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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

#481

Post by microtherion »

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 want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD.

What's that supposed to mean? Surely the value of e.g. Linux to its stakeholders surpasses 1B.

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

#482

Post by eru »

ganafagol wrote: post #390
eru wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

A permissible MIT license might even be the best way to exploit this.

Assuming there are network effects for being the 'official' place to contribute to your project, than you can start with an MIT license, and once it gets popular, you take it private with slightly ever less permissible licenses.

(GPL wouldn't make this so easy.)

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

#483

Post by stevekemp »

josteink wrote: post #389
ganafagol wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel the same way. In the early nineties a corporation got in touch with me, they said they were working on a Java IDE and could they ship some of my source as "example projects". I thought about it for about six seconds and said "Yes please!" I think they even mailed me a CD-ROM at some later point.

At the time I was thinking "Yay! I'm famous! My code is good!".

Over the years I've seen some of my code, not much of course, end up in other big projects and I'm a little proud, and a little pleased. The fact that the company got the money and not me? Doesn't bother me in the slightest.

I write code for me, and if I get bug reports that prove other people used it then I'll try to improve things. Money just isn't a consideration, although I have linked an Amazon wishlist in a few places over the years, and received unexpected books/films which make me smile.

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

#484

Post by faeyanpiraat »

michaelt wrote: post #334
faeyanpiraat wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a way the dual licensing could do exactly that, it's just a manual process, and not "automated" by the license.

It depends on the project. If your GPL project will be so tightly coupled with the company's project that their entire project will become GPL - then yes. Big libraries like Qt, for example. On the other hand, if the coupling to the user's project is loose and doesn't make their entire project GPL, they have no reason to pay for a license. For example, compiling with gcc or hosting with nginx, or calling ffmpeg doesn…

Wouldn't using AGPL solve this issue?

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

#485

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #467
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 hav…

I feel for him being in his tough spot, but let's be clear on what faker.js is. I suspect many companies (like mine) use it to create "decent"-looking data for tests. But we could trivially do without it, and basically just used it because it was there. I contrast this with some other open source projects we use that we specifically contribute to (using GitHub donations) because they are central libraries to our code base.

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

#486

Post by andrey_utkin »

gkoberger wrote: post #31

I 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…

> it’s extra hard when you get no additional value.

I believe this, the identification and the articulation of additional value, is the problem with FOSS sustainability, and it's urgent that we resolve that.

I hope I am onto something with the idea of crowdfunding specific commitments, as I have sketched there: https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/3735cd917...

The mental model behind this is quite simple, and I hope that once adopted, it will avoid a lot of unproductive behaviours and expectations on both sides, of the producers and the consumers.

It's strange that there's so little crowdfunding happening to deliver free and open source software. One of the very few prominent examples is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-mig...

Basically I believe in offerings which promise specific qualities (timeliness of responses and bugfixes, roadmap features schedule etc) and cover the costs of development (including market rate salary for the developers according to their skills which they use to develop and manage the project).

I am currently developing this with the aim to roll out my first experimental offerings. I am keen to help others to adopt this approach, so everybody is most welcome to reach out to me with any questions.

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

#487

Post by webmaven »

tingol wrote: post #316
cercatrova wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want usage, you can make it MIT and then suffer while they capitalize your code (as they are with in their rights to do), or if you want protection but low usage, make it AGPL or proprietary even. I don't really see a scenario where you have high usage, high prot…

What's the point you're making? There's a lot of proprietary software that's - high usage - high protection - high profit What's the argument that OSS software (which you could use for free indefinitely until you gain profitability) is somehow not capable of the same?

> What's the point you're making? There's a lot of proprietary software that's

> - high usage - high protection - high profit

> What's the argument that OSS software (which you could use for free indefinitely until you gain profitability) is somehow not capable of the same?

Software that meets those criteria also has an organization that spends quite a lot on sales and marketing. Stimulation of usage and extraction of revenue doesn't happen on its own.

More explicitly, if an already-profitable organization can't use the software without paying on day zero, quite a lot of effort has to be expended to get them to make the leap, hence the long enterprise sales cycle. You can do it with just marketing if you keep the purchase price low (ie. below what a department manager is allowed to spend using a corporate credit card).

Open source can circumvent this to an extent, but to do so it has to allow businesses to use the software for free, and convert a percentage of those users to paying voluntarily.

Whether the mechanism of conversion is consulting and customization services, hosting services, support services, dual licensing, an 'enterprise' version with specific features, or something else is immaterial, they are never just paying for exactly what they were getting for free. The closest a business will come to that is employing developers to work on the open-source software, or at least allowing employees to work on the software during work hours.

The specific licensing-only approach you're outlining will only work in a very narrow case: A new unprofitable company starts using the software for free, and starts paying once they cross over to profitability (at which point they might decide to switch to using something else, instead). Note that there are some very large VC-fueled companies that have yet to be profitable. Convincing an already profitable business to pay at the outset just can't be done without the aforementioned marketing and sales.

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

#488

Post by at-fates-hands »

Fordec wrote: post #52

I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately. Years ago software was fully build on the backs of a multitude of giants within their niche domain. But for a while now large companies have been adopting a model of taking from open source contributions and raking in billions. The original social bargain of "pay it on" has been broken by the Bezos of the world raking in billions. And yes, as o…

> But for a while now large companies have been adopting a model of taking from open source contributions and raking in billions.

I've been working at a large corporation for about five years now. I've been on more than a few projects where we wanted to use an open source product/tool to help build an application and it was roundly rejected by the security team. After two back-to-back requests were rejected, we were told corporate policy was 100% against using any open source tools or products in anything we did.

The ironic part is this monolithic, hulking corporation is losing chunks of market to smaller, more nimble companies who can get their product to market in three months. Whereas, it takes us 18 teams and 100 people and two years to get the same product to market. Their solution? Just buy the technology instead. We've had dozens of acquisitions over the past year or so.

Which now creates another new set of problems I'm sure you can already see. . .

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

#489

Post by rglullis »

sokoloff wrote: post #472
rglullis wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Developers have made massive gains overall by commoditizing their complements. Linux OS is almost surely the largest single example of this. How many fewer developer jobs would there be now if every OS installation cost what Solaris used to cost (or even what Win2K8 Server cost)?

> Developers have made massive gains overall by commoditizing their complements

Sorry, I am not following. What is the implication here, that application developersand Free Operating Systems are complemetary products?

> How many fewer developer jobs would there be now if every OS installation cost what Solaris used to cost?

Of course the market would be much smaller without FOSS, but how does this relate to what I am talking about?

I wish we had more FOSS, not less. I wish people were willing to refuse the short-term apparent benefit/convenience of closed source and started at least hedging their investments on FOSS alternatives.

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

#490

Post by offbyone »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #485
ampdepolymerase wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

I feel for him being in his tough spot, but let's be clear on what faker.js is. I suspect many companies (like mine) use it to create "decent"-looking data for tests. But we could trivially do without it, and basically just used it because it was there. I contrast this with some other open source projects we use that we specifically contribute to (using GitHub donations) because they are central libraries to our code…

That's going to be true to some extent of every library your company uses, but for every library someone writes and offers as FOSS, you don't have to spend the cycles designing, developing, and maintaining your own, nor training new hires on using it. You're fundamentally misunderstanding the value of having good quality tools developed by someone else.

And I'm not even going to _start_ on what I think of your attitude towards test tooling vs "central libraries" other than to note that if you don't consider test tools central to your development process, I think you have bigger problems.

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