That depends on the license.

I have to keep track of our FOSS licenses at my job, and we have to avoid certain tools that feature licenses that do actually require upstream contribs. They usually only specify this as a req for commercial use of the tool, as a way to prevent someone taking the FOSS tool, adding new functions, profiting off the free work, and giving nothing back.

The Reciprocal Public License is one example.

Just because something is built out of love does not make it safe, and attestation is about safety. You wouldn’t trust an un-attested surgical device, just because there’s a really positive community around its design.

Signal is a life-or-death app for some people.

This is true regardless of the language in use. I’m not sure why you brought it up.

Because if you know Python, you know requests already. Or flask, or configparser, or itertools, or maybe even pyqt.

Languages all have their own ‘most common libraries’, which add to the time it takes to learn how to be competent in that language. If a python dev tells me they know all the syntax, but have no clue what itertools or requests are, my eyebrows go up.

There’s a lot of language-specific knowledge that needs to be learned before you’ll be competent in it, that people don’t even think about.

If someone was competent enough to author code that’s fit to pull into a project like Lemmy, they’re more than capable of translating those skills to Rust.

With time, perhaps, but why is someone going to do that as a prerequisite for a spare-time FOSS contribution? People tend to contribute to the projects they already have the skills for.

No language seeing modern significant use is so esoteric that a reasonably seasoned developer couldn’t make something competent in it within a week of starting to learn its syntax.

Knowing the minimal syntax of a language to get past compilation errors is not even remotely close to being “competent” in it. You need to learn the language’s structures, you need to learn how the compiler works, you need to learn the libraries that the FOSS project is using, you need to learn the security pitfalls for the language… The language used can be a HUGE hurdle to overcome.

“You know Python and Javascript, so you can write competent C++ code that is FOSS-contribution-acceptable if you take a week to learn!” (inb4 memory management and pointers and templates and ‘oh no every input field I wrote is a trivial buffer overflow’…)

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“People steal the profits from others’ labor all the time, that’s normal and good.” - You

It prevents commercial distribution of the program, and thus it discriminates against persons and groups who wish to distribute the program commercially.

Uhhhh what? That’s not how any of that works.

“No discrimination against persons or groups” is about protected classes.

Interpreting it to mean “anyone for any reason” would mean that open source allows people to simply assert sole ownership of it, because to not allow them to is to discriminate against people who want to assert sole ownership. That’s an ad absurdum broadening of the OSI ethos.

Edit: a helpful commenter has found where on OSI’s website it does prohibit non-commercial-use clauses…

…and the blog author was in fact incorrect in their assertion that it violates the personal discrimination clause (clause 5). It is a violation of Clause 6, “No Discrimination Against Field of Endeavor.” Also, the section specifically talks about prohibiting its use by a business, which is not the same as its sale by a business.

Let’s say Alice develops an application with maintainer lock-in, but for whatever reason the need for a fork arises. Bob has been studying the code and knows how to maintain in properly. However, because Alice’s code has a non-commercial redistribution clause Bob cannot make money off his maintainership. If the software is sufficiently complex that Bob has to spend a lot of time on it, or if Bob must be able to provide paid support (e.g. for regulatory reasons) he is not allowed to do so. Only Alice can demand financial compensation and thus in practice she is the only one who can afford to maintain the code.

Oh no. This person literally IS trying to just be able to start charging money for someone else’s code.