If I don’t want to spend money on tips at the restaurant, even less will I want to spend it on donations
The difference is that a tip is “you’re already getting paid to do your job, why would I pay you to do your job?”. Whereas this is “you gave me this for free, so maybe if I make a bunch of money I could show appreciation for that gift” or pay-it-forward so the next guy can also get a free start, etc.
And yes I know they’re are busted places on this Earth where basically servers don’t already get paid to do their job and are thus reliant on tips as income, but that’s a different problem…
I have third world money. Every penny I make goes into things I need to survive, not things I could get for free after a Google search
That’s cool man, we’re not talking about you. We’re talking about Open AI, who pays employees hundreds of thousands of American dollars a year.
You should be allowed to use it for free. And a donation from a company like them, could make it easier for a person like you to get an awesome cutting edge tool for free!
I hope we eventually get a copyleft lisence that states: “by using this product in a comercial product you have commited to supporting it, either by monetary fee or doing development work for it behalf, otherwise this product is entirely free of cost and is provided as-is”.
Edit: and the developers can freely reproduce the GPL license exception for all their products:
// Under Section 7 of GPL version 3, you are granted additional // permissions described in the GCC Runtime Library Exception, version // 3.1, as published by the Free Software Foundation.Currently, and I don’t know why, this extremely useful license exception for (C++) headers, which is meant for compiled down to machine-code is not usable for anything else. If your library is not part of GCC, the GPL does not help you here. As such, if you publish a header only library under GPL, you cannot state that the code using your code is not under “API” boundary, ie. free of GPL, while keeping your precious header under GPL. And no, LGPL, does not save you here.
You only have non-copyleft lisences like MIT (disgusting), Apache (shitly less gross), BSL-1.0 (still non copyleft) or LGPL (not gross, but extremely limiting.)
And, if you still publish something, I plead it is at least under GPL, since this guarantees a life for the produce, non-negotioable, forever, which I think is still better than dying and giving up to pooh of public domain.
There is a “Commons Clause” that people can add but there is some controversy as to whether adding this clause is enforceable. It very much would violate the strict definition of “FOSS”.
That said, I very much am against corporations that make full use of FOSS without contributing anything meaningful in return. I personally believe companies that make over $1M in revenue should absolutely donate something to the FOSS products they use.
Not only that but developers need to stop using permissive licenses like MIT or CC0. Moving to something like GPL3 (and specifically version 3) would go a long way for companies to stop treating open source as a well they can exploit.
Discussion I’ve seen on the subject on Hacker News tends to veer towards MIT being the only license allowed for use in many orgs (with exceptions of course) because license compliance is hard to manage when you’re using a lot of open source and you’re a small org. So many developers release their code with MIT licenses so it gets used more and looks better on the portfolio.
While I can see their perspective I personally agree with your take and would love to see more GPLv3 adoption and fewer stupidly permissive licenses. There’s tooling out there to help with the license compliance challenges, if enough developers moved away from MIT licenses then companies will be forced to deal with it.
You can just dual-license as AGPL and a separate commercial license that you negotiate on a case-by-case basis.
I don’t think believe using GPL will achieve anything. I am a professional developer. If I’m looking for a library for a problem and find one that’s GPL, then I will simply not consider using it. What are the options here?
I could search for a different library with an MIT license. Let’s, for the sake of argument, assume that there are none.
I could ask my boss if I can release all our source code to the public. Yeah, sure. That’s going to happen.
I could ask my boss if I can have a bit of budget to haggle out a license with the library author. That’s a waste of time and money. Hammering out a license agreement across language boundaries and jurisdictions will involve a lot of lawyering and waiting that’s just not worth it. The additional fees would likely even outweigh the agreed payment to the author.
So what’s left? I don’t use a library and program the thing myself. It might take a while, but I’m way cheaper than lawyers. So in the end, GPL won’t do a thing to force a business to support FOSS, but will annoy developers.
That’s why, if I ever am in a position to meaningfully add to FOSS, it will be under the MIT license.
It sounds more like you think you are entitled to have access to a library to begin with. Why should one exist that you can exploit in a way that your business wants rather than one that respects freedom—this is where I completely agree with the software freedom folks.
If you work for a private business that is earning profit, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect to pay for a library or build it yourself. Why should something else just exist for your business to exploit?
It sounds more like you think you are entitled to have access to a library to begin with.
Could you point me to the part of my comment that led you to that conclusion?
First of all, I want to be clear that I wasn’t trying to be harsh. But it’s just your entire comment. As soon as you say, “I was looking for a library,” you’ve already indicated that you feel entitled to find a library somewhere rather than build it yourself (or pay someone to do it for you).
Do you not understand how that comes across as entitled? Meaning you feel entitled to access a software library that exists with a license you can exploit. You’ll reject a GPL licensed library because it is copylefted and you know your management would never go for GPLing the entire work.
What I’m saying is that if you’re writing your own software with a private business, why do you expect there to just be some library you can use internally to exploit and not contribute back to the community?
As soon as you say, “I was looking for a library,” you’ve already indicated that you feel entitled to find a library somewhere rather than build it yourself
That interpretation is completely on you. Whenever one is writing code, it’s good practice to check if it hasn’t been written before. No-one needs to re-invent the wheel for the umpteenth time.
Do you not understand how that comes across as entitled?
No. This approach is literally taught at Uni. Don’t repeat work. That’s not only in programming. A chemist’s saying is “6 months in the lab can save you 2 hours in the library.” Blindly doing everything from scratch is just incredibly poor use of resources.
You’ll reject a GPL licensed library because it is copylefted and you know your management would never go for GPLing the entire work.
Yes. I don’t see how that’s a contentious point. I think I made my position clear in my last comment.
why do you expect there to just be some library you can use internally
That assumption is based on experience. The whole JavaScript ecosystem thrives on the idea of building stuff based on others’ work. It’s you, btw, that chose to interpret ‘looking for’ as ‘expecting to exist’. I never said that, nor did I mean it.
My favorite option: use the GPL licensed solution to wow your boss by getting the project done fast. Then, the company either gets sued, thereby financially contributing to the project, or you are asked to replace it with your own implementation, giving you job security.
Or… don’t work at a workplace so toxic that you need to pull these shenanigans.
Eh, it’s not really so different from the situation you described. I want to support FOSS in my work, but the chances of moving the needle on donations or contributions is slim to none.
I love open source but I feel like it’s hard to get donations. So by making code gpl, I can only hope that the company using my code will at least make it open source.
has enabled us to support massive global traffic with a single primary Azure PostgreSQL flexible server instance(opens in a new window) and nearly 50 read replicas spread over multiple regions globally. This is the
I do wonder why they are using Azure PostgreSQL flexible instead of the Azure CosmosDB Postgres offering based on Citus
Cheaper maybe? I haven’t priced in citus myself
Their sponsors list is pretty out of date, I clocked crunchydata on there which is now snowflake, and that’s an old logo
The financial supporters page has a donor from December 2025, so they are listing new sponsors. And Crunchydata seems to still use that branding in https://www.crunchydata.com/
Weird, that page is likely for legacy customers as snowflake owns them and they’re now known by another name.
The logo itself they’re using is an old logo, predating 2022 when they moved to the “friendly hippo” away from “murder hippo”
deleted by creator
Imagine growing up to find out that your parents never paid a dime to help your aunts and uncles whose donations you were raised on.
