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"There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo... Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company." (aus.social)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

To be fair every FOSS license will prevent a company from having exclusive rights to use your work. Even if you get a bit lax and include MIT and BSD licenses as FOSS, a company still cannot take your work and stop other people from using it.

In the case of Duolingo, it's pretty different because that volunteer labor output is gated in a proprietary walled garden.

Whereas contributing a patch to chromium for example will never gate that contribution, even if it makes it into chrome and produces millions of dollars of profit for google. You can always and forever freely access and use a version of chromium with your patch as long as there's still a copy left to access.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

To be fair every FOSS license will prevent a company from having exclusive rights to use your work

The trajectory for many Foss projects is to get the hardest part off the ground with mindshare and initial development. Then after all the hard work it becomes successful, the project is closed and all new features are added into the closed fork.

Technically you still have the original work but within a few years the project is dead except for your personal work because the main fork has a large corporation behind it continuing the development.