[federalfarmer]

>indie devs hiding their source code from corps takeover is the new free software.

High power level take.

The Stallman ethos of Free Software simply hasn't played out the way idealists thought it would. Instead, libraries are standardized by megacorps to farm employees inculcated into their design patterns and get GitHub clout chasers to fix bugs for free.

Open source really needs something like the CC-BY-NC-ND* license. Code is open but you can't profit from it. Unmodified redistribution requires credit. You can modify the code for personal use but you can't redistribute it without permission.

This model at least eliminates the potential maliciousness of a lot of closed-source software while leaving room for indie devs to profit from their work.

*[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/]

[trollbridge]

AGPL3 gets somewhat near this; if someone wants to profit in the cloud from it, they have to share all changes they make (and in theory then anyone else could go run a for profit or free service in the cloud or locally with the same new code).

[meiraleal]

Sharing code back isn't enough. AGPLv3 falls short in ensuring the profits from the tools get shared with the creators and maintainers

[candiddevmike]

> they have to share all changes they make

Only with users who access the service.

[b_shulha]

There is a Fair Source model, driven by Sentry: https://fair.io

[federalfarmer]

Didn't know about this, glad to know others are seeing a similar problem! I've definitely tried to monetize self-hosted projects that could benefit from Fair Core in particular.

The flexibility of the licensing text is also nice as it'd be very easy to modify the standard "two years to open source" timetable or drop in a different license type like GPL:

https://github.com/keygen-sh/fcl.dev/blob/master/FCL-1.0-MIT...

[RobotToaster]

> Open source really needs something like the CC-BY-NC-ND* license.

That seems akin to saying "vegan food really needs pork", since by definition a NC licence can't be open source. Not to mention such licences cause as many, if not more, problems than they solve.

https://community.oscedays.org/t/why-are-non-commercial-lice...

[lowkey]

Notably the open source foundation tried and failed to trademark the term open source in 1999.

As such “by definition a NC license can’t be open source” is true only by certain definitions. Open source is a generic term, not owned by the OSI, despite the holy wars fought over it.

I realize my post is controversial and may spur vitriol from some. It is an uncomfortable truth for many.

[pjmlp]

Mostly because many decided that to make money, they had to go with VC money and business friendly licenses, instead of dual license GPL + commercial.