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Not really. Just make your software AGPLv3. It's literally the most free license GNU and the FSF have ever come up with. It ensures your freedom so hard the corporations cannot tolerate it. Now you have leverage. If the corporations want it so bad, they can have it. They just gotta ask for permission to use it under different terms. Then they gotta pay for it.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html

All you have to do is not MIT or BSD license the software. When you do that, you're essentially transferring your intellectual property to the corporations at zero cost. Can't think of a bigger wealth transfer in history. From well meaning individual programmers and straight to the billionaires.

The BSD style openness only makes sense in a world without intellectual property. Until the day copyright is abolished, it's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved. Nothing else makes sense.




The problem is, there will be almost zero packages that (very few) "corporations want so bad". The only exception might be cloud providers, that want to host your mildly-popular open-source message queue, but, again, if you are Amazon, you'll soon just re-implement that message queue, drop the "original" one, and after a couple of years your mildly-popular project will become not popular at all.


In that case we'll simply end up exactly where we started. There's a twist though. This time around we're not being taken for fools and exploited.

Better to have a completely irrelevant forgotten project than a massively popular one that makes us zero dollars while CEOs make billions off of it.

This post always comes to mind every time this topic comes up:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120620103603/http://zedshaw.co...

> I want people to appreciate the work I’ve done and the value of what I’ve made.

> Not pass on by waving “sucker” as they drive their fancy cars.


That is a really good post from 15? years ago, and still very relevant to this day.


Yeah, I've never forgotten it.

He hasn't stopped blogging either.

https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/

https://zedshaw.com/blog/2018-03-25-the-billionaires-vs-bran...

That last link is about this place and covers some abuse he got here on HN over that GPL article. All the way back from 2009.




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