From: Alejandro Colomar <alx-AT-kernel.org>
Hi all,
As you know, I've been maintaining the Linux man-pages project for the last 4 years as a voluntary. I've been doing it in my free time, and no company has sponsored that work at all. At the moment, I cannot sustain this work economically any more, and will temporarily and indefinitely stop working on this project. If any company has interests in the future of the project, I'd welcome an offer to sponsor my work here; if so, please let me know.
Have a lovely day! Alex
In my opinion it's criminal just how often this happens. Big business making obscene profit off the back of volunteer work like yours and many others across the OSS community.
That's why the current state of open source licenses doesn't work. Commercial use should be forbidden for free users. You could dual license the work, with a single, main license applying to everyone, and a second addendum license that just contains the clause for that specific use, be it personal or corporate. Corporate use of any kind requires supporting the project financially.
I hope we see an evolution of licensing. Giant companies shouldn't get a free pass if they're just going to treat the original devs like a commodity to be used up.
I agree, but this is mostly an issue with permissive licenses like MIT. GPL and its variants have enough teeth in them to deal with shit like this. I'm scared of the rising popularity of these permissive licenses. A lot of indie devs have somehow been convinced by corpos that they should avoid the GPL and go with MIT and alike
Oh I definitely agree with you there. I just think GPL is close but not close enough.
Just, um, don't invite that guy who helped out with the xz tools...
Everything needs to be slapped with the AGPL. Fuck corporate America
I thought AGPL was the more restrictive version of GPL? Which license should we use so that corporates need to pay?
Unfortunately it is still not enough. There have been many instances of people using these licenses and still corporations using their software without giving back, and developers being upset about it.
And unfortunately there are no popular licenses that limit that. I've seen a few here and there, but doesn't seem to be a standard.
My company will let me purchase software, but it won't let me donate to FOSS. Budgeting says it's "unnecessary". So screwed up. (A tiny amount money on my end, but still, it would be nice to help out a little.)
