TLDR: Companies should be required to pay developers for any open source software they use.
He imagines a simple yearly compliance process that gets companies all the rights they need to use Post-Open software. And they’d fund developers who would be encouraged to write software that’s usable by the common person, as opposed to technical experts.
It’s an interesting concept, but I don’t really see any feasible means to get this to kick off.
What are your thoughts on it?
I worked at a company that had an open source policy. They wanted to use as much open source as possible but didn’t want to contribute back in any way. I explained to them that’s the antithesis of open source. If they find a bug, they should be willing to try to fix it or at least help fix it. Now all the code they wrote internally was closed source.
I’m fine with closed source projects but don’t use open source and just leech from it. Eventually people will stop or bugs will never get fixed. Everyone needs to chip in either money or time.
Depending on the nature of the changes, it might be more advantageous to tell them that it’s easier (i.e. cheaper) to contribute changes upstream, rather than maintaining them separately forever. Also, the good will and reputation boost involved can be significant.
Don’t say it if it isn’t true or anything, but in a lot of cases it’s true.
They didn’t ever touch the open source code. They’d just open a bug or feature enhancement. Why it annoyed me so much. I believe open source is best when everyone contributes something. Either time, money, or something of value.