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”.
Edit: and the developers can freely reproduce the GPL license exception for all their products:
// Under Section 7 of GPL version 3, you are granted additional // permissions described in the GCC Runtime Library Exception, version // 3.1, as published by the Free Software Foundation.Currently, and I don’t know why, this extremely useful license exception for (C++) headers, which is meant for compiled down to machine-code is not usable for anything else. If your library is not part of GCC, the GPL does not help you here. As such, if you publish a header only library under GPL, you cannot state that the code using your code is not under “API” boundary, ie. free of GPL, while keeping your precious header under GPL. And no, LGPL, does not save you here.
You only have non-copyleft lisences like MIT (disgusting), Apache (shitly less gross), BSL-1.0 (still non copyleft) or LGPL (not gross, but extremely limiting.)
And, if you still publish something, I plead it is at least under GPL, since this guarantees a life for the produce, non-negotioable, forever, which I think is still better than dying and giving up to pooh of public domain.
There is a “Commons Clause” that people can add but there is some controversy as to whether adding this clause is enforceable. It very much would violate the strict definition of “FOSS”.
That said, I very much am against corporations that make full use of FOSS without contributing anything meaningful in return. I personally believe companies that make over $1M in revenue should absolutely donate something to the FOSS products they use.
Not only that but developers need to stop using permissive licenses like MIT or CC0. Moving to something like GPL3 (and specifically version 3) would go a long way for companies to stop treating open source as a well they can exploit.
They use those licences because more than anything else they want their product used
Discussion I’ve seen on the subject on Hacker News tends to veer towards MIT being the only license allowed for use in many orgs (with exceptions of course) because license compliance is hard to manage when you’re using a lot of open source and you’re a small org. So many developers release their code with MIT licenses so it gets used more and looks better on the portfolio.
While I can see their perspective I personally agree with your take and would love to see more GPLv3 adoption and fewer stupidly permissive licenses. There’s tooling out there to help with the license compliance challenges, if enough developers moved away from MIT licenses then companies will be forced to deal with it.
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.
That’s why, if I ever am in a position to meaningfully add to FOSS, it will be under the MIT license.
My favorite option: use the GPL licensed solution to wow your boss by getting the project done fast. Then, the company either gets sued, thereby financially contributing to the project, or you are asked to replace it with your own implementation, giving you job security.
Or… don’t work at a workplace so toxic that you need to pull these shenanigans.
Eh, it’s not really so different from the situation you described. I want to support FOSS in my work, but the chances of moving the needle on donations or contributions is slim to none.
Yeah open source monetization sucks in the corporate world. Maybe there could be a license that goes something along the lines of “you may use this for free as long as your company’s years revenue isn’t over X €”
Called “Fair use” or “ethical software” but people hate it and lawyers tell you it is not enforceable for… some reason
Tying it to revenue wouldn’t work that well due to inflation. Metas AI has a license that basically says that, but with a user number. Both ideas however would mean that the project isn’t open source anymore
Open source doesn’t mean free for everyone for every purpose
Quote from the Open Source Initiative definition of Open Source:
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
Not everyone agrees:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html
In practice, open source stands for criteria a little looser than those of free software. As far as we know, all existing released free software source code would qualify as open source. Nearly all open source software is free software, but there are exceptions.
First, some open source licenses are too restrictive, so they do not qualify as free licenses. For example, Open Watcom is nonfree because its license does not allow making a modified version and using it privately. Fortunately, few programs use such licenses.
I’m not sure the GNU play project or FSF are the best source for a definition on open source, as they don’t “agree” with open source. Same reason a capitalist might have a very dubious definition of communism, at least comparing it to how actual communists might use the word
GPL only guarantees the source for customers.
Companies just post it because it’s easier than mailing it out on request.
True, I don’t think there’s really a good solution to this (other than getting rid of capitalism)
Epic does that but it’s under a contract (user agreement) not the license and OSS can’t afford the legal fees that they can.
The other issue is putting the license under a shell company.
What about something like “1 gold bar price*7.4”? It would keep up with inflation way more. Currently 1kg of gold has a value around 135.992€ btw
[I am not an economist, i am just a random dude who thought it was a good idea due to gold value having always the same value or smth like that]
Gold markets are too volatile.
To mitigate these limitations and reduce write pressure, we’ve migrated, and continue to migrate, shardable (i.e. workloads that can be horizontally partitioned), write-heavy workloads to sharded systems such as Azure Cosmos DB, optimizing application logic to minimize unnecessary writes. We also no longer allow adding new tables to the current PostgreSQL deployment. New workloads default to the sharded systems.
“wow, we’ve made our postgres so good and fast… by moving heavy workloads to a NoSQL database engine”. Truly mind-blowing, OpenAI. Just like their LLM service, not even their technical staff can stop themselves from lying and writing misleading statements.
The only interesting part could have been what they use for caching… but of course they don’t give any details at all. And all the rest is already well-known DBOps stuff… and basically all automatic with stuff like cnpg.
web scale
They should have used mongoDB https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
I love open source but I feel like it’s hard to get donations. So by making code gpl, I can only hope that the company using my code will at least make it open source.
Their sponsors list is pretty out of date, I clocked crunchydata on there which is now snowflake, and that’s an old logo
The financial supporters page has a donor from December 2025, so they are listing new sponsors. And Crunchydata seems to still use that branding in https://www.crunchydata.com/
Weird, that page is likely for legacy customers as snowflake owns them and they’re now known by another name.
The logo itself they’re using is an old logo, predating 2022 when they moved to the “friendly hippo” away from “murder hippo”
Imagine growing up to find out that your parents never paid a dime to help your aunts and uncles whose donations you were raised on.
You’re voting with your wallet to have your freedom restricted when you use FOSS software without donating or contributing, but then pay for closed source software because it demands payment.
