And before you say "the carpenter enjoys making chairs too"... I'll believe that if you can show me that a substantial percentage of carpenters spend 8 hours a day making chairs even when they're not monetising them. A substantial percentage of developers spend 8 hours a day coding when they're unemployed because they enjoy it.
> Seems like a mistake to rely on it for anything other than entertainment
I disagree, shouldn't be used even for entertainment. Going to YouTube for entertainment and relying on it to guide you is how you end up being radicalised on certain topics.
Obviously I am aware that not all user actions represent choices, but the hypothetical being proposed was specifically in the context of good established free software alternatives existing. In that context users switching to software with more permissive licenses would imply a choice on the users part. It is reasonable to assume this choice implies the users value something about the other software more than they value what the GPL incumbent has to offer. Of course such a choice could be motivated by many things like newer features, slick website, the author’s marketing, but whatever the case if the license was not sufficient enticement to stay, this feels significant.
Hey, this is a completely unacceptable comment on HN. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here. We have to ban accounts that do this repeatedly. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Combining source code under different licenses into one product is a nightmare.
You have to follow the AGPL "no additional restrictions" clause while also following the Apache License, and the Apache License might have require you to follow additional restrictions.
Honestly this has never been an issue for me, sure I have had to explain the limits of the licenses and check that I understand them. I guess it depends on your use case, so I am still uncertain when this has become a problem for you.
I think that the photos they have on their front page should be enough to tell you who is their target market.
I've invented this heuristic: if the page that describes the project uses the word "solutions", then they'll attempt to use "open source" to obtain free labour, but will distribute the revenues only amongst those people who actually have control.
I don't think the GP implied anything about race? The photos I see are war frigates, power plants, some sort of military operations center, and commercial airliners.
I left every option open for OP to explain. I personally couldn't care less what skin colour are in any of the photos. Not a single one of them match my own.
Everything you mentioned in that list in people who can pay. As opposed to people who code and they use what they code, and furthermore share it with other people who also code and use what they code.
It's "open source" so that they save on developer costs, not for ideological reasons, and you can tell from the photos on their front page - that's what I was implying.
I think this is kind of cynical. I often adopt open source tools because I want to avoid vendor lockin. And so do many. It's not like I say, "Wow. Another code base to dive into and spend hours trying to understand." Nope. I just want the assurance that I can do it if I ever need to do so.
Governmental organizations and corporate firms is the vibe (or maybe that was obvious and you're just trolling).
I think the point was that open source hasn't often been supported by companies serving these kinds of markets and the interests of the broader community are often sidelined.
The time and energy that it takes to do it and build it, and then make it easy for current users to move their automatic updates to the fork, then maintaining it etc.
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