- cross-posted to:
- opensource
- cross-posted to:
- opensource
This doesn’t surprise me at all… Just like bots in games. Selling a service that benefits another. Its shady, but definitely believable.
Also, what if this is an actual viable way to “market” for an open source project?
There 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.
There’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 to cynically change 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.