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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

#321

Post by sneak »

echelon wrote: 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…

Copying isn’t stealing when we do it with songs and movies, and copying isn’t stealing when corporate programmers do it with free software we’ve published on the web for all to use.

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

#322

Post by BlueTemplar »

cercatrova wrote: post #132
3pt14159 wrote: post #63

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…

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…

The traditional ways to make money from free (libre) software and open source were :

1.) selling physical copies

2.) charging for support

The first one is probably not viable most of the time these days, but I can see how the second one could work : for instance one could modify one's code forge so that you would need to pay to open a ticket, and/or put up an asked sum of money to start working on a ticket (that several people could contribute to).

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

#323

Post by ratww »

tastroder wrote: post #217
wjnc wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the police would ransack my family home after a fire you could probably write the same article. Charred RPi's and lots of computer parts, enough wiring for a new house, lots of chemicals (cleaners, fertilizers, other chemical agents with regular gardening use cases), ultimate survival guide and related parts ("This guy was prepping for something!"). The naming of suspects is just adding insult to injury. If he's i…

Ah well, just saw the house fire tweet and sent him a few bucks. Guess I'm on one more list now. There seem to be a few articles that are at least not half filled with the ramblings of an elderly neighbour: https://www.qgazette.com/articles/more-charges-possible-for-... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8737513/NYPD-discov... https://abc7ny.com/suspicious-package-queens-astoria-fire/64... Emotional distress se…

This is terrible. All the news are based on speculation, but they plastered his very-Googlable-name everywhere, only making it harder for him to get a job now.

I honestly can't see anything positive about those articles existing before there's a proper court case.

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

#324

Post by Lio »

cercatrova wrote: post #147
keyle wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does dual licensing works? Got a prime example simple to understand? Asking for a friend...

You offer a copyleft license like AGPL but also offer a paid license for those who don't want to deal with AGPL. Since you as the creator own the copyright, you can license it however you want, including multiple licenses simultaneously.

Forgive me for a naive question but how do external contributions to the AGPL code find their way back to the commercially licenced code?

Are all contributions to the "original" pre-licenced source? If so is there some extra legalese to ensure that the changes will always end up in the AGPL source too?

I know of many successful projects using dual licencing so it must work, I'm just wondering how on a legal front.

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

#326

Post by sgift »

unishark wrote: post #113
Fordec wrote: post #52

I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately. Years ago software was fully build on the backs of a multitude of giants within their niche domain. But for a while now large companies have been adopting a model of taking from open source contributions and raking in billions. The original social bargain of "pay it on" has been broken by the Bezos of the world raking in billions. And yes, as o…

you mean the good ole days when Microsoft paid 50k for quickdos before making billions from it?

That's 50k more than most open source projects make, also: No one forced the owners of qdos to give Microsoft that license for 50k. Sellers remorse is a thing, but I'm not sure why we should feel sorry for them.

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

#327

Post by BlueTemplar »

mikkom wrote: post #137
Karupan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I assume that parent meant «shut down the copies of the code under their own control».

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

#328

Post by qiqitori »

ralfd wrote: post #255
j15t wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, why not?

For projects with copy-left license one has to contact all contributors and ask for their permission to relicense: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/33/how-can-a-...

Most of the time, when you license something under GPLv3, you explicitly allow for later versions of the GPL. The "either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version." part was famously removed in the Linux kernel.

This clause is a bit dangerous -- if a bad actor gets control of the FSF and manages to release an official GPL version that is completely bonkers, all current GPL-or-later software can be distributed under that license.

    This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

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

#329

Post by icebraining »

kd5bjo wrote: post #143
3pt14159 wrote: post #63

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…

That sounds like an aggressive copyleft license plus a paid commercial license to avoid the copyleft terms. If someone wants to charge for a software library, is there a good royalty-free, one-time payment license template out there somewhere?

The problem with dual-licensing is that it impedes collaboration. If one contributes a big feature, shouldn't they also get some cash from those sales? If so, who decides how much?

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

#330

Post by yamrzou »

It looks like this is what triggered it: https://twitter.com/marak/status/1325612104808886274

"There has been a data leak somewhere in FAANG and I can tell you with certainty billions of dollars are being made off our work and there are multi-millionaires literally laughing at us."

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