💭 ᴍɪɴʏᴀᴇɴOver 3.1 million fake "stars" on GitHub projects used to boost rankings
geography082There is a clear situation in Foss( even more in self hosting) where projects are presented as free open source but they are intended to monetize at the end and use the community help for development.
Can you give examples of this? What is the coat to the end user? Hardware, IT-services (VPS, and alike?) or like map providers using OSM data?
aleqIsn’t this kinda what the controversy around the ElastiSearch licensing change was about? I think people have had similar frustrations with HashiCorp software, but I don’t know the details.
In my opinion that was a little different. The enterprise was using the software basically, contributing nothing but selling services around it. The licence was meant to force them to help out monetarily from what they were making off it. But rather than do that Mason forked it and now have to support their own imp with their own devs.
D_Air1Which is just as good in my opinion if I am understanding the situation correctly.
This happened in the earlier years of Android. Developers were FOSS until people helped them get the app to a polished state. Then close it and charge money. Make a big push to promote the paid app.
jagged_circleThere’s nothing inherently wrong with monetizing FOSS. People gotta eat.
If I understand them correctly, @[email protected]’s point is not that it is wrong to monetize FOSS, but rather that companies increasingly develop open source projects for some time, benefiting from unpaid work in the form of contributions and, perhaps most importantly, starving other projects from both such contributions and funding, only for cynically changing the license once they establish a position in their respective ecosystem and lock in enough customers. The last significant instance that I remember is Redis’ case, but there seem to be ever more.