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Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing" (pluralistic.net)

submitted 9 months ago by kpw@kbin.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

492 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.

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[–] puttybrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 39 points 9 months ago (4 children)

If I made software that people cared enough about to crack and pirate, I'd be happy that it's popular enough for that to happen.

I am a software developer but I've only worked on SaAS and open source projects.

[–] zerofk@lemm.ee 25 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I work on software which is pirated. It is even sold by crackers, who make money off my work. This does not make me proud.

What does make me proud is when a paying customer says they love a specific feature, or that our software saves them a lot of manual work.

[–] poopkins@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Pride unfortunately doesn't pay the bills. It's terrific that you contribute to open source, but not all commercial software can be open sourced.

[–] psud@aussie.zone 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Popularity opens other ways to make money. Open source is profitable for GNU. Cory Doctorow does fine.

[–] poopkins@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I don't think it's reasonable to expect every commercial product to find profitability through exposure. I can attest to this first hand as I had published an open source Android game that was republished without ads. This led me to ultimately make the repository private, because I could not find a way to remain profitable while offering the source code and bearing the costs of labor and various cloud services.

On the flip side I guess I can take credit for the millions of installs from the other app… except they didn't publicly acknowledge me.

[–] psud@aussie.zone 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Was it under a "copyleft" licence (like GPL) that forces the other one to also be open source? Did you use a licence that requires you are acknowledged?

If you did the first, you at least pulled someone else into open source work

[–] poopkins@lemmy.world 0 points 9 months ago

Yes, GPL.

At the time I had seen that it had been forked into numerous private repositories, I believe roughly 100 or so. Perhaps I could have made a claim to have the other app taken down through Google Play, but I had no faith that this would be resolved, and even if it would be, it would be an ongoing problem.

As for whether they would have made open source contributions or not is in the end a moot point for me, because the only change that I observed was that they changed the colors and typeface and extracted the in-game menu into a separate welcome screen. I would not have merged this back into my repository.

While I myself violated the copyleft of my project by taking it closed source, I felt that it was my only resort. I've continued to develop the game over the past few years and by modernizing it and adding additional content, I've been able to significantly outpace my competitor.

For me, this ordeal had been a bit of an eye opener. I came out of university fully supportive of open source and when I discovered how this affected a real world project, I genuinely approached this situation understanding that it was just a risk I needed to accept. However, in the three years that it was available on GitHub, I received only two small PRs, and combined with the license violations, I felt that there was really no advantage to keeping it open source.

While this is just my anecdote, it has changed my perspective on how open source can realistically work more broadly. I honestly can't envision any kind of business that needs to offset large production costs able to publish that content viably as open source.

[–] ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 1 points 9 months ago

Most people who work on open source projects have a lucrative job and work on Open Source on the side. I also volunteer, but I still need a job that actually pays me as well.

Reading some of the comments here it feels like speaking to little children who believe money magically appears on their account.