Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Back in pre-history - thirty years ago, say - software designers wanted to make their work available for free, but commercial companies would take it, make a small change (maybe), and call it their own, charging money for it. Open source licensing changed all that, because vendors couldn't simply cash in on someone's work to create an entirely closed and proprietary version of it. But all that was before the cloud and software as a service. And so open source designers are facing the same problem they did in pre-history: a company like Amazon comes along, takes an open source database, and builds a closed and proprietary service out of it, and contributes nothing back to the original project. That's why, according to this article, a number of open source companies changed their licensing this year. They feel they're being taken advantage of. And they're right.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

Copyright 2024
Last Updated: Mar 28, 2024 1:55 p.m.

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