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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

#491

Post by lowbloodsugar »

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 their friends."

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

#492

Post by treis »

Robin_Message wrote: post #391
hobofan wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

The problem with this is that Redis isn't used because it is particularly good. It's used because everyone else uses it. And everyone else uses it because it's free.

If you tried to charge for Redis then "everyone else" would stop using it and pretty much all of the value disappears. It becomes a niche product that you shouldn't build on. You're vulnerable to high license fees and experienced developers become harder to find since few get experience with it.

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

#493

Post by OldHand2018 »

unishark wrote: post #113
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…

you mean the good ole days when Microsoft paid 50k for quickdos before making billions from it?

As a really fun thought experiment, imagine that they took the $50,000 and put it into 30-year US Treasury bonds in 1981 and sold them in 1986 to buy Microsoft at the IPO.

It would be worth about $212 million today. And that ignores dividends.

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

#494

Post by bushin »

C19is20 wrote: post #293
enriquto wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? No. Money is a collective construct and strictly subject to collective norms (e.g., taxes). Paying selected people money for not really working is the cornerstone of corruption.

I just bought a TV from a shop selling the same as in another store, but cheaper. Should I return it and go and pay more? I've paid my taxes, the rest is mine.

Through no fault of your own, powerful and/or discontent people in your country can significantly alter your purchasing power.

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

#495

Post by pedro596 »

RegnisGnaw wrote: post #468
pedro596 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I am referring to the case where FAANG would make money out of your work in closed sources:"With this FAANG will need to negotiate to use your code in closed sources(...)"

Still I get your point, and they indeed don't need to negotiate to use GPL but, with GPL most of the times the actual developer receives the merit of the work (whatever it means) and more important, the community can use any improvements/features/functionalities that FAANG may develop on top of original work.

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

#496

Post by draw_down »

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…

I decided recently anything I open source in the future will have a license that grants no use, really the opposite of a license. That way it’s clear I don’t care about people’s issues and requests and so forth. You weren’t supposed to be using it anyway, and probably won’t if it’s not available via a package manager etc

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

#497

Post by quells »

slooonz wrote: post #383
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…

> 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. Pro…

Besides the fact that this would limit access to those projects for those unable to pay, there are the issues of multiple contributors and transient dependencies.

Say a project is started by one person, made open source, and becomes popular. They start accepting contributions from the public, including substantial features and bug fixes. They later move on and someone else becomes the lead maintainer. Who would receive the money in your scheme? The original author? The current maintainer? Divvied up among anyone who has ever touched the code? If the Digital Ocean tshirt giveaway is anything to go by, popular paid projects would be overwhelmed by "contributors" hoping to snag a slice for changing around a few words. It gets really complicated pretty quickly.

Say a project depends on one or more of these paid projects - does it now require payment of at least as much as the sum of its dependencies, and their dependencies, etc? That could add up quickly unless there's some scaling factor and you hope those projects make it up in volume. Surely there will be typosquatting projects which are (at best) wrappers for real ones and siphon off some of the fees.

And so on. All this is just to say that it's complicated and the details matter.

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

#498

Post by woah »

wjnc wrote: post #169
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…

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…

40 pounds of potassium nitrate?

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

#499

Post by marcinzm »

tastroder wrote: post #217
wjnc wrote: post #169

Earlier 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…

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…

>Naming suspects in these cases seems so weird from a non-US perspective, there's not even been a court case.

As I understand it, the original reason for this is to prevent the police from simply making people disappear. It's a public check on what the police and government do to people.

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

#500

Post by tpxl »

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…

> fix issues and send them upstream

Fat chance. An average programmer will replace the library if the current one has issues, not fix the issues in the library. It is rational to do so (assuming a different lib exists, which it does for most libs).

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