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Ethical source, a new type of open source company
by
Alex
https://ethicalsource.dev/blog/oes-announcement/
It's not easy to live off the open source model. If you're happy with being small and having enough to live the life you do already, then it's great. However if you want to grow larger, it looks like you have to move away to another license like Mongo, Redis, Mapbox because one day someone like Amazon can come and crash you.
Would love to get fellow Indie Hackers to chime in re. this, what do you think?
Essentially it boils down to pledging to do good with your technology, will be interesting to see how it plays out in practice.
At some point many companies sell out and abuse their users in some way. Maybe this could be the preventative factor?
I'm curious how enforceable it is. I also wonder how long of a lever it is. A lot of the recent ethical controversies I noticed were big companies like Google building a search engine for China, or MSFT working with ICE, or Amazon offer facial recognition. Is an ethical licence actually effective there? All of those companies have a huge impact and their own technical infrastructure so I don't know how important OSS is to them. What actually seemed to impact them is their customers and employees raising a stink.
Maybe the value in an ethical license is just to get people to talk about it, which may be valuable indirectly, but I'm not sure useful of a tool it is to directly stop an organization from acting in a way someone doesn't like.
IANAL