Comments on: From the communism of capital to capital for the commons https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/from-the-communism-of-capital-to-capital-for-the-commons/2017/01/24 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Thu, 26 Jan 2017 19:14:02 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 By: Ozgur Zeren https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/from-the-communism-of-capital-to-capital-for-the-commons/2017/01/24/comment-page-1#comment-1578255 Thu, 26 Jan 2017 19:14:02 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=63058#comment-1578255 This proposition has some pitfalls:

IBM is not non-contributory to Open Source. So are many others, leave aside who are propagators of open source like RedHat.

Thus, the ‘copyfair’ licence check would not qualify for these.

And, non-contributory entities may produce a modicum of contribution and thus qualify. Trying to establish standards on what contribution there should be, and how much it should be, would open a whole can of worms. A commit which is accepted for an open source project? Good luck deciding that. And some projects may abuse such a rule to prevent entities from committing and thus keep them paying instead of using the software for free.

This, in addition to the fact that any user of any software also is a tester of that software, and they contribute to the project through bug reports, or at least by advertising the software word of mouth when they recommend the software to others. Moreover, “Major company X is using our Open Source software” is also a major advertisement for any open source project and highly increases their visibility. When these users come up with these kind of objections, counter-arguments will be difficult to find…

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