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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

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I suggest something along the lines of Dmytri Kleiner's Peer Production License? As discussed more generally on P2P Foundation: http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Copyfarleft

Hey, original author of the Peer Production license here. AMA

Hi Dmytri, in your work you mentioned that PPL isn't intended for software. (As it is based on CC-BY-NC-SA which is also not intended for software)

Do you have licensing recommendations for software along the lines of copyfair/copyfarleft?

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

#522
post #498
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…

40 pounds of potassium nitrate?

Pretty common size from the big box and home & garden type stores. https://www.lowes.com/pd/Sta-Green-43-lb-15-000-sq-ft-32-0-1... I'd be suspicions if he had 10-20 bags and didn't run a landscaping company or multiple acres or grass to maintain.

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

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can’t offer people a free lunch and then claim they are steeling if they don’t voluntarily tip you the full cost of a lunch. No, but I can be miffed if I offer people a free lunch and they turn around and sell the free lunch I paid to make and keep all the money.

You certainly can, but why? It’s a problem easily solved by not giving away free lunches or adding terms. It seems odd to me to have the solution completely within my power to fix, but not fix it, and complain about the situation. In my view, the license is specifically made to allow reselling. That’s why I pick MIT, Apache, and BSD. If I don’t want people to resell then I pick GPL or some other license.

[deleted]

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

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can’t offer people a free lunch and then claim they are steeling if they don’t voluntarily tip you the full cost of a lunch. No, but I can be miffed if I offer people a free lunch and they turn around and sell the free lunch I paid to make and keep all the money.

You certainly can, but why? It’s a problem easily solved by not giving away free lunches or adding terms. It seems odd to me to have the solution completely within my power to fix, but not fix it, and complain about the situation. In my view, the license is specifically made to allow reselling. That’s why I pick MIT, Apache, and BSD. If I don’t want people to resell then I pick GPL or some other license.

Wait, doesn't GPL also specifically allows reselling ?

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

(And GNU even encourages it.)

See also about selling exceptions to GPL, like Qt does :

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html

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

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 attitu…

You're completely mischaracterizing my post. My point is that if faker were anything slightly above free, we really wouldn't have used it, and our code quality wouldn't suffer from not having it. It was more of a "ooh, that's kinda nice" thing when we used it.

> 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.

That's not my attitude at all and is a bullshit strawman. I actually do donate to libraries that are fundamental to our test framework. Faker is just definitely not one of them.

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

#526

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 just goes to show you how rough the real world really is. Like, it’s free and a pretty good solution, but still replaceable lol.

Tough crowd.

Always charge, or get value somehow, because I can promise you people will feel entitled to whatever baseline you give them (in this case ‘free’).

Everyone and everything is replaceable, oh cruel world, why you do us dirty like that?

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

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How often have you implemented a trivial feature and, after adding tests, debugging, doing code review, etc, you find it’s taken a nontrivial amount of time. And it’ll likely take maintenance too as you learn what you need (easier when you’ve seen it done already). Most of these trivial things probably take nontrivial time, and if you add all of them together for all the trivial projects you use, it’s probably saved…

Likewise, the trivial or novel that you borrow for free isn’t really free when you need to use it suddenly in ways that the license doesn’t permit or it is just technically inconvenient. It is sort of like leasing vs buying, but not really a good analogy.

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

#528

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…

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…

> Do note that this effectively prevents other people from collaborating with you, since their contributions would be GPL-protected and you may not sell them.

It is common to require a CLA/CAA in these dual-licensing cases such as Qt and other big commercial projects.

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

#529
post #479

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 get a lot of value out of eg the Linux kernel. But I never contributed any value back to that project. What makes me a better person than Apple etc?

Do you use Linux to create applications that restrict user freedoms? If yes, then you are not better than any of them.

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

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in that case is the WRONG solution to a problem.

Then what is the better solution? Saying it's wrong without giving alternatives isn't a very useful comment imho. edit: And the solution needs to apply to the US, with all it's brokenness, not some other country with different social structures.

The media doesn’t do this is the U.K. or Australia. We have much stronger libel laws.

Nobody has been “disappeared” by the police, either.

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