I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project

Post by pocksuppet » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

geocar wrote: post #258

pocksuppet wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perverse incentives strike again! Websites that allow links in user-generated content are spammed with user-generated spam links to improve SEO of spam sites, which hurts the site's own reputation because most of the links on it are spam. To avoid this, all sites use nofollow.

As this example shows, by all sites using nofollow, Github is improving the SEO of spam sites. What the fuck are you talking about?

Post by pocksuppet » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 5:35 PM UTC

nananana9 wrote: post #160

pocksuppet wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In particular, if you license it MIT, and it's useful, expect Amazon to make a fork, not give you the source code, and each tens of millions of dollars from it while you don't get a cent. There's writing code for charity, and then there's this . Charity wasn't meant to include hyper-corporations.

If you want evil megacorps to give you money when they use your thing, maybe say "if you're an evil megacorp you have to give me money when you use my thing" in the license? If your license reads "hey, you can use this however you want, no matter who you are, and don't have to give me money", people will use it however they want, no matter who they are, and won't give you money. Unfortunately, for decades, free softw…

Post by pocksuppet » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 5:38 PM UTC

mkehrt wrote: post #150

pocksuppet wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In particular, if you license it MIT, and it's useful, expect Amazon to make a fork, not give you the source code, and each tens of millions of dollars from it while you don't get a cent. There's writing code for charity, and then there's this . Charity wasn't meant to include hyper-corporations.

I don't understand your point? If you write code with an MIT license, this is what you would expect.

Post by raylad » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 12:44 AM UTC

Post by duskdozer » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 5:50 AM UTC

shevy-java wrote: post #169

nananana9 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want evil megacorps to give you money when they use your thing, maybe say "if you're an evil megacorp you have to give me money when you use my thing" in the license? If your license reads "hey, you can use this however you want, no matter who you are, and don't have to give me money", people will use it however they want, no matter who they are, and won't give you money. Unfortunately, for decades, free softw…

I agree that MIT may not be the best licence here in such a use case scenario. The question is why corporations think they can be leeches though - and the bigger, the more of a leech they are on the ecosystem. That's just not right.