I guess a distinction has to be made wrt what kind of sw gets what license. In the forming years of F/OSS, it was mostly re-implementing Unix, compilers, and POSIX tools, guided by strong specs and portability requirements. Now with Linux almost the only server OS standing, questionable innovations such as containers, one-of-a-kind software being released as F/OSS, and the abundance of F/OSS directly responsible for the "cloud" (in the sense that selling services and integration is the only area left where to make a buck), the copyleft/non-copyleft taxonomy doesn't seem to work anymore.
No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
381–390 of 966 posts
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don't love this hyper-centralization of wealth and it would be better for the world if we defanged the power that billionaires have. We tried it here in russia back in 1917. But then oops! something went wrong.
In all fairness, there is an extremely large middle ground between Communist insurrection and loophole-diseased corporatism. Just using anti-trust laws to their full effect would be enough.
Well, in practice anti-trust law has proven a better tool for the people who can afford expensive lawyers than it's supposed intended purpose.
Funny enough, even the original paradigmatic case of breaking up Standard Oil was a farce.
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#383I 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…
> 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.
That’s the big issue IMO. It’s easy for one developer to say "if you make money you can pay me a tip". When you have hundreds of dependencies, tracking developers wanting donations is almost a full time job…
If I were npm CEO, I would :
1. Propose the users (the ones using npm install/ci without publishing packages) to create accounts
2. You can put any amount of money on your account ; it will be monthly used to finance the packages you have downloaded that month
3. Developers (the one publishing packages) can flag their packages to be downloadable either publicly, only by registered users or only by paying users
4. Take a small fee
5. Profit
Then do the same with composer, apt, yum, and you have a pretty good coverage of the FLOSS ecosystem and potential monetary contributors just have to monthly fund 4 accounts.
I don’t understand how it hasn’t happened yet.
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#384Seriously. 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 said this years ago: open source always the brides maid, never the bride. That or its a bit like atlas, holding up the burden of capitalism.
Either way the internet is still just a big ip network. You can still setup a vps and run your own email, website, rss, blog, etc. And I know some people (masochists, psychos?;-) who do but they do that admin work for a living. Yeah, you gotta roll up your sleeves but that's just life: you have to work for it. These companies prey on human laziness and "free" stuff.
Just stop using garbage services and take back control. I'm one of those technological troglodytes who refuses to participate in most modern web nonsense. I have a smart phone with only a few utilitarian programs. I don't use any social media. I use bandcamp to stream/download my music collection which I paid outright for. I don't have any smart appliances, TV's or IoT trash. My life is fine and I have plenty of friends and a social life. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking you need to drink the dumpster juice internet koolaid.
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That is an arbitrary criteria, and you'll end up with software being written by Apple Development LLC, the loss-making shell company that Apple uses to do all it's development. If you want something other than the GPL you can use it but don't be surprised when people commercialise your software at scale,…
I mean, this is a fairly trivial loophole to close if you have a lawyer who knows what they're doing. In fact, you don't even need to close the loophole. You just need to make FAANG employees pause long enough to worry that they might not comply, deterring them from using said library.
How does it help you if they don't use your lib? Why do you publish your work in the first place? To get donations? That's not what open source was invented for.
If you don't want people to use your work, don't publish it. Publishing has the totally selfish goal of getting others to help you by trying things out, report bugs and improvements and some of them to contribute those things to you. Don't publish if you don't care and just want mobey out of it. Then open source is not for you.
You think Linus Torvalds wanted donations when he published Linux? Or that he was in a particularly philantropic mood? No way. He did it to get other people to work for him. And it turned out great for the project! That he is now making a living with it is just a side effect.
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#386Seriously. 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…
The point of Free Software is to protect the freedom of the user. Open Source doesn't have a point and never did.
You’re far too generous. Open Source has always had a point, and it’s succeeded in achieving that point: the point is to take mindshare away from Free Software so developers use non-copyleft licenses that are preferable to big business.
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#387Seriously. 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…
> Remember when the Internet was actually pleasant? When it was nice to build stuff for others to use?
I do. I definitely miss it. And I fully agree with your post up until this point.
> Stop giving your work away for free when the companies only take.
Or just use a license which forbids locked down SaaS exploitation.
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#388Earlier 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…
Do you have any ammonium nitrate though? I mean, chances are he was just some pyro and not actually interested in bombing/killing people. But it's dumb to do that in a flat.
> But it's dumb to do that in a flat.
One of the other articles refers to some sort of fireproof container outside of the house.
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#389Earlier 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 fact, you don't even need to close the loophole. You just need to make FAANG employees pause long enough to worry that they might not comply, deterring them from using said library.
How does it help you if they don't use your lib? Why do you publish your work in the first place? To get donations? That's not what open source was invented for. If you don't want people to use your work, don't publish it. Publishing has the totally selfish goal of getting others to help you by trying things out, report bugs and improvements and some of them to contribute those things to you. Don't publish if you don…
> Why do you publish your work in the first place? To get donations? That's not what open source was invented for.
I don't know about everyone else, but if I publish something as open-source it's because it's something I made and needed in the first place.
Open-sourcing it is just a way to enable other people who have an itch to scratch to be able to do so. More often than not, such scratches comes back benefiting me as the original author.
I don't get this fixation on everything having to be profitable, but then again I don't work on any FOSS projects full time. I only do it to scratch an itch, to make the software work for me.
And when it works... I go do the actual work I'm paid to work on, using the software I've helped make better.
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#390Earlier 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 fact, you don't even need to close the loophole. You just need to make FAANG employees pause long enough to worry that they might not comply, deterring them from using said library.
If you don't want FAANG employees to use your code, why don't you just forbid them?
Exactly. If you feel this is unjust, put a non-commercial clause in you license.
And watch everybody avoid your lib. You think you are special? A competing lib will soon show up without that restriction. And that lib will get attention from corporations and they will have thousands of eyes use the lib and test it and beat the hell out of it and fix issues and send them upstream (since maintaining a fork is too much work) and eventually this commercial-permissive alternative will thrive and be 100x as stable and streamlined and your alternative will cease to exist.
But you are free to do this. Nobody prevents you from it. But please don't cry later when seeing effects that you don't like.