this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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    Seeing big companies take advantage of BSD or MIT licensed projects without sharing their contributions will always pain me. (lemmy.world)
    submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by atmur@lemmy.world to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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    [–] merc@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 months ago

    That's not really a common situation though. Sure, people might use the BSD license on something they did as a hobby, or just to learn things. But, the scenario described here is more like:

    A group of people all have the same little problem, and they work together to come up with a solution for it. They solve the main problem, but their solution has a few rough edges and there are similar problems they didn't solve, but they're not motivated to keep working on it because what they have is good enough for their current needs. So, they put out some flyers describing how to do what they did, and inviting anybody who's interested to keep working on improving their fix.

    A company comes along, sees the info, and builds a tool that solves the problem but not quite as well, and for a small fee. They spend tons of money promoting their solution, drowning out the little pamphlet that the original guys did. They use as much IP protection as possible, patenting their designs, trademarking the look and feel, copyrighting the instructions, etc. Often they accidentally(?) issue legal threats or takedown notices to people who are merely hosting the original design or original pamphlets.

    Maybe the original inventor didn't get screwed in this scenario, but you could say that the public did.