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

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241–250 of 966 posts

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

#241
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I should've worded that better. Of course they can't pull the existing versions, but then can shut down any further development and support.

> but then can shut down any further development and support.

Not really. A fork can easily continue developing and supporting it.

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

#242
post #229

So you've made something cool and it's time to release it. These seem to be the options at hand: 1. Release under a permissive license (MIT, BSD) and: - Have everyone and their grandma use it. - Die poor 2. Release under a copyleft license (GPL) and: - No company is going to use or contribute to it, unless they can somehow clearly separate it from what they see as their intellectual property. Or just hide it where no…

5. Do nothing. - Die poor

6. Get a job that pays the bills, write code in your spare time for the joy of writing code, publish code as PD to help others learn. Maybe blog about it. Die happy.

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

#243

Used the open source licence to get popular and now you're butt hurt? You would have zero users if your project was closed source.

And zero of the extra stress associated with maintaining a large project for free on your spare time.

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

#244
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unreal isn't open source

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

For a moment I disagreed with this, so I'll add a link to the OSD [0] for anyone else who wants to quibble.

Also a choice quote about Stallman [1]:

"Richard Stallman argues the obvious meaning of term "open source" is that the source code is public/accessible for inspection, without necessarily any other rights granted"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

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

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay? This particular project is soliciting donations: “Support us with a monthly donation and help us continue our activities.” I’m not really sure what your point is, because you never actually made one. You just said I was wrong.

One issue is that donations implicitly promote a cost-plus pricing model (I'd like to earn 10k a year doing open source, so that's how many donations I need to fund me working on this). Whereas something like dual-licensing promotes a value-based pricing model (our fortune 500 doesn't need to pay 5 engineers for a year to build and maintain this distributed system; we would happily pay equivalent of an engineer per y…

What's the problem with a cost-plus pricing model? Having a solid ecosystem of cost-plus priced open source software would already be a great step up from the status quo.

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

#246
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…

I would disagree about google and Facebook. Both have made tremendous OSS contributions such as BPF LSM, level db, react, and zstd.

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

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making an ethical judgment based on religious text is a serious folly.

As opposed to basing them on...some system you came up with?

Almost as good, one might imagine. No truth written in the Bible gets less true. No lie gets less false. About the only benefit is that you know the Bible as a whole is fairly Lindy and full of powerful and competitive memes.

Which may mean that the text is useful as a means to express your opinions.

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

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it may not be free software, but it is open source

The term of art is "source available" - "open source" means something different.

As far as I am aware, a usual term of art is also "shared source" (this term was in particular used by Microsoft in the past).

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

#249
Makes me wonder if GitHub could add a “paid support ticket” as an add-on to their donation buttons. A repo owner could offer paid support tickets by setting an option. A bit of a combination of bounty program and consulting, but simpler and streamlined using GitHubs clout.

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

#250
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.

> educational and nonprofit purposes

> once you start to make money

So if a nonprofit uses that software to sell services (they gotta fund their expenses after all), does that count? Seriously. With vague phrasing like this, you're gonna have a bad time. Contracts are that verbose for a reason.

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