There is a “Commons Clause” that people can add but there is some controversy as to whether adding this clause is enforceable. It very much would violate the strict definition of “FOSS”.
That said, I very much am against corporations that make full use of FOSS without contributing anything meaningful in return. I personally believe companies that make over $1M in revenue should absolutely donate something to the FOSS products they use.
Not only that but developers need to stop using permissive licenses like MIT or CC0. Moving to something like GPL3 (and specifically version 3) would go a long way for companies to stop treating open source as a well they can exploit.
Discussion I’ve seen on the subject on Hacker News tends to veer towards MIT being the only license allowed for use in many orgs (with exceptions of course) because license compliance is hard to manage when you’re using a lot of open source and you’re a small org. So many developers release their code with MIT licenses so it gets used more and looks better on the portfolio.
While I can see their perspective I personally agree with your take and would love to see more GPLv3 adoption and fewer stupidly permissive licenses. There’s tooling out there to help with the license compliance challenges, if enough developers moved away from MIT licenses then companies will be forced to deal with it.
There is a “Commons Clause” that people can add but there is some controversy as to whether adding this clause is enforceable. It very much would violate the strict definition of “FOSS”.
That said, I very much am against corporations that make full use of FOSS without contributing anything meaningful in return. I personally believe companies that make over $1M in revenue should absolutely donate something to the FOSS products they use.
Not only that but developers need to stop using permissive licenses like MIT or CC0. Moving to something like GPL3 (and specifically version 3) would go a long way for companies to stop treating open source as a well they can exploit.
Discussion I’ve seen on the subject on Hacker News tends to veer towards MIT being the only license allowed for use in many orgs (with exceptions of course) because license compliance is hard to manage when you’re using a lot of open source and you’re a small org. So many developers release their code with MIT licenses so it gets used more and looks better on the portfolio.
While I can see their perspective I personally agree with your take and would love to see more GPLv3 adoption and fewer stupidly permissive licenses. There’s tooling out there to help with the license compliance challenges, if enough developers moved away from MIT licenses then companies will be forced to deal with it.
They use those licences because more than anything else they want their product used