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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

#391

Post by Robin_Message »

hobofan wrote: post #245
Robin_Message wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No problem per-se, but to give a simple example:

Suppose a developer, let's call him Salvatore, lives in a modest apartment in, say Italy, and would live very comfortably indeed on three hundred thousand euros a year.

And let's say three cloud providers, call them, Jungle, Blue, and Lots, agree to give Salvatore a hundred thousand a year each to keep developing a, I don't know, a high-performance in-memory database. Lucky Salvatore, plenty of money for doing what he loves anyway.

Let's say that this database is quite good, and Jungle, Blue, and Lots each make a cool hundred million a year in pure profit renting out instances that run Salvatore's code.

So, whilst Salvatore has done perhaps better with the cost-plus model than he was before, he is capturing just 0.1% of the economic surplus that is being generated by his code.

And that is the problem in this scenario: if all elements of the value chain are cost-plus except one, that one element captures all of the surplus even though it may not be deserved.

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

#392

Post by rglullis »

eru wrote: post #380
rglullis wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Even though I believe it is more about the principles than the economics, where am I saying otherwise?

The problem I am talking about is the asymmetry: Apple (Amazon, Google, MS, etc) can create value from the work from FOSS developers, but FOSS developers can not create value from the work of Apple (Amazon, Google, MS, etc).

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

#393

Post by ganafagol »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #331
icebraining wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, can you define each word you've used in your post?

I don't understand what you're asking, can you elaborate? Edit: I guess you're asking about 'ESR' and 'RMS.' ESR = Eric Raymond, an early proponent of open source as a communal development model ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html ). RMS is Richard Stallman, the originator of the GNU project on which the Linux kernel is based, as well as the GPL. RMS disagrees with ESR, in that he argues that the term "open s…

No, the question was supposed to illustrate that if you have that approach to language, then communication is impossible. There needs to be a shared notion of what certain words and concepts mean. You claimed that they mean whatever some person claims them to mean. So the question to you was what do your words mean, since with that entirely freewheeling approach to language, nobody here can know what you meant.

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

#394

Post by Shorel »

StavrosK wrote: post #378
spockz wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Treat it like code. Do some refactoring and that's it. I do see your point, if the license had to be written from scratch. But you already have a template. Use it.

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

#395

Post by hazz99 »

black_puppydog wrote: post #342
trevyn wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing a gig at a coffee shop for tips and not compromising on your vision seems like a solid choice to me.

> Making the world a better place by allowing big corporations to generate solid fake test data for their QA flows. --- Random Guy in a random Silicon Valley episode Not compromising your vision? Not to belittle Marak's work here, it's certainly valuable, but it doesn't sound like something that one does to make the world better, but like something that is useful (nearly) only in a corporate context and should be don…

I think regardless of the repository, participation in the FOSS ecosystem strengthens it and encourages more people to join. The very act of doing so makes the world a better place, indirectly.

It's not the same as boots-on-ground charity work, no. But it's something.

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

#396

Post by watwut »

jml7c5 wrote: post #267
lollmao wrote: post #189

Unrelated, but why do people prefer to assume gender over just using gender-neutral pronouns? Not a native English speaker but I've seen this a lot, especially on HN even when there's no indication of subject's gender whatsoever. Or is it just weird to use they/them? Thanks

It's a weird problem with the language. Despite many attempts, with proposals like "xe" and "thon"[0], English never picked up a good gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun. [Yeesh, that's a mouthful of adjectives.] As recently as 15 years ago, using "they" to refer to a single individual was derided by many as grammatically incorrect. It was common in colloquial speech, but frowned upon in writing, mostly beca…

"Sally and her friends went to the mall, then they left" is ambiguous with or without they being singular. But, if it was normal in colloquial speech, there is no reason to not have it normal in written speech. That would be weird limitation to enforce. I am mostly surprised it was normal in colloquial speech tho.

(In this case, we know that Marak is man, so the whole thread is likely just trolling attempt.)

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

#397

Post by solatic »

pietrovismara wrote: post #295
solatic wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the person who wrote the software and owns the copyright, nothing prevents you from dual-licensing your software. You can release your software as GPL on GitHub, with a notice that you're willing to also license your code under a paid proprietary license; interested parties may send an email to sales@example.com at their leisure. Do note that this effectively prevents other people from collaborating with you, sinc…

It's not what OP meant at all. He's asking for a license that lets regular devs use your project freely, but require fortune 500 like companies to pay.

Who do you think a "regular dev" is?

If it's software for personal use, then the GPL is just fine. The GPL is explicitly designed to protect personal use.

If it's software for commercial use - I mean, that's exactly what the issue is here. Commercial users ought to need to pay for the software they use. Just because you offer a commercial license doesn't mean you need to charge a million bucks for it - if someone emails you and says that they work for a startup, you can always respond with a exclusive commercial license free of charge, if you like.

If you own the software you can charge whatever you like to different people.

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

#398

Post by skinkestek »

huhtenberg wrote: post #333
jgilias wrote: post #163

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. Use https://commonsclause.com or another commercial use restriction with an open source license. - Get bashed for not being a real open source by fellow nerds - Get licensing fees from larger companies

Just say it is commons clause, not ordinary open source.

I've even become convinced (based on someone digging out enough references) that the term ipen source was being used before OSI, but for the rest of the HN, just say "commons clause" without saying "open source" and I guess most bashing disappears.

There will always be that person annoyed that it isn't AGPL - or MIT for that matter - but for most if us we just want to know what the license actually is.

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

#399

Post by CamperBob2 »

ganafagol wrote: post #393
CamperBob2 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what you're asking, can you elaborate? Edit: I guess you're asking about 'ESR' and 'RMS.' ESR = Eric Raymond, an early proponent of open source as a communal development model ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html ). RMS is Richard Stallman, the originator of the GNU project on which the Linux kernel is based, as well as the GPL. RMS disagrees with ESR, in that he argues that the term "open s…

No, the question was supposed to illustrate that if you have that approach to language, then communication is impossible. There needs to be a shared notion of what certain words and concepts mean. You claimed that they mean whatever some person claims them to mean. So the question to you was what do your words mean, since with that entirely freewheeling approach to language, nobody here can know what you meant.

My claim was a response to an assertion which has now been edited, so... meh. You win teh Internets.

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

#400

Post by prepend »

trevyn wrote: post #181
dehrmann wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Playing a gig at a coffee shop for tips and not compromising on your vision seems like a solid choice to me.

Definitely, it would be nice. A key to this approach is being able to survive based on tips alone.

It will make me really frustrated if I play for tips and then yell about how listeners should pay be $100k.

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