in a fair world, all of these companies who abuse the GPL license woild get sued and have to face actual consequences. but the legal system favors the rich, and the FOSS dev is left to starve. killed by their own passion.

These are my thoughts regarding FOSS for a long time. The sense of facilitating the development and freedom of the project has been distorted years ago, when large corporations put their hands on this project, controlling it. Just look at the amount of “OpenSource” soft and services controlled by Google, M$, Amazon, FB … Yes, they are free to distribute and modifiable by devs, but mostly full of APIs from these corporations, not controllable by the user, subtracting their sovereignty and only modifiable with effort by people capable of understanding the scripts and redirects they contain. For a normal user it is increasingly irrelevant whether the project is FOSS or proprietary, while these products and the internet in general are in the hands of these companies.

A simple question is enough, which one do you prefer to use? FOSS projects from large corporations, or Freeware from small independent startups, if you don’t have the knowledge to review the script anyway, almost impossible in millions of lines, with external references from large apps and services? It becomes decisions of mere trust, perhaps with the help of external services, such as WebKoll, Blacklight, Unfurl and similar, where in the end the license that the product has is irrelevant, with respect to security and privacy, often in question or not, in some like others. In the end only the intentions and ethics of the developer matter.

Yes, of course, the concept of OSS, FOSS and FLOSS requires a profound review and update, so that it does not become a destroyer of what it aims to protect and promote, a free internet.

• https://github.com/microsoft
• https://opensource.google/projects
• https://aws.amazon.com/es/opensource/
• https://opensource.fb.com/projects/
• https://code.gov …

Doesn’t make sense at all.

I keep seeing Redhat used an example, but they contribute a HUGE amount a source code and projects… Pipewire, systemd, rpm, DBUS and even the main XML addon for VSCode, etc.

I don’t think people realise how much poop linux would be swimming in if they went bankrupt…

Redhat are literally one of the big reasons why Linux is so seamless these days, and they’re solving a lot of the big problems. And from my understanding, they still contribute the code seperately anyway.

That being said, I agree money needs to go towards developers. However, a lot of them end up hired at major companies. And I don’t think this is the way to approach it

I agree. Either use a business source license like Elastic and others, or fight for the installation of a third party that audits proprietary code for license use and sues if the rules haven’t been followed. It’s why I like the creative commons. They are quite realistic. Most of their licenses say: if you use this commercially, you have to pay. If not, then it’s free.

People who claim business source licenses are “not opensource” sound like such capitalist shills to me. It’s as if they’re shouting from the rooftops “it’s OK to fuck over opensource developers because principles matter more than reality”.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Most of these problems are literally just capitalism. This solution is just a band aid, and even then is unlikely to be implemented in a way that will help the problem.