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Toot

Written by Benjohn on 2024-12-19 at 08:28

Musing on a walk. Is there an argument that Copyleft, while a good ideal, wants to utilise and live with a capitalist system by having it contribute?

I think I it is preferable to either end, or at least subjugate capitalism to the commons.

Given that, is there a better model for open source things? Is free for non profit, reasonable pricing for profit making better?

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Descendants

Written by Dave Griffiths on 2024-12-19 at 08:33

@benjohn Good questions... An old, related problem here is that there is no legal definition for "for-profit" or "commercial" - e.g. arguments back in the day over whether you could sell cdroms (for the price of a cdrom) with linux on them.

This is what makes CC-NC licences problematic - everyone thinks they know what non-commercial means but it's tricky to actually pin it down legally.

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Written by Benjohn on 2024-12-19 at 12:36

@nebogeo nods I think that’s pretty reasonable, but I feel like there’s probably a good enough definition in a lot of cases for it to work? Eg, all the banks, FANG; this is commercial use.

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Written by Dave Griffiths on 2024-12-19 at 15:14

@benjohn So there is a threshold? Is that on turnover or profit? It's too complicated for licensing.

What worked in practice was the difference between GPL and MIT and friends meant that we were categorically told to avoid using GPL code in anything when I was work at a multinational corp - the liability for a big org is too great. This is partly why I've always used GPL in my code since.

You could also think about it the other way around, governments could reward companies or individuals spending time working on open source using the R&D corporation tax credits system.

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