Well, that's why the GPL was created: to make it impossible to siphon off profits by building on open source. Of course that is wildly incompatible with how most businesses operate, so the corporate world pushed open source authors towards more business-friendly licenses like MIT and Apache.
Of course what most people overlook with GPL in businesses (as an individual) is that as using the GPL excludes you from large sections of the economy and thus carries a cost not everyone can afford. In turn companies frequently use the GPL for "open source washing" via public/private licensing.
In the 90s I used to hear a lot of people joking that the GPL view on open source is communism. After having shifted politically to the left I now think that joke is actually truer than most people realise. And the incompatibility of a communist "gift economy" (i.e. take what you need, give what you can) with the capitalist host system lies at the core of most of the problems we see with open source sustainability.
In other words: open source "economics" (voluntary mutual exchange with no strings attached) is entirely alien to capitalism because in capitalism this behavior is essentially economic suicide except for a few scenarios (e.g. general marketing like Google, onboarding and recruiting like Facebook or promoting commercial services like Microsoft). Much like how CJ characterised npm Inc in her JSConf EU talk, these companies aren't walking all over open source authors because they're evil, they're doing it because they have no useful way to interact with them except for marketing.
Your piece reads mostly like it's trying to get employees to force their employers to support open source via the usual means of labor struggle (i.e. threatening to withhold their labor, shame them so others withhold their labor) but that to me looks more like a band-aid.
Of course what most people overlook with GPL in businesses (as an individual) is that as using the GPL excludes you from large sections of the economy and thus carries a cost not everyone can afford. In turn companies frequently use the GPL for "open source washing" via public/private licensing.
In the 90s I used to hear a lot of people joking that the GPL view on open source is communism. After having shifted politically to the left I now think that joke is actually truer than most people realise. And the incompatibility of a communist "gift economy" (i.e. take what you need, give what you can) with the capitalist host system lies at the core of most of the problems we see with open source sustainability.
In other words: open source "economics" (voluntary mutual exchange with no strings attached) is entirely alien to capitalism because in capitalism this behavior is essentially economic suicide except for a few scenarios (e.g. general marketing like Google, onboarding and recruiting like Facebook or promoting commercial services like Microsoft). Much like how CJ characterised npm Inc in her JSConf EU talk, these companies aren't walking all over open source authors because they're evil, they're doing it because they have no useful way to interact with them except for marketing.
Your piece reads mostly like it's trying to get employees to force their employers to support open source via the usual means of labor struggle (i.e. threatening to withhold their labor, shame them so others withhold their labor) but that to me looks more like a band-aid.