The Register recently published a story titled Putin on the code: DoD reportedly relies on utility written by Russian dev. They should be ashamed of this story. This poor open source developer is getting beat up now to score some internet points. It’s very upsetting.
But anyway, let’s look at some receipts.
If you’re not real smrt, it seems like pointing out an open source project is written by one person in a country you don’t like is a bad thing. It could be. But it also could be the software running THE WHOLE F*CKING PLANET is written by one person. In a country. But we have no idea which country. It’s not the same person mind you, but it’s one person.
We need a new license. My hope is currently residing in the Post Open License. IINM it will legally define how commercial instances have to contribute back or pay to opensource maintainers/devs and how it will work in complicated dependency trees.
Also, IMO, we should stop using weak copyleft stuff like MIT, Apache, MPL, etc. GPL and AGPL seem like the best licenses to force companies to contribute back, even if it’s not monetarily.
I do like projects that say “any support requests require a contribution (monetary or otherwise) and will be ignored otherwise”. It’s a fuck you to companies that create support requests and don’t pay or contribute.
Anti Commercial-AI license