> The message to open source developers is toil for decades and any marketing savvy VC funded company can take your work to market and basically erase your contributions and no one will hold them to account.
I don't want to make a political message here, but this is essentially the risk you take with a more permissive license. Someone absolutely can come along and build a product that subsumes yours. They can create proprietary extensions that you can not use, essentially gaining the benefit of your work without having to return the same favour. Basically, you then have to compete against yourself.
With a copyleft style license, it is much harder (though not completely impossible) for someone to do that. You will most likely be able to use their extensions and will be able to compete on a basis of who is executing better.
There are serious downsides to copyleft style licenses for things like containerisation, though. The barrier to entry is really large and you are going to cut out a lot of players who could help you. So it's really a matter of strategy. But if you are going for a permissive license, you'd better have all your ducks in a row because you should expect something like this to happen.
Free and open source business models are still pretty naive these days and I think it's going to take a few more decades before we have a really good idea of the best way to proceed.
It's exactly what has happened to Docker. Their one product that makes money now has massive competition with all of the other orchestrators that exist. If people want simple they use ECS or Docker CE (which is free). If they want complex they often turn to Kubernetis etc.
I don't want to make a political message here, but this is essentially the risk you take with a more permissive license. Someone absolutely can come along and build a product that subsumes yours. They can create proprietary extensions that you can not use, essentially gaining the benefit of your work without having to return the same favour. Basically, you then have to compete against yourself.
With a copyleft style license, it is much harder (though not completely impossible) for someone to do that. You will most likely be able to use their extensions and will be able to compete on a basis of who is executing better.
There are serious downsides to copyleft style licenses for things like containerisation, though. The barrier to entry is really large and you are going to cut out a lot of players who could help you. So it's really a matter of strategy. But if you are going for a permissive license, you'd better have all your ducks in a row because you should expect something like this to happen.
Free and open source business models are still pretty naive these days and I think it's going to take a few more decades before we have a really good idea of the best way to proceed.