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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

#461

Post by okprod »

Qwertious wrote: post #450
jabl wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Fu…

By "Free Software movement... relying on corporate money" do you mean the volunteer developers/contributors who have corporate jobs? The FSF is mostly funded by individuals / not corporate money.

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

#462

Post by Qwertious »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #447
dvdkon wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

I see antitrust as a critical purpose of freedom-respecting software - suppose you pay the author for the rights to use the semis proprietary software. You go on a decade or two, and become critically reliant on it.

But then they jack up the price a hundredfold.

You can't do anything (short of rewriting), even if you could flat-out hire a replacement dev team for the entire project for cheaper than what they're charging you.

OpenOffice and MariaDB are classic examples of Free Software solving this - the IP holder sandbagged, so the community forked and fucked off. Even despite that though, LibreOffice still suffers from losing its OpenOffice name, and plenty of users lose out because they're unknowingly using a barely-updated version due to abovementioned sandbagging.

Proprietary software hands a default victory to the IP holder. Free Software hands a default victory to the user. It's either one or the other.

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

#464

Post by black_puppydog »

hazz99 wrote: post #395
black_puppydog wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, I don't want to say I disagree with their work, not at all!

And while I thought this is classic corporate-centric coding, some people [1] seem to have a strong relationship with this:

> Faker is love. Faker is life. I applaud this move. Someone sponsor this man!

I can't edit the GP anymore, but it really seems to be a beloved tool. I guess we love the tools we use, even if they ultimately benefit someone else. :)

[1]: https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/issues/1046#issuecomment-7...

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

#465

Post by rglullis »

sokoloff wrote: post #456
rglullis wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I would say that developers have been able to create a lot of value building on top of Android (Google), Flutter (Google), and .Net Core (Microsoft). I could probably dig up specifically an Amazon open source example, but I think you can convincingly argue that devs have created a ton of value building on top of the work on AWS.

First, creating value on top of the platform is not the same of extracting value from it.

Second, the examples you give are not part of the core value of the companies. They are commoditizing their complements. [0]

When Google releases a self-hosted version of their search and adwords programs, when Amazon makes AWS products compatible with OpenStack or when people can run iOS on any hardware and have access to the source, then I will start believing they are willing to give back proportionally to the amount of value they extract.

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

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

#466

Post by runako »

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'm curious how you would feel about a scrappy bootstrapped startup building their business around your FOSS and then, sometime much later, becoming a large company whose founders become billionaires. (I have a couple of examples in mind where this has happened.)

> What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down?

For folks who do not work 100% in OSS, there can be many points:

- The whole Github-as-resume thing makes it important to have public contributions (most people's day job lives in private repos). To some extent, much of the industry needs OSS in lieu of effective employee screening processes.

- It's a convenient way for big companies to exchange IP without formal bilateral agreements. Everyone else just benefits for free.

- Your line of work is X, but you built a crude project for Y. You open source it because you don't actually care about area Y at all but hope your work could be useful for someone else.

- You write something for yourself and publish in the hopes that someone else will help you improve it for free. You're looking for free work and/or critique of your work. You don't actually care if someone else makes a billion dollars on it because you weren't interested in starting a business around it. Plus, you gain reputational points from having built it (consider Linus Torvalds's ability to get work as a programmer as a result of having started Linux, for example).

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

#467

Post by ampdepolymerase »

arthurcolle wrote: post #102

On Twitter, he claims that he was recently made homeless due to an apartment fire, and asks the community to send funds to help him avoid homelessness, which seems reasonable enough. He later goes on to describe "fake news written by the NY Post." I searched for this, and found an article that might be the article he describes (timing fits) [0] Pretty crazy story, all in all! He seems to be in some pretty dire strait…

For all those people in this thread praising his work, now's the time to put your money where the mouth is. If you have used his work, push your companies to sponsor/donate. Asking irrelevant questions like whether he has a job does not help the situation. The community's response to events like this is what determines the future of open source. People like to complain about copyleft vs libre licenses. But if you have benefitted much from open source software and are hesitant about contributing back financially, you are part of the problem. This is not just about Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Fortune 500s. If you are a tech startup with revenue or funding and uses his software in your products, consider a 5 to 6 figures contract, or at the very least a significant one time donation.

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

#468

Post by RegnisGnaw »

pedro596 wrote: post #372
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…

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 wri…

If the GPL is fine for them, why would FAANG need to use a different license?

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

#469

Post by Qwertious »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #322
cercatrova wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 seve…

We could still sell software if distros decided to add support for selling freedom-respecting software through the package manager. Some people still do it (see RCU on http://davisr.me , it's a $15 FOSS third-party program for stuff related to the ReMarkable e-ink stylus tablet)

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

#470

Post by schmappel »

ratww wrote: post #323
tastroder wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I never understood the need to name suspects - address and all - in this country.

In my home country suspects that are (or are about to be) charged and convicted with a crime have their last name abbreviated (e.g. Paul S.), which seems completely reasonable to me. You're innocent until proven guilty, for one. But even if you're guilty and convicted, your punishment should be limited to whatever the judge rules it should be.

I don't see the need for public shaming beyond whatever punishment they get in court should they be convicted. When someone is released after a prison sentence they have a right to resume their life. They did their time, after all.

Sorry if I sound like I'm rambling a bit, English is not my native language.

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