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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

#11

Post by Fordec »

bdcravens wrote: post #5

Certainly his right; his project (though it has a very permissive license), his time. It sounds like he's tired of working on it, and he requires sponsorship to make it worthwhile. Let's say he doesn't, and the project is forked. This begs an interesting question: does he own the npm name? "faker" has mindshare, not just in JS; if he's unwilling to work on it, would it make sense for the NPM organization to reassign…

Kind of sets a horrible precedent by NPM no? Keep, maintaining your open source project or we use it for a different project. How many builds does that break the very next update? What about downstream codebase security?

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

#12

Post by sleepychu »

CravingLogic wrote: post #4

I'm curious what the motivation was for doing this now after supporting faker.js for 8+ years. Also, isn't faker.js a completed project? What is there to maintain?

179 open issues as of now https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/issues?page=1&q=is%3Aopen+....

Looks like people want new data generation, new generation interfaces.

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

#13

Post by xenihn »

corty wrote: post #9
xenihn wrote: post #3

It's actually really sad that someone who has easily generated millions of dollars of value with their work gets nothing for it. Yeah yeah, it's open source, but it still sucks. I'm assuming they can't be compensated easily due to legal reasons?

They won't be compensated easily due to cheapness reasons. Anything legal is just an excuse (assuming Marak isn't on some terrorist blacklist or something).

I'd be interested to know if that's really the case. Hopefully some people can weigh in. I really don't want to believe that what you think is true because it's upsetting.

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

#14

Post by bdcravens »

xenihn wrote: post #3

It's actually really sad that someone who has easily generated millions of dollars of value with their work gets nothing for it. Yeah yeah, it's open source, but it still sucks. I'm assuming they can't be compensated easily due to legal reasons?

True, but is there anything new here? That's been an conundrum as long as open source has been a thing.

There are also example of open source developers who have made a great living from their projects. That's on the developer to find a business model that works.

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

#15

Post by Fordec »

xenihn wrote: post #3

It's actually really sad that someone who has easily generated millions of dollars of value with their work gets nothing for it. Yeah yeah, it's open source, but it still sucks. I'm assuming they can't be compensated easily due to legal reasons?

Can't or won't? He's literally saying "hire me if you want this". If that's too high a bar for "generating millions of dollars of value" then something is grossly wrong and headline worthy in of itself.

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

#16

Post by crooked-v »

bdcravens wrote: post #5

Certainly his right; his project (though it has a very permissive license), his time. It sounds like he's tired of working on it, and he requires sponsorship to make it worthwhile. Let's say he doesn't, and the project is forked. This begs an interesting question: does he own the npm name? "faker" has mindshare, not just in JS; if he's unwilling to work on it, would it make sense for the NPM organization to reassign…

Given that NPM hasn't done so before, I find it very unlikely they would do so now.

More likely, the fork would become "faker2" if they don't want to come up with a new name.

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

#17

Post by Karupan »

Right move IMO. The consulting firm a friend works for uses faker.js for almost all their projects. The consultants get paid $1500 a day and they haven’t even thought of donating as it “free and open source”.

I also hope the license is more restricted for commercial use.

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

#18

Post by gfody »

CravingLogic wrote: post #4

I'm curious what the motivation was for doing this now after supporting faker.js for 8+ years. Also, isn't faker.js a completed project? What is there to maintain?

a programmer's work is never done. I imagine this is doubly true for anything js related. this project has 179 open issues and 85 open PRs, impressively almost as many issues as lines of code!

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

#20

Post by ganafagol »

You sir have misunderstood the concept of open source software.

As an open source author or maintainer you don't do the work for others and then expect some kind of compensation. The idea instead is to do the work that you would have done anyway because somebody else paid you or because you did it for fun, and then you publish it to use the community to help you fix issues. A philantropic motivation is nice but not necessary and just a minor side effect. And just as you don't have an obligation to help does nobody have an obligation to help you either.

That's why I like the term "open source" better than the original "free software". If you get the root motivation that RMS had for the "freedom" aspect of it, then that's the same thing, but too many people read it as "for free". Like apparently the author of this article. And that's just wrong.

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