This kind of attitude is why less and less people are open sourcing software
Why would I waste my time releasing any of my projects for free when people will attack me and call me a poser anyway
Might as well charge people money, who by the way will actually be grateful to do so, that try to keep up with the open source community's purity treadmill
There’s no treadmill. Belief in software freedoms has always been belief in software freedoms.
It’s ok if you don’t believe in software freedoms, but you shouldn’t pretend to be someone who does by releasing some software that respects users’ software freedoms. It’s deceptive.
Either you care about software freedoms, or you don’t. If you don’t, why are you releasing any software under free software licenses? If you do, why are you releasing any nonfree software?
Also, do you have a single bit of backing data to suggest that your first sentence is true? I don’t believe that it is. It seems to me there is more free software than ever before.
> It’s ok if you don’t believe in software freedoms, but you shouldn’t pretend to be someone who does by releasing some software that respects users’ software freedoms. It’s deceptive.
As long as the different parts are clearly marked/indicated as such, why would you impose such a ridiculous standard? In your world, if a company makes 99% of their software GPL, and then releases some proprietary tool, they're suddenly being deceptive? Would you prefer to just lose the 99%?
I agree GP's attitude is ridiculous, but if a very small number of purists on the internet is the reason less people are open sourcing software, then those people are just as guilty of bad reasoning/judgment as the purists.
IMHO the real reason is that the threat of hostile/competing forks has gone up. It used to be gauche at best, evil at worst, to take somebody's open source code and compete with them, but increasingly the landscape is changing. I think that's the real problem, and IMHO the answer to that is the AGPL, not to go proprietary.
Why would I waste my time releasing any of my projects for free when people will attack me and call me a poser anyway
Might as well charge people money, who by the way will actually be grateful to do so, that try to keep up with the open source community's purity treadmill