by dns_snek | 2025-10-30 19:11:49+00:00
I understand the motivation of FOSS just fine, majority of my published side projects are AGPL licensed. I'm also glad that you found a niche selling FOSS software and wish you best of luck, I really do, but your comment doesn't make a lot of sense in terms of economic principles.

> If someone wants to make themselves my distributor, they /should/ get paid for that.

I have to admit you're the first person I've ever talked to who would be happy to let others commercially exploit the fruits of their labor without any sort of compensation, while actively trying to make a living from that labor yourself, fascinating!

> That kind of competition -- yes, it is competition -- would inspire /cooperation/. That would give both of us, the distributor and myself, incentive to work together to maximize both of our profits.

If you really want to call that "competition" it's unfair competition, more specifically free riding. You make the software, they sell it for cheaper and keep all the money, that's the premise of my concern because your license allows it. They don't really have an incentive to work with you because their goal is rapid exploitation of their victims.

> When I receive money for my program, $12/year, they loose a customer of their service, -$36/year.

Categorical error. You didn't make that money by exploiting their labor, you made that money by making a better product with your own labor. That is real competition unlike the scenario we're discussing.

> That means: my software has /increased/ the total value of my competitor, and we are /both/ making profit. My software literally expanded their market.

Sure, the OEM makes the tablet and you make the software which is an obvious symbiotic relationship. It's also a categorical error because it's not comparable to the scenario we're talking about.

> But I don't think they will, because /they know/ that anyone else can do exactly what they're doing.

Why would they care? It's not like they're investing any real effort into it. They just need to make a few sales to offset the ~30min cost of setting up a cron job and creating a listing.

> And if they improve my program

They won't, that's not the type of actor I'm concerned about.

> And if I don't win, the user /does/. They get a better product at a better price. That's the WHOLE POINT of free software, that it's good for the user, not for the developer.

That's a really weird take on the free-riding problem. Yes the user wins for a few months before you go out of business - that is generally bad for users because it means the end of support.

> You have an obsolete understanding of the world

Yes, clearly. This is the first time I've read about a story like yours and I've read a dozen stories about high profile projects being forced to relicense from AGPL to BSL/SSPL or another non-free license, stories of people having their projects cloned and having their lunch stolen overnight.

People would rather watch ads than spend $1 to remove them, they'll visit a small business to get extensive advice and then buy from Amazon because it's 10% cheaper, they'll buy a terrible quality $2 gadget from Temu over a locally manufactured, high quality gadget for $10, but you want me to believe that given the choice, most people wouldn't take a "75% off" deal in a heartbeat...