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> Corporations and robots must pay.

Greenpeace is a (non-profit) corporation. Unions are corporations. Municipalities. Colleges and universities.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person

Should they have to pay?

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I am not sure sudo is licensed under MIT or GPL, looks it's like a mix of licenses[1]. The end of the first license says it's sponsored in part by DARPA.

From 2010 to February 2024, it was sponsored by Quest Software according to the history page[2].

[1] https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/main/LICENSE.md

[2] https://www.sudo.ws/about/history/

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The behavior of corporations is shameful.

After all, people in these companies don't work for free and are able to spend a lot of money for other services.

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You can demand payment but it doesn't mean you'll get paid. These days companies will clone your work instead of paying.
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As covered literally just a few days ago (IIRC), you absolutely can demand payment: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi actively works to detect MDM, and if found, demand payment.

Not open source, but an interesting counterpoint, I think.

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Relevant articles are here

- https://lgug2z.com/articles/normalize-identifying-corporate-...

- https://lgug2z.com/articles/i-started-identifying-corporate-...

The post-open source space is indeed a very exciting space in 2026

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The GPL is a good idea. It's our socieconomic system that isn't.
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Everything is a good idea if you assume a world in which it works.
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Communism has entered the chat.
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That, for example, would be a better system. One the GPL would work beautifully in.
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That's a nice slogan, but how does it work?

Say, I clone sudo. Clearly, a human applying freedom zero. I use it in my projects. Probably still freedom zero. I use it in my CI pipeline for the stuff that makes me money... corporation or human? If it's corporation, what if I sponsor a not-for-profit that provides that piece of CI infra?

The problem is that "corporation or not" has more shades than you can reasonably account for. And, worse, the cost of accounting for it is more than any volunteer wants to shoulder.

Even if this were a hard and legally enforceable rule, what individual maintainer wants to sue a company with a legal department?

What could work is a large collective that licenses free software with the explicit goal of extracting money from corporate users and distributing it to authors. Maybe.

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Not for commercial use without buying a license is a pretty standard licensing scheme. This has been worked out for decades.
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And the shades in between account for the large number of new licensing schemes sprouting, with different restrictions on what is and isn't possible. (Not to mention the large number of "just used it anyways" instances). And it struggles for smaller utilities, or packages of many different things.

It's "worked out" in the sense that it still doesn't really work for a lot of maintainers.

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What happens when the code is abandoned? Can I make my own changes whenever I want?

The problem with commercial software is the lock in.

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