I used to be a big believer in open source software, but as for profit enterprises continue to pillage the community without giving anything back more and more I feel that it’s not worth the time or effort involved, unless the work is protected by a proper GPLv3 license.
I'm reminded of a story Tim O'Reilley tells. When we started out, he published a set of the BSD documentation, which was explicitly licensed for free commercial use, this was long before what we know now as Creative Commons. He kept getting flak from people criticising him for profiting from publishing freely licensed documents, but one time he was at a book fair or conference and one of the authors told him how thrilled they all were to see their work in print and out there being used by so many people. That was a dream come true for them.
That is the ethos, it's what open source and CC is about. I may not be in a position to profit from some of my work, or I might be willing to donate it for free. If someone else can do something valuable enough to other people with it that they get paid to do it, good for them. The world is a better place. At the end of the day companies and corporations are just made up of people making a living.
Oh I don't know, I bet Google would love to hire someone like DHH just for their geek-brand. Honestly, they should have hired the homebrew guy for the same reason. But yeah, I think the FAANG+M's of the world understand the value of a "thought leader" type dev. (Microsoft has plenty of full-time open source devs on payroll, which I know because I've met some at conferences.)
https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?s=20
I used to be a big believer in open source software, but as for profit enterprises continue to pillage the community without giving anything back more and more I feel that it’s not worth the time or effort involved, unless the work is protected by a proper GPLv3 license.