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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

#121

[this comment was deleted as HN doesn't pay me to contribute to the discussion]

What is exploitative about the model? You explicitly license your code in a way that's free to use for anyone, with the intent of giving back to the community.

The author of jQuery did fine as a book author. WordPress gave birth to a massive profitable company. PHP is alive and kicking with the backing of Zend. These are all perfectly fine ways to make a living out of OSS work.

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

#122

I am not religious but labourers in the vineyard stuck with me from school: The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. 10 So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. 11 When they received it, they began to grumble(D) against the landowner. 12 ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they…

> that was the terms set

The terms do not include free support.

Basically, Marak is just saying he won't go back to the vineyard to work for free, but he will if he gets paid a fair salary. Else, the landowner will have to search for new workers.

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

#123
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?

Looks like he does get paid a little bit by half a dozen companies/employees - maybe $1200/month? https://opencollective.com/fakerjs#backer But yea, people aren't paying because they don't want to pay. I've written something similar at work in the past, and the work required to support a single fixed scenario is so much less than the work required to support a generic tool that it would have felt hard to justify payi…

Looking at the Open Collective transaction log, looks more on the order of ~$20/month. (With some variation caused by one-time donations.)

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

#124
Has anyone ever heard of a service that allows users to attach bounties to issues? So if the open source developer fixes an issue, the developer gets the money offered by the issue reporter.

Edit: Answering my own question.

https://gitpay.me

Doesn't appear to be too popular though: "We paid $2547 USD in bounties "

Edit 2: No wonder it's not popular

https://github.com/gitpay/website/pull/4

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

#125
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Australia the streaming options for music/video are better than our previous options for CD's/cable. A three month subscription to Spotify costs less than a single album would cost me 20 years ago.... not even account for inflation. A monthly Netflix subscription is 20% of the price that cable would cost here 5 years ago.

> Spotify You don't own the music. You can't share it, use your own software to analyze, shuffle, remix it, etc. > Netflix subscription But now there's Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, Showtime Anytime, Peacock Premium, etc. Except now instead of one easy to use interface to access it all, it's spread out all over the place and inconsistent as hell. And more expensive!

I just stopped watching things. Kind of a strange outcome but I'm also more happy with it than expected.

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

#126
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…

Perhaps people should start reconsider using GPL 3... once again, Richard Stallman was right all along.

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

#127

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 n…

Open Source has nothing to do with Free Software. There is a plenty of OSS products which are not free to use.

Can you give an example, because Im not sure what you mean exactly.

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

#128
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 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…

[deleted]

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

#129

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…

Have you seen the Anti-capitalist Software License?

https://anticapitalist.software/

By default it disallows use by entities like Apple, but you could dual-license it, to provide the million-a-year alternative

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

#130

I am not religious but labourers in the vineyard stuck with me from school: The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. 10 So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. 11 When they received it, they began to grumble(D) against the landowner. 12 ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they…

> 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.

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