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

441–450 of 966 posts

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

#441

Post by bigbizisverywyz »

keyle wrote: post #119
pjmlp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what happens when the hipster folks attack GPL and push for MIT like licenses. Had Linus not chosen it for Linux and I bet I would still be using a mix of Solaris, Aix and HP-UX on the server room. Dual licensing is the only true path, it was already so in the shareware days, and it will be back to be the daily reality. Bills have to paid.

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

I think Atlassian have a dual licensing model where you can download the source code and build the product yourself, but only for single users, or open source projects.

Commercial users however have to buy a copy, but the source is available for all.

Maybe somebody could create a github (sharehub?) equivalent where anybody doing a clone has to register and then commercial entities can pay for the licence or single use hobbyists could attest.

people sharing the code can then set what they see as a fair price and the website will take a cut of the revenue (e.g. 30% ducks )

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

#442

Post by ludston »

ganafagol wrote: post #40
dtech wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also fully his choice to no longer do that...

Absolutely. I would even encourage people to stop do this kind of thing. It's just that the rant demonstrates the misunderstanding, which is what I'm trying to point out.

I don't know if there is "one true motivation" for working on open source software, and any other reasoning is a lack of understanding.

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

#443

Post by globular-toast »

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 don't want GPL.

Any reason for that? Most of the opposition is on religious/fashion/popularity grounds as far as I can tell.

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

#444

Post by ghaff »

fest wrote: post #309
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…

What is the consensus on using/extending GPL licensed code in the web backend?

If it's just being used in the web backend (or not being made available for download generally), you're not distributing so GPL doesn't come into play. This is the "loophole" that AGPL was created to address.

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

#445

Post by falcolas »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #234
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: Don't release the code and sell your product. Taking pride in your work also means valueing it properly. - 95% chance you die poor. 4.999% chance you make a decent living out of it. 0.0001% chance Facebook buys it for enough money that you can buy your own island on Mars.

The problem here is that selling your closed source project requires a significantly distinct skill set from writing good code. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Venn diagram of a good project and being able to sell the project for a decent living is much smaller than 5%.

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

#446

Post by roel_v »

nmfisher wrote: post #437
roel_v wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mot…

I don’t know why you think it’s not possible (or that it’s anything more than trivial). Revenue, affiliated companies, third party service providers, etc are all basic legal concepts. The risk is far more likely to be inadvertently making the licence overly narrow and preventing usage by companies that you would actually intend to allow (or at least contemplate should be allowed). Regardless, the text doesn’t really…

shrug The Unreal engine mentioned elsewhere in this threat also seems very simple (an order of magnitude more straightforward as what we're talking about here I'd argue), yet if you go on the Id forums you'll find many questions from people in various edge cases that fall under one category in spirit and another in the letter of the license. But hey, I'm just some guy on the internet, what do I know, we'll just have to agree to disagree until someone really tries to find out.

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

#447

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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.

Or you could pay the author for his/her work from your income.

I could be wrong but it seems obvious to me that semi-commercial licenses would explode the amount of open code available, because instead of devs working for corporations, corporations would end up working for them.

Commercial licensing - open code, free for non-profits, per-seat or per-user pricing for for profits with an official license, forks are considered a derivative work, clean room clones aren't. There would be details, but there are always details, and they don't stop two hundred page EULAs from existing and being (mostly) binding.

But we don't have this because Stallman is a zealot and he wanted to Make A Point about purity. So instead of creating a market where devs could actually get paid for original work and corporations would be the ones paying, corporations get millions of hours of development effort for free - because he thought he could somehow magically strong-arm them into playing to his rules.

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

#448

Post by ydlr »

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…

> The right reaction is not to stop producing open source software. The right reaction is to adjust the license.

I think the kind of software written also needs to be adjusted. Most open source software I've encountered recently has either been created to solve a business problem that only happens at a large scale or solves a developer tooling problem that only occurs when working in large groups.

When the open source software is being made to address the problems of corporations and their employees, of course corporations are going to be the ones that benifit.

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

#449

Post by harimau777 »

jabl wrote: post #426
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…

> Seriously. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? To nitpick: They are not stealing it, they're using it per the license terms. Don't like that? Well, choose a different license. That being said, I think there's an underlying point here. The "business-friendly" open source movement co-opted the idealistic free software movem…

Good points!

The issue that I see is that many (most?) people want a middle ground:

On the one hand, it's not important to them to use some sort of viral copyleft license that forces people who use their project to make their code free.

On the other hand, they don't want people who use their project to be aggressively anti-competitive or anti-developer.

So for example, it would be fine if Apple charged for their OS and kept it closed source as long as they allowed anyone who wants to develop apps for their OS to do so.

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

#450

Post by Qwertious »

jabl wrote: post #426
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…

> Seriously. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? To nitpick: They are not stealing it, they're using it per the license terms. Don't like that? Well, choose a different license. That being said, I think there's an underlying point here. The "business-friendly" open source movement co-opted the idealistic free software movem…

I think the first misstep the Free Software movement made was relying on corporate money. Not because "corporations are evil lololol", but because they aren't focused on the what we care about. For instance, when a webpage is bloated with ads/trackers the website itself is usually relatively lightweight, but has to embed ads/trackers to make money, and the ad/tracker companies don't care about the user experience. Fundamentally, even if the money ultimately comes from the customer, it comes more directly and more short-termly from businesses, so we focus on meeting business use-cases. So if you cut out indirect payment and get money directly from users, I expect we'll have a much healthier ecosystem.

But let's talk more broadly: Servers. Linux is great for servers. But remind me: who gives a flying fuck about servers? Surely not the FSF, because most real people use personal computers (that means desktop/laptop/tablet/phone/smartwatch/anything else you the typical user can physically unplug/open) and don't administer servers, and on top of that the FSF dislike services in the first place! (See: "service as a software substitute").

People don't have control over enterprise software in most cases - even at the office, your IT department literally chooses what you can do on "your" computer. So why do we have so much free software aimed at business, and so little aimed at e.g. games? Because that's what our money systems are set up to get funding from. Point is, enterprise software being open-source is not an end in itself, it's only useful as a means to an end.

So while corporations can be a useful tool when our interests align, they should not be our primary pillar of support. That should be the actual users, who pay money.

I think the biggest mistake we ever made was leaning into the "free" in free software. It's not as hard as you'd think - let me ask you, why is paying with ads and data-sucking so popular? I'd say, because they're convenient and ubiquitous. Every browser and user on the planet has support for ads/tracking, so every webpage supports them. They make PayPal niche in comparison! They're also incredibly convenient, having zero-click autopay!

Distros should have had payment models built into the OS (available) from the start. There should have been "app stores" selling free software from repositories - it's absurd that selling free software is claimed as a way of making money, but distros do absolutely nothing to accommodate such sales and will in fact undercut* potentially sustainable free software by repackaging it and putting it in repositories gratis, so now there's not even the slight convenience benefit to buying!

Yes, it's legal for a distro to do that. It's also legal for corporations to be parasitic, that doesn't make it moral.

Anyway, move towards patreon-style funding or traditionally proprietary models that take money directly from the consumer. Then you won't see desktops stagnate due to all the money coming from servers.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/619/

Post reply on HN