There’s always the “I’m not signing any NDA, fuck you” answer. The fact that he went along with their NDA says something. He could have said no. Open source thrives on openness, and NDAs are the complete and polar opposite of openness.
Make them play on your own field. If they’re the ones coming to you, it’s because they see value in what you offer so you have leverage. The fact that they have money is irrelevant.
There’s no harm in going to the meeting to just listen to what they have to say. Why should he deprive himself of that knowledge? That would be dumb. Information is power. Just because he can’t run out and say “here’s all the things they talked about” doesn’t mean he can’t use what he heard to his and the FOSS community’s advantage. Maybe they disclose that they’re working on some $thing, and now he can start development of a feature that might somehow protect against that $thing.
I love FOSS and the community, but far too often their zealous nature cause them to make poor decisions. The world isn’t black and white. Stop treating it like it is. NDAs happen in business all the time for anything and everything. A lot of companies won’t even have a meeting with you/another company AT ALL unless an NDA is in place. It’s standard.
Not going to at least hear what they had to say was stupid.
I mean, the real answer is that most open source developers aren’t here for freedom at any cost. They’re here like a startup… Waiting to be acquired for big bucks. Open source doesn’t pay bills, and if a megacorp pulls up in a Brinks truck full of cash, I wouldn’t be surprised if 80% of open source projects sell
Came here to say this. Open source isn’t a noble crusade, and developers are not monks with vows of poverty.
Until we get unlimited gay space communism, people will always take the money and avoiding that truth and acting shocked when they do at least listen to the people with unlimited money will always lead to disappointment.
as true as this is, it means the developers are the ones with more power to stop things being taken over, and clearly as you said, they won’t.
truth is it means you can’t trust open source devs who touch with for-profit money at all, they’re all as corpo and crooked and are willing to sell everyone out for themselves.
I was trying to be a little kinder, but yeah, that’s my general opinion.
It’s one reason I like code that’s actually owned by a foundation/organization that has all that pesky oversight and meetings and politicking because it makes things MUCH harder to be unilaterally sold out from under their users: it DOES happen, but it’s not just writing a check to one guy and hey presto next week your shit is broken/infested with malware/vanishes without a trace.
They have their own problems and require funding to actually operate as intended, but it’s at least a layer between the ‘I made this’ meme and the users of the software.
This is why I trust GPL licenses over things like MIT. Fully permissive licenses are ripe for developers to sell out. GPL licenses ensure the code remains open and limits even what the original developer can do (so long as they merge a sufficient number of third party changes to make relicensing impossible). Permissive licenses allow developers to close off future updates should they desire. I haven’t looked at the license of Mastodon’s code to be fair, I’m just speaking in general.
Mastodon is AGPL 3, so no problem there, the problem lies not in the code but somewhere else. Even if Mastodon was closed source, we have other code basis like pleroma, etc. but if the main guys start marching into the wrong direction then this is the beginning of the end.
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There’s always the “I’m not signing any NDA, fuck you” answer. The fact that he went along with their NDA says something. He could have said no. Open source thrives on openness, and NDAs are the complete and polar opposite of openness.
Make them play on your own field. If they’re the ones coming to you, it’s because they see value in what you offer so you have leverage. The fact that they have money is irrelevant.
There’s no harm in going to the meeting to just listen to what they have to say. Why should he deprive himself of that knowledge? That would be dumb. Information is power. Just because he can’t run out and say “here’s all the things they talked about” doesn’t mean he can’t use what he heard to his and the FOSS community’s advantage. Maybe they disclose that they’re working on some $thing, and now he can start development of a feature that might somehow protect against that $thing.
I love FOSS and the community, but far too often their zealous nature cause them to make poor decisions. The world isn’t black and white. Stop treating it like it is. NDAs happen in business all the time for anything and everything. A lot of companies won’t even have a meeting with you/another company AT ALL unless an NDA is in place. It’s standard.
Not going to at least hear what they had to say was stupid.
I mean, the real answer is that most open source developers aren’t here for freedom at any cost. They’re here like a startup… Waiting to be acquired for big bucks. Open source doesn’t pay bills, and if a megacorp pulls up in a Brinks truck full of cash, I wouldn’t be surprised if 80% of open source projects sell
Came here to say this. Open source isn’t a noble crusade, and developers are not monks with vows of poverty.
Until we get unlimited gay space communism, people will always take the money and avoiding that truth and acting shocked when they do at least listen to the people with unlimited money will always lead to disappointment.
as true as this is, it means the developers are the ones with more power to stop things being taken over, and clearly as you said, they won’t.
truth is it means you can’t trust open source devs who touch with for-profit money at all, they’re all as corpo and crooked and are willing to sell everyone out for themselves.
I was trying to be a little kinder, but yeah, that’s my general opinion.
It’s one reason I like code that’s actually owned by a foundation/organization that has all that pesky oversight and meetings and politicking because it makes things MUCH harder to be unilaterally sold out from under their users: it DOES happen, but it’s not just writing a check to one guy and hey presto next week your shit is broken/infested with malware/vanishes without a trace.
They have their own problems and require funding to actually operate as intended, but it’s at least a layer between the ‘I made this’ meme and the users of the software.
This is why I trust GPL licenses over things like MIT. Fully permissive licenses are ripe for developers to sell out. GPL licenses ensure the code remains open and limits even what the original developer can do (so long as they merge a sufficient number of third party changes to make relicensing impossible). Permissive licenses allow developers to close off future updates should they desire. I haven’t looked at the license of Mastodon’s code to be fair, I’m just speaking in general.
Mastodon is AGPL 3, so no problem there, the problem lies not in the code but somewhere else. Even if Mastodon was closed source, we have other code basis like pleroma, etc. but if the main guys start marching into the wrong direction then this is the beginning of the end.
They can fork the project files and have a community edition