this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
20 points (95.5% liked)
Free and Open Source Software
17941 readers
114 users here now
If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Because of anti-customer features. Hard to implement those in a FOSS project, without a fork undermining you.
Not only anti-customer features. Any kind of product monetarisation becomes much harder in a FOSS project.
Say, you built this cool piece of software/hardware/product.
You can either keep it closed source and sell it. Anyone who wants to clone it, needs to put in a similar amount of R&D to what you did. If you have patents, you can even stop them from copying your stuff all together.
Or you can open source it. That means, you need to spend more money to get your product open source ready. The design files need to be good enough that someone other than you can use them. You need a good documentation, so that others can actually replicate your work. All that is not cheap. And then someone else will come along and copy your stuff. Since they have no R&D attached to it, they can easily sell the product cheaper than you did (or even give it away for free, see e.g. CentOS).
If they are super anal about that, they even add your Github page as the place to put feature requests/bug reports. Happened e.g. to a game console cartreader project where I contributed.
Do the math: Which option gives you better return on investment?
Tbh pirating closed source software is as easy, as installing forked code. Maybe you could add a non-competition clause to a new open source license, so that the original FOSS software company has the legal high ground over anyone that undersells them.