NVIDIA GPUs are probably too expensive

https://lemmy.world/post/42043519

I hope we eventually get a copyleft lisence that states: “by using this product in a comercial product you have commited to supporting it, either by monetary fee or doing development work for it behalf, otherwise this product is entirely free of cost and is provided as-is”.

I don’t think believe using GPL will achieve anything. I am a professional developer. If I’m looking for a library for a problem and find one that’s GPL, then I will simply not consider using it. What are the options here?

I could search for a different library with an MIT license. Let’s, for the sake of argument, assume that there are none.

I could ask my boss if I can release all our source code to the public. Yeah, sure. That’s going to happen.

I could ask my boss if I can have a bit of budget to haggle out a license with the library author. That’s a waste of time and money. Hammering out a license agreement across language boundaries and jurisdictions will involve a lot of lawyering and waiting that’s just not worth it. The additional fees would likely even outweigh the agreed payment to the author.

So what’s left? I don’t use a library and program the thing myself. It might take a while, but I’m way cheaper than lawyers. So in the end, GPL won’t do a thing to force a business to support FOSS, but will annoy developers.

You shouldn’t be using GPL licensed software for that. End of the story. The person who created that software doesn’t want you tp use in your proprietary software and thats exactly why it is GPL. Only Free software are supposed to use them.

Think about it. You cannot use proprietary code of other softwares in your workplace, so why should you be able to use free software in yours? The work done by you for your employer is not benefiting free software, unless yours is also free. So yeah GPL is a “fuck proprietary” license by design. And it does achive its thing. It is good for other free software, and everyone is forced to preserve the freedom in it.