support all the software without maintainers who specialize in that particular language/domain. So we lock in people in those positions, exercise peer pressure/guilt to keep them working and then turn away and say “they just don’t know how to FLOSS”.
And even after we’ve seen it happening time and time again we keep insisting that FLOSS is the best thing out there.
We’ll have to move on to something else to see a meaningful change. I’d suggest excluding businesses from using software for free. You can keep your collective development, community building, and all the warm fuzzies. But you have to start requiring paid licensing for businesses if you want to stop the exploitation. You simply can not win on the moral basis in a system that has no strong moral aspect to it, such as free market capitalism.