I’m surprised that other people are surprised that for-profit companies constantly try to increase their profits; such companies only contribute to FOSS when that’s more profitable than the alternative. The Linux kernel, AMDGPU, Steam, etc only exist because some part of the software/hardware stack is proprietary (which becomes a more attractive product as the FOSS portion of the stack improves).
I’m definitely not justifying the “rug-pulling”, but people need to stop supporting projects with no potential for long-term profitability unless those projects can survive without any support from for-profit companies. Anything else is destined to fail.
Great video. I actually bought the domain opensource.rip a few weeks ago, just to list the affected projects and explain exactly what jeff geerling did here. Haven’t started it yet, and I’m mostly commenting just to make myself commit to the idea.
Intending to create a static site with Zola, lmk if you wanna contribute. Submitting information like I asked for in the following post would already help me out :)
Corporate
Open source
Pick one. Capitalism cannot abide anything not being commodified. “Corporate open source” is an inherently contradictory term.
A contributor license agreement, or CLA, usually (but not always) includes an important clause: a copyright assignment.
This is a strategy employed by commercial companies with one purpose only: to place a rug under the project, so that they can pull at the first sign of a bad quarter. This strategy exists to subvert the open source social contract. These companies wish to enjoy the market appeal of open source and the free labor of their community to improve their product, but do not want to secure these contributors any rights over their work.
List of some companies that use CLAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement#Users
