• Ardens@lemmy.ml
    32·
    3 months ago

    Maybe, but not necessarily. You see, there could be plenty of reasons to protect ones code…

    • foremanguy@lemmy.ml
      31·
      3 months ago

      I don’t know what could be the reason for a non-profit to not open-source the code of a publicly available tool/product, except to hide or keep their property

      • Ardens@lemmy.ml
        1·
        3 months ago

        Is that not a good reason, if you are trying to help people, and competitors likely would damage that mission? There’s a thousand possible reasons, and I really wonder why you can’t imagine any of them…

        • foremanguy@lemmy.ml
          2·
          3 months ago

          Because if you care about user you should be at least transparent to them, in your example you could make your codebase open-source with a license restricting it for commercial uses

          • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
            2·
            3 months ago

            You can’t. Blocking commercial use stops a licence being open source. If you don’t want commercial competition, then you need copyleft, so anyone using your code has to share their modifications with whoever they give binaries to. If they end up using your code to make a better product, then it’ll have to be open source, too, and you can incorporate the improvements back into your version.