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I think you've missed the point again, it's more like this:

1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.

2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything.

3. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.

If you can't go to step 3, then you are doing it wrong and need to change step 1 from "giving it away for free" to something like "giving it away for free to the common people and at a price for corporate."

Which you could say "but that's not open source!" and you'd be right, which is exactly my point here: I don't think you want to do fully open source software, you want to do software and get paid for it somehow. If you do open source and get paid eventually and non binding, that's a nice little bonus, but it's not the main goal, never was with open source.





Although I agree with your overall point, there is a middle ground here: (commercially) non-free but open source software.

I believe that's where the biggest disagreement ITT lies. There are currently good ways to do FOSS, proprietary closed-source and free closed-source software development. But if the OSS is worth charging for (commercial) use, devs are left with asking for donations, SaaS or "pay me to work on this issue/feature".

There arguably should be better mechanisms to reward OSS development, even if the largest part of an OSSndev's motivation is intrinsic.


Agree completely, that's why I don't understand these people who demand payment for open source code after having given it away to the world.



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