<story><title>Scapegoating free software’s failures</title><url>https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/11/17/VC-Shill.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>api</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve thought this for years: the aggressive defense of super liberal OSS licenses with no sort of &amp;quot;SaaS clause&amp;quot; or other limits turns FOSS into free labor for SaaS companies.&lt;p&gt;SaaS is more closed than closed: you control nothing, not even your data, and can trivially be spied on and monetized in other questionable ways. The fact that some of the pieces of a SaaS site are open source is meaningless and changes nothing.&lt;p&gt;If all code must be free &amp;quot;as in beer&amp;quot; for all uses then this kind of SaaS (paid or &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; and paid for via surveillance capitalism) is literally the only possible business model. Well that and traditional 100% closed. The Googles and Facebooks of the world are fine with that.</text></item><item><author>catern</author><text>While this article&amp;#x27;s tone is somewhat angry and personal, it makes some quite interesting points and takes a perspective that I&amp;#x27;ve never heard before.&lt;p&gt;Before reading the article I was tentatively in favor of more expansive copyleft licenses such as Mongo&amp;#x27;s SSPL, for various reasons. But I hadn&amp;#x27;t considered something implied by that position, which this article says directly: The FSF and what one might call &amp;quot;mainstream copyleft&amp;quot; are aggressively defending corporate interests by attacking such licenses. Perhaps they (the FSF et al) don&amp;#x27;t do it intentionally, but that&amp;#x27;s nevertheless their effect...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skybrian</author><text>Just as a side note, &amp;quot;free labor&amp;quot; is common and not necessarily a bad thing. Whenever you give someone a gift, whatever work you did on it is effectively free labor. You could also think of donations to charity that way when you fund them out of your salary, not to mention volunteering.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s true that often people don&amp;#x27;t want to do that, though, and this is certainly understandable.</text></comment>
<story><title>Scapegoating free software’s failures</title><url>https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/11/17/VC-Shill.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>api</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve thought this for years: the aggressive defense of super liberal OSS licenses with no sort of &amp;quot;SaaS clause&amp;quot; or other limits turns FOSS into free labor for SaaS companies.&lt;p&gt;SaaS is more closed than closed: you control nothing, not even your data, and can trivially be spied on and monetized in other questionable ways. The fact that some of the pieces of a SaaS site are open source is meaningless and changes nothing.&lt;p&gt;If all code must be free &amp;quot;as in beer&amp;quot; for all uses then this kind of SaaS (paid or &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; and paid for via surveillance capitalism) is literally the only possible business model. Well that and traditional 100% closed. The Googles and Facebooks of the world are fine with that.</text></item><item><author>catern</author><text>While this article&amp;#x27;s tone is somewhat angry and personal, it makes some quite interesting points and takes a perspective that I&amp;#x27;ve never heard before.&lt;p&gt;Before reading the article I was tentatively in favor of more expansive copyleft licenses such as Mongo&amp;#x27;s SSPL, for various reasons. But I hadn&amp;#x27;t considered something implied by that position, which this article says directly: The FSF and what one might call &amp;quot;mainstream copyleft&amp;quot; are aggressively defending corporate interests by attacking such licenses. Perhaps they (the FSF et al) don&amp;#x27;t do it intentionally, but that&amp;#x27;s nevertheless their effect...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>closeparen</author><text>&amp;gt;free labor for SaaS companies&lt;p&gt;Approximately all then open source software I work with on a daily basis is SaaS companies pooling efforts on the problems they have in common, yes.</text></comment>