"8 profitable repositories" Profitable is a strong word for making 75 cents a month, which is the highest of all the repositories.
The purple dollar value on the Discover page shows the Individual price of the repository, not the total profits.
GitRoyalty – First OSS Paywall
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Re: GitRoyalty – First OSS Paywall
#12"8 profitable repositories" Profitable is a strong word for making 75 cents a month, which is the highest of all the repositories.
The purple dollar value on the Discover page shows the Individual price of the repository, not the total profits.
Oh, fair enough then. It seemed to line up with less than $8 total payout, which itself I don't quite get because the minimum payout is $20..??
I took it as the equivalent of looking at a list of "Patreon" projects and the total contributions they make, rather than a storefront with sticker prices.
Re: GitRoyalty – First OSS Paywall
#13Isn't this going to get banned by npm like those ads did?
Re: GitRoyalty – First OSS Paywall
#14Thanks Feross! GitRoyalty is an experiment that allows OSS project maintainers to hide a package’s manifest file (or build script) behind a monthly subscription. This way users will have to subscribe in order to install the package using dependency managers like NPM. The idea is that with low prices and the power of numbers, both popular and transitive OSS dependencies can sustain development instead of relying on a…
I think this isn't very open, and it would be nice for you to invent a different name than OSS to describe it.
As for barriers to subscribe, are you sure it's low? What do companies think of this? Aren't they going to treat this exactly the same as proprietary software? With full pre-qualification of the vendor?
Re: GitRoyalty – First OSS Paywall
#15Isn't this going to get banned by npm like those ads did?
GitRoyalty just hosts a git remote repository that you pay to get access to. NPM and almost all other package managers support installing from git URLs, and too many people rely on this functionality for it to ever be removed.
Re: GitRoyalty – First OSS Paywall
#16This is a very interesting idea and looks like a promising execution - I may try this with one of my repos. I have a question: it seems the only license options are IP-locked. What if a developer wants to issue non-IP locked licenses to paying users? This is a feature I would consider enabling - is that something you will support in the future?
Re: GitRoyalty – First OSS Paywall
#17I had to check that today is not April 1st. If you badly want my money, sell me your product honestly, under a commercial license, and don't call it OSS. There are other "source available" licenses. If you want a donation from me, show your tipping jar / patreon / whatever else link. If you want your software be OSS, well, don't conceal the source. I suppose that a project of any significance that would use such a "p…
The problem with non-permissive licensing is that a lot of employment contracts strictly forbid them. That and commercially licensed OSS projects have no way to distribute funds to arbitrary contributors in a legally straightforward way. And I personally have not had any success with donations, whereas 2 days after setting up my project with GitRoyalty me and my contributors are making $10/month.
This is indeed an interesting problem! It looks like a way to sell a commercial license in effect, without selling it in any legal terms.
I wonder how funds acquired via GitRoyalty get distributed, from the legal standpoint, and what makes such distribution different from distributing a share from a sale of a commercial license.
Re: GitRoyalty – First OSS Paywall
#18Isn't this going to get banned by npm like those ads did?
GitRoyalty just hosts a git remote repository that you pay to get access to. NPM and almost all other package managers support installing from git URLs, and too many people rely on this functionality for it to ever be removed.
More thinking if you have to mess around with license files to get packages to work they will remove the package.
Re: GitRoyalty – First OSS Paywall
#19If it's truly OSS what's there to prevent someone from simply forking it to make a version where the manifest file is distributed freely (in both senses of the word)?
Re: GitRoyalty – First OSS Paywall
#20I had to check that today is not April 1st. If you badly want my money, sell me your product honestly, under a commercial license, and don't call it OSS. There are other "source available" licenses. If you want a donation from me, show your tipping jar / patreon / whatever else link. If you want your software be OSS, well, don't conceal the source. I suppose that a project of any significance that would use such a "p…
> If you want your software be OSS, well, don't conceal the source.
That's what struck me as odd too. #2 of the OSI "Open Source Definition" seems useful.
The program must include source code, and must allow
distribution in source code as well as compiled form.
Where some form of a product is not distributed with
source code, there must be a well-publicized means of
obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable
reproduction cost, preferably downloading via the
Internet without charge. The source code must be the
preferred form in which a programmer would modify the
program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not
allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a
preprocessor or translator are not allowed.