>To think there are so many great devs out there, spending their own time and dime to build free of charge software which is then commercially exploited by cloud providers is just sad.
The obvious solution to this is to use the AGPLv3 license for all or most software one writes, which is what I prefer to do, as it's the strongest copyleft license available currently.
We see in many circles that it's not the hip thing to do, to write copyleft software. No, the hip thing to do is write permissively-licensed software and either not care about companies using it as free labor or complaining about a ''social contract'' that wants to be implied, but never explicitly stated as copyleft does.
I believe the trend towards permissive licensing has been pushed mostly by corporate interests and now we see the result. I believe things would be better if every company had to either share its code as copyleft, write everything itself, or actually pay for other proprietary software it could incorporate into its own. That is, I'd rather Grammarly, as an example, have no real option but to purchase an Allegro or Lispworks license, rather than being able to use SBCL and contribute little or nothing.
The obvious solution to this is to use the AGPLv3 license for all or most software one writes, which is what I prefer to do, as it's the strongest copyleft license available currently.
We see in many circles that it's not the hip thing to do, to write copyleft software. No, the hip thing to do is write permissively-licensed software and either not care about companies using it as free labor or complaining about a ''social contract'' that wants to be implied, but never explicitly stated as copyleft does.
I believe the trend towards permissive licensing has been pushed mostly by corporate interests and now we see the result. I believe things would be better if every company had to either share its code as copyleft, write everything itself, or actually pay for other proprietary software it could incorporate into its own. That is, I'd rather Grammarly, as an example, have no real option but to purchase an Allegro or Lispworks license, rather than being able to use SBCL and contribute little or nothing.