Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 966 posts

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

#371

Post by fractalb »

ganafagol wrote: post #32
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…

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…

GPL ftw!

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

#372

Post by pedro596 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #63
ganafagol wrote: post #32

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…

I am not a lawyer, and please correct me if needed, but you can publish with GPL in all your projects that you own the copyright and simply include "if GPL doesn't suit your needs ping me" in a README and you can do agreements on case by case basis where you can grant a different license to a specific third party. With this FAANG will need to negotiate to use your code in close source but any average Joe can just write a nice email and use it.

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

#373

Post by michaelt »

dvdkon wrote: post #279
rusk wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 for one wouldn't use a library licensed like this. There are ideological reasons, but more practically, let's say I run a server that provides a public service. At some point, it gets a lot of traffic and I want to accept donations or use ads to fund the hosting. Under such a licence, I'd be completely at the mercy of the author, who could effectively shut down the server.

Is the problem that you have to pay at all - or is the problem merely that in the absence of a listed price, there's no guarantee the price will be fair?

Would you also reject a library with this license if you knew the commercial use license was pocket change?

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

#374

Post by spockz »

StavrosK wrote: post #275
spockz wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with the TimescaleDB license[1]? It basically means open source but companies cannot just take the product and offer it as a (paid?) service. They are allowed to provide other services services that are built with timescale underneath but not offer the product itself as a service. [1]: https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/blob/master/tsl/LIC...

The TimescaleDB license can only apply to TimescaleDB.

There is nothing holding you back to create a similar license for your own product.

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

#375

Post by orlandohill »

spockz wrote: post #167
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…

Are you familiar with the TimescaleDB license[1]? It basically means open source but companies cannot just take the product and offer it as a (paid?) service. They are allowed to provide other services services that are built with timescale underneath but not offer the product itself as a service. [1]: https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/blob/master/tsl/LIC...

The Polyform Project has two source-available licenses that achieve a similar result.

* Perimeter

https://polyformproject.org/licenses/perimeter/1.0.0

* Shield

https://polyformproject.org/licenses/shield/1.0.0/

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

#376

Post by roel_v »

nmfisher wrote: post #271
roel_v wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I mean, this is a fairly trivial loophole to close if you have a lawyer who knows what they're doing." In the same way that it's trivial to write a twitter clone in a weekend, yes. Hundreds of goverments have tried for decades to do what you claim is trivial. Good luck.

Extending restrictions to affiliates/related bodies corporate is absolute bread and butter commercial legal work. Most lawyers are writing these kind of clauses week in, week out. What you are presumably referring to is transfer pricing, which is a completely different beast.

While I have never practised as a lawyer, I do have a law degree, and I've written several papers on IP and IP licensing when I was in law school. And I will also add that I did not do my degree in the US. Still, I am quite convinced that it is very hard to codify the intention of what the OP wants to do in a generic software license (i.e. one that you do not draft specifically for each client).

I do not have the motivation to lay out my full argument as that would take another entire paper, but even if it turns out to be not as hard as I think it is, it certainly isn't as easy as is posited here.

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

#377

Post by ganafagol »

stormbeard wrote: post #136
ganafagol wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Making the source code available for everybody to see and use for derivative works under certain conditions like retaining authorship notices or keeping the same license (copyleft). There are many varieties of this, some are more permissive than others. But this does not directly imply a certain business model.

Some people do donation-based development. And that's fine. And some people do things entirely for free, that's also fine. (But don't be angry that somebody then takes your code and does what the license you put it under permits them to do, e.g. not pay you.)

And others are corporations that have full-time employees write code and publish it as open source. See all the Red Hat work. Or Intels and others contributions to the Linux kernel.

Open source is more than the lone dev in their basement doing selfless acts and sometimes begging for donations.

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

#378

Post by StavrosK »

spockz wrote: post #374
StavrosK wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TimescaleDB license can only apply to TimescaleDB.

There is nothing holding you back to create a similar license for your own product.

Except for the fact that I can't afford to pay a lawyer a few thousand dollars to draft a license for my OSS libraries.

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

#379

Post by jannes »

I am really wondering why NonCommercial (NC) software licenses aren't more popular. Of course, the FSF would not consider them "free", but does that matter?

As far as I can tell, the Creative Commons NC and BY-NC licenses are pretty popular for (non-software) creative works. Why doesn't the same thing exist for software?

You could then dual-license a paid version.

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

#380

Post by eru »

rglullis wrote: post #300
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…

Apple doesn't love you back. Amazon doesn't love you back. Any company that seems oh-so-awesome, but makes their software proprietary, does not love you back. You are never going to fix the problem of centralization of wealth if you keep thinking that is a matter of "unfairness". (Much like Socialism and central planning), as long as people give in their freedoms to big central entities for the immediate benefit they…

I thought free software was all about allowing people to create value from it?
Post reply on HN