Building a commercial product on top of a free open source software is pretty awful practice
But as @Deleted said, a lot of stuff you use daily is based in some form on FOSS. Linux was just one big example.
I agree that building a commercial product on top of FOSS without giving back in some form is pretty awful practice. But the bold part is important. Simply taking something that’s free and open source and using it for your commercial product is not bad, it’s more common than you might think. But if you do that, you should give something in return.
every website is built on layers and layers of FOSS libraries. The really stupid move is building a commercial product on top of free proprietary software or APIs, as all the 3rd party app developers for reddit learned recently.
You said:
But as @Deleted said, a lot of stuff you use daily is based in some form on FOSS. Linux was just one big example.
I agree that building a commercial product on top of FOSS without giving back in some form is pretty awful practice. But the bold part is important. Simply taking something that’s free and open source and using it for your commercial product is not bad, it’s more common than you might think. But if you do that, you should give something in return.
every website is built on layers and layers of FOSS libraries. The really stupid move is building a commercial product on top of free proprietary software or APIs, as all the 3rd party app developers for reddit learned recently.