Linked by snydeq on Mon 1st Jun 2009 16:28 UTC
InfoWorld reports on the fight over open source 'leeches' -- companies that use open source technology but don't give back to the open source community. While some view such organizations as a tragedy of the commons, others view the notion of 'freeloaders' as a relic of open source's Wild West era, when coding was a higher calling and free software a religion.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Really, this comes down to a 'legal' vs 'moral' argument and illustrates how they are not the same thing.
Its perfectly 'legal' for a commercial enterprise to use GPL, BSD, or other open source software for its own use and to even make money off of it.
However, it is also perfectly fine for someone to argue that its 'moral' for said enterprise to contribute back to the community from which it derived the benefits.
This is no different than any other 'community' that a commercial enterprise deals with.
Some companies choose to give a little back to the community, encourage their employees to donate a little company time to charity, community volunteering, and have policies of being 'good neighbors', and some companies have no such concepts in the way they run their business.
Why is that so hard to understand?