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No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

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Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your sentiment, but this is not the right reaction. It won't improve anything. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? You are free to adjust the license to prevent this. But then tomorrow everybody comes and rants about that the GPL is too restrictive. That's the price we pay for this. It's the license that keeps…

I don't want GPL. I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That's it. That's all I want. MIT-Billionaires. Want to take funding from A16Z? That's a million a year for the license or something that maybe scales with a market cap just to level the playing field between a funded startup and Apple Computers. Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don…

This is the traditional point that Open Source™ people turn up and say that you’re not allowed to discriminate between different groups of users with an Open Source™ licence. Personally, I’d be in favour of a non-military licence, but that’s historically been blocked by the OSI for the same reasons (not that it stopped Crockford).

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your sentiment, but this is not the right reaction. It won't improve anything. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? You are free to adjust the license to prevent this. But then tomorrow everybody comes and rants about that the GPL is too restrictive. That's the price we pay for this. It's the license that keeps…

I don't want GPL. I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That's it. That's all I want. MIT-Billionaires. Want to take funding from A16Z? That's a million a year for the license or something that maybe scales with a market cap just to level the playing field between a funded startup and Apple Computers. Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don…

That's just a proprietary license, just write the license like that if you want as I don't see how anything is stopping you from creating or using such a license. Just don't make the assumption that it's open source, it's just another form of a proprietary license like much of the paid software currently present.

However, don't complain later on that you can't modify software or run it on your own device like you can with GPL. You can't have your cake and eat it too, pick one.

I wrote more about this in another comment but I'll paste here for convenience.

---

Why do people create something and explicitly license it under an open source license and are then surprised when it's used as the license permits? I can see a few possible reasons:

1. Culture: GitHub seems to have the culture of people using and putting out their code as open source just because everyone else is doing it, or they just don't know or care to do enough research about software licenses.

2. Promotion: open source seems to be used as a way to promote your product and you simply hope that no one will "screw you over" by using the license as it permits, even by big companies. They'll use open source to build their product but will cry foul when corporations do the same exact thing the open source creators were doing in the first place!

These two factors seem to account for a the reasons behind switching licenses or other licensing issues for a significant portion of the open source license based posts on Hacker News in the past several years. Companies could have just started with a proprietary or copyleft license initially but inevitably in most of the posts I've seen, it's always a company with a permissive MIT style license that then bemoans cloud vendors rightfully taking advantage of their code.

What will happen in the future? It seems that people will create more proprietary software in the form of ostensibly "open source" licenses such as the SSPL by MongoDB or others. People will say that they're not truly open source, just another variation on proprietary source available licenses, which is true but the problem isn't a moral one, it's a practical one. GPL was started because the end user freedoms were eroded, and these licenses also fall into that, where people will soon discover that a proprietary license isn't great when they want to expand the original software but are encumbered by the license, such as if they work for a large company or other such restriction. Having no restrictions is always better than having even small ones.

But how will open source creators make money, one may ask. The simple answer is, they don't, and they shouldn't expect to. The more complex answer is, open source is not a business model, it is merely a licensing and distribution model. You must compete not on the code but the problems your code solves. Your product must also include marketing, sales, branding, and other business skills. Treat your product as a startup.

Amazon could open source all of its code and infrastructure and it would still be the dominant player in cloud computing as well as buying stuff online. Why? They are not in the business of selling code, they are in the business of selling convenience (as every business is actually, you don't hunt your own meat, a grocery store sells you the convenience of buying food, with money rather than time and effort; business is just commoditized convenience). Moreover, people know and trust Amazon, they don't know your other site, even if you took their source code and made your own website.

At the end of the day, people need to understand that a product is not a business. If you want to make money, you probably shouldn't make a free product. There are ways to leverage a free product into a business, as seen with TailwindCSS (free, open source) to Tailwind UI (paid, proprietary) or Laravel to Laravel Spark and Forge (they're what's known as lead magnets in marketing terms, a free product to entice the customer to buy the paid version), but don't expect people to spontaneously pay you when they could use your product for free, unless, again, you have the business skills to make your product stand out via marketing and having product-market fit.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#133
post #117
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unreal Engine license is along these lines: it's free if you are small / no significant revenue, and it's 5% of your revenue otherwise. That said, not every shared-sources project would be used, if its license requires to pay royalty.

Unreal isn't open source

What the parent is asking for is inherently not open source.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#134

You sir have misunderstood the concept of open source software. As an open source author or maintainer you don't do the work for others and then expect some kind of compensation. The idea instead is to do the work that you would have done anyway because somebody else paid you or because you did it for fun, and then you publish it to use the community to help you fix issues. A philantropic motivation is nice but not n…

Open Source has nothing to do with Free Software. There is a plenty of OSS products which are not free to use.

That's not correct, those are not considered OSS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#135
post #28

I empathize with the sentiment, but if you want to get paid for your open source work, surely it would work better to set up a Patreon and point people to it, rather than write "send me a six figure contract or fork this!" in a GitHub issue. It's also weird to use a license that explicitly lets Fortune 500 companies use the code for free, and then write that you don't want them to do so in the issue. Just change the…

He's not complaining about use, he's complaining about support. This is not a licensing issue. He is frustrated that companies that use his software for their business raise support and feature requests and expect him to work on them for free again and again.

Do they really expect him to work on them?

I'm 100% sure they know that open source doesn't guarantee that and that he's well within his rights to ignore their support requests if he feels like doing something else.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#136

I think this is fair for him to do, and well within his rights. He’s clearly frustrated. I wish there was a better way for open source projects to solicit donations. It’s hard to get your boss to pay for software; it’s extra hard when you get no additional value. I feel like open source would have more luck if Issues could have attached bounties. I may not think to donate to faker.js, however as someone with access t…

Please stop painting open source as a donation-based development model. That's completely distorting what it is about.

Care to elaborate on what _you_ believe it's about?

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#137
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your sentiment, but this is not the right reaction. It won't improve anything. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? You are free to adjust the license to prevent this. But then tomorrow everybody comes and rants about that the GPL is too restrictive. That's the price we pay for this. It's the license that keeps…

> The right reaction is not to stop producing open source software. The right reaction is to adjust the license. The right reaction is whatever the author/maintainer wants to do. If they want to re-license, that is fine. If they want to just shut the whole thing down, that is fine too.

> If they want to just shut the whole thing down, that is fine too.

Actually if it's under a non-restrictive open source licence, it's not fine at all - the code will still be legally available for everyone.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#138
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want GPL. I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That's it. That's all I want. MIT-Billionaires. Want to take funding from A16Z? That's a million a year for the license or something that maybe scales with a market cap just to level the playing field between a funded startup and Apple Computers. Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don…

What is wrong with saying “all rights reserved. You are free to use this software for educational and nonprofit purposes but once you start to make money off it you must request permission in writing” - I’ve seen a few licences like this. I guess the down sides are it might send some people elsewhere and you might be on your own trying to enforce it in court.

I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up.

Besides, it would have to be a lot more formal; another commenter mentioned the Unreal Engine, which states something to the tune of "free to use until you earn over X, then you pay us Y% of your revenue".

Cynically, open source libraries need to use the err, hook-and-sinker approach? Be really good at bootstrapping a company or part thereof, then when they have buy-in, start charging. It's what Unreal and (I think?) Unity do, it's what Slack did (really successfully, in a lot of places where it was introduced it was snuck in the back door by employees, used for a couple of months until the restrictions became too much, then the company started to pay for it; I've never seen 'grassroots' software deployment like that before and I'm impressed).

But it'll be difficult to pull off fully without the software being as-a-service or DRM things.

I wonder if the package manager systems could play a role in that. Require you to register your application at e.g. NPM, then every time an `npm install` is done, keep track of it. If usage does not decrease, start charging for things.

One could also consider an alternative, compatible package manager; an open source publisher could opt to only push to and promote that one. The package manager charges for use, and pays package maintainers relative to usage.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#139
post #21

Seriously. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? Apple is telling us we can't run our own software on their goddamned devices, yet they built their empire on open source. Look at Facebook, Google, Amazon. They've extracted all the blood they can and given us back scraps. AWS is repackaged software you pay more for. Yes, it's…

What a sad zero-sum way of looking at things. Your open source software doesn't go away because some corporation decides to use it. The companies you list have made substantial contributions to open source.

They've destroyed our open web, replaced RSS with DRM, left us with streaming and music options worse than cable and personal audio libraries.

The web is bloated with ads and tracking, AMP is given preference, Facebook and Twitter are testing the limits of democracy and radicalizing everyone to cancel one another.

This is the important part from the GP. If they were under the AGPL or say a new better GPL which patches the problems with GPLv3 then those companies that have destroyed the open web would have at least had to buy the work or do it themselves. Even if that doesn't have a huge impact on the state of things, at least project maintainers can say that they are not contributing to it.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#140

On Twitter, he claims that he was recently made homeless due to an apartment fire, and asks the community to send funds to help him avoid homelessness, which seems reasonable enough. He later goes on to describe "fake news written by the NY Post." I searched for this, and found an article that might be the article he describes (timing fits) [0] Pretty crazy story, all in all! He seems to be in some pretty dire strait…

This looks like a pretty popular project, so I assume he's decently talented. How does he not have a day job? Passion projects are great and all, but they're not known for paying the bills. Especially for solo maintainers, it's almost like playing a gig at a coffee shop for tips. Want to make a career out of it? You need talent, marketability, and be ready to compromise on your vision.
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