My name is Aasrith, and I’m a IB Career Path student conducting a research project on the ethics of open-source software commercialization. I’m specifically exploring whether companies have an ethical responsibility to contribute back when they monetize open-source projects like Godot.
I’m not asking for technical support — only short ethical perspectives from developers or contributors who are willing to share their views. Even 1–2 sentences would be incredibly helpful.
Any responses can remain anonymous and would be cited as personal communication for academic purposes only.
If you are also willing to complete a Microsoft form, please do as it would much more helpful for my project.
Hi there! Interesting research question. To talk about ethics is a bit like taking about taste, right?
Two things before I jump in:
If you want anonymous feedback you should leave a contact or a link to reach you directly outside the forum.
Maybe you should clarify what you mean by “contribute back”. I assume now you mean code changes and extensions, not money.
Generally, I’d argue that companies have no ethics at all. The people working there all have their individual ethics that form a fuzzy collective one, that the company could claim for itself. Companies usually don’t have a core self but an out-directed self purely for marketing purposes (marketing also being b2b networking and recruiting).
Still, there is no such a thing as universal ethics. There is law and there is norm - both are very local.
For the individual “ethics” I’d point towards individual responsibility. Excuse the extreme comparison: just as soldiers have the individual responsibility to question orders, developers working for companies utilizing open-source code for their commercial product should decide for themselves (and based on the licenses that original code has) if they want to contribute their code back.
From a practical perspective: if the license does not strictly demand code contribution when used, I’d say that for most companies & people it is easier to just donate money to the maintainers of the original codebases. And this is what I expect commercial projects to do, not just from an my own ethical point of view, but also economically. If developers in companies don’t support open-source projects they take code from financially, they act short-sighted, because this is how valuable projects die and will not be useful in the future (security updates, bug fixes, general updates to new technology etc.)
Refactoring your changes to the original codebase and going through the review process takes time that usually is not easily provided in the free market.
To answer your questions I didn’t intend to leave my contacts or links as I just wanted to gauge the community’s thoughts on the issue and felt there was no need to. I have made a Microsoft form however that goes more in depth of what I wanted to receive to complete my school project and is in the link below (It is completely anonymous). If you like to complete this form, please do.
When I meant contribute back I meant both money or code changes and extensions.
No. The internet wouldn’t exist with that attitude. Open source is you get what you pay for. The reality is that companies that invest in open source as the underlying pinning of their architecture end up contributing a lot back. Because when bugs happen, their engineers have to go fix the open source codebase. Then they end up pushing it forward and paying for those engineers to do it because they need it to survive. This is why smart companies invest in open source tools financially when they can. So they don’t end up paying hidden labor costs.
Also, the reason you use an open source project or library instead of building a bespoke one is you do not have the time/money/knowledge to do it yourself. Or the tool is so good, there’s no reason to do it yourself. Forcing companies to “ethically contribute” would hurt projects - not help them. Sorting through crappy forced coding that is substandard or useless would literally grind most open source projects to a halt.
Your question is also really myopic - considering coding the only contribution of value to open source. Documentation, YouTube tutorials, answering questions on forums, and actually using the software and providing feedback are just as necessary for a successful open source project. Community around an open source project can enhance it more than money because people are engaged and interested. It takes a lot more people using the software to report bugs than it does to code new things in.
Ultimately, anyone using open source software is contributing to it. Whether they want to, or not. Whether they know they are or not.
Subjectively, I think they do, but not a moral duty, and certainly not a legal one (as long as they obey the licence).
For instance, if I see someone drowning in a river, I might be considered a monster not to jump in and help them, but there is no moral duty on me to risk my life. But is there an ethical duty, that if I can help I should? I would think so, but it is subjective. Like there are no objective morals, there are no objective ethics either IMHO. (I am not a philosopher and I understand these are contested and complex topics.)
So it is where it is today. If you want to, do, if not, you don’t have to. That is sort of one of the points of open source is it not? Freedom to use, freedom to contribute, the freedom to choose?