Have FOSS licenses outlived their usefulness? Bruce looks at what might come next in the world of free and open source software.

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Corporations are more powerful than they’ve ever been and fewer people have the option to contribute to FOSS. FOSS has also been coopted by corporations (see elastic search, redis, or any crippled product whose FOSS version doesn’t do shit and is just used to market to people who think it’s important). I don’t think FOSS has outlived its usefulness, it’s just very difficult to drum up the amount of work it takes to support it on a worldwide scale, but forcing financial support with the contracts mentioned in the article is just a way for corporations to have even more say in how FOSS is developed (or not developed). He mentions several examples of corporations screwing over the FOSS community and he wants more of their influence? It doesn’t seem like a great idea to me even if it seems convenient short term.

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Bingo.

This is the problem with any kind of forced financial support - it leads to centralized control, and not likely by those who mean well.

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