Posts tagged open culture
Open communities need to be partners, not sources of free labor
- 05 December 2018
In the last couple of years, we’ve seen an increasing number of organizations start to spawn products that take a largely open stack (e.g., the SciPy ecosystem) and wrap it in a thin layer of proprietary/custom interface + infrastructure. On the face of it, this isn’t a problem - I really want people to be able to make money using the open source stack - however, there is a big caveat. When you look at the work that those organizations have done over time, you often see a pretty thin trail of contributions back to those open source projects.
I’d argue that using an open community’s software without contributing back is straight-up exploitative (legal, sure, but still exploitative), and we should think about ways to suppress this kind of behavior. This post is a collection of thoughts on that topic.