Post
by stienman » Tue Mar 22, 2016 9:34 am
I wasn't sure I should weigh in or not, whatever you do, make sure it's good for your own health.
What I discovered from my own similar experiences is this:
- It caused me more pain and unhappiness to worry about it and react to it than it did to ignore it and move on.
After I realized that going down that path was personally unproductive, and, in fact, hurtful for me, I chose to let things lie and found that there were some positives from the non-ideal situation. The primary positive was that they were reaching people who needed my work who I would not have reached any other way.
I wasn't happy about someone else profiting off my work, and I wasn't happy that people who should have had free access to it had to pay a fee, but in the end I had to admit that I wasn't interested in marketing or advertising it, or doing customer support, and if someone else was, and I had already chosen to make the software free, then who was I helping by making it harder?
Yes, it felt like stealing, but I wasn't in it for the money, I was in it to help people. More people were helped when others latched on to it - even for a profit motive - than were being helped with my limited effort and resources.
As such I would contact the few people who were being successful, remind them that they had to at least document in a link or documentation that their product used open source software, and whether they responded or not or obeyed the license or not, I moved on.
It simply isn't worth the emotional aggravation, and once you start putting up fences you have to defend them, and it becomes so much more a drag on your time and energy.
Again, do what you feel needs to be done for your sake, but I just want to warn you that spending much time or effort on this may actually be the opposite of what you want - you might end up spending more time and energy going down that path than you would simply letting it go, and you might get burned out more quickly fighting these battles than if you let it go.
Regardless, I do appreciate your work, and wish you didn't have to deal with this. It's so disheartening when this happens. Good luck, whatever you choose!
