I knew people in general are terrible to whoever is providing something for free but WTF.
Atleast he also gets occasionally nice emails
He concluded the brief talk with one last email; it was from an 11-year-old child who had found curl useful in some project they were working on. It included an expression of gratitude that, Stenberg said, was truly heartwarming.
Yeah, it's once again a case of a central piece of software in a very precarious situation, and businesses that aren't … quite mindful of the fact that they're making demands from someone they're not paying.
Exactly. At the same time the same businesses are claiming record profits, and not contributing to that central piece of foss software at all in any way (like the car manifacturers mentioned in the post).
Some other alternative could be making GPL-3.0-or-later + a Contributor License Agreement a more common option, so that it is possible to tell companies that if they want to use the library in some closed-source application, they need to work out a license deal.
CLAs are frequently involved in turning software proprietary though, so it isn't exactly held in the highest esteem in the FOSS community.
And without a CLA you essentially get the Linux kernel situation, which will be stuck on GPL2 forever, since they can't reasonably get everyone to agree to switch to GPL3, especially since some copyright holders are not just unwilling, but unreachable or dead (and in several jurisdictions copyright lasts for decades after death).
Personally I suspect public funding, similar to science, education and libraries, is a more likely option, though that'll be an uphill political struggle a lot of places.
So a "here's the code, do whatever you want with it, but you must contribute your changes" is open source but a "but you must contribute money if you make money with it" isn't? Isn't that just nitpicking?
Not free software; of course, makes sense. Rather a limited free software.
I knew people in general are terrible to whoever is providing something for free but WTF.
Atleast he also gets occasionally nice emails
Yeah, it's once again a case of a central piece of software in a very precarious situation, and businesses that aren't … quite mindful of the fact that they're making demands from someone they're not paying.
Exactly. At the same time the same businesses are claiming record profits, and not contributing to that central piece of foss software at all in any way (like the car manifacturers mentioned in the post).