TLDR: Companies should be required to pay developers for any open source software they use.

He imagines a simple yearly compliance process that gets companies all the rights they need to use Post-Open software. And they’d fund developers who would be encouraged to write software that’s usable by the common person, as opposed to technical experts.

It’s an interesting concept, but I don’t really see any feasible means to get this to kick off.

What are your thoughts on it?

  • mo_ztt ✅
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    15 months ago

    Hm, interesting stuff. Yeah, maybe it’s more common than I was aware of – that’s still a little weird to me, because there are entities like FSF that are so happy to go to bat for people legally if they do want to make it a legal issue.

    Maybe it’s made a little more complex because a lot of authors don’t want to “punish” the company involved so much as they just want people to comply with the terms of the license, and a lot of companies aren’t violating the license out of maliciousness but just from lack of knowledge or it just being more difficult than it sounds to keep your ducks in a row with source availability.

    FWIW, I know Android phones generally have something buried in the settings where it explains what the licensing is for the code on the phone and with a theoretical offer for the source if you want it. That seems like what the Youtube talk is about; just creating the technical tools so that people can be in compliance without it being a pain in the butt that costs your engineers time and costs you money to do which companies are going to be tempted to avoid. But yeah, maybe people are getting sloppy about it in a way I wasn’t aware of; that’s sad to me if so.