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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

#161

Post by roenxi »

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.

That is an arbitrary criteria, and you'll end up with software being written by Apple Development LLC, the loss-making shell company that Apple uses to do all it's development.

If you want something other than the GPL you can use it but don't be surprised when people commercialise your software at scale, don't pay for it and don't release changes back to the community.

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

#162

Post by neltnerb »

fabianhjr wrote: post #100
neltnerb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might honestly be right, for anyone who expects to buy five albums a year. The downside being that all the music you've "bought" might just disappear if the service goes down. It might be worth it, but the best of both worlds would be nice. I'm not sure what that should be, but unlimited local copies of everything for a small amount of money doesn't sound fair -- but Spotify hardly deserves a big cut of it either…

It already exists on both fronts: stream2own and a cooperative. https://resonate.is/

Oh, I remember this. Gosh, I really wish it was good, and I mean that sincerely. It's just got such a limited selection and set of genres, and if what I want is a radio station to listen to in the background half the time...

Don't get me wrong, the music is lovely. I like the idea a lot. It's just really not comparable =/

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

#163

Post by jgilias »

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 nobody sees it.

  - Die poor
3. Release it under a commercial license and:

  - Get bashed on HN for doing so

  - Nobody uses it

  - Probably die poor
4. Dual license it as GPL and commercial and:

  - Sue everybody as they are just taking the GPL version and never looking back. Especially if they can hide it somewhere.

  - Die poor
Pick your poison.

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

#164

Post by Karupan »

mikkom wrote: post #137
Karupan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The right reaction is not to stop producing open source software. The right reaction is to adjust the license. The right reaction is whatever the author/maintainer wants to do. If they want to re-license, that is fine. If they want to just shut the whole thing down, that is fine too.

> If they want to just shut the whole thing down, that is fine too. Actually if it's under a non-restrictive open source licence, it's not fine at all - the code will still be legally available for everyone.

I should've worded that better. Of course they can't pull the existing versions, but then can shut down any further development and support.

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

#167

Post by spockz »

echelon wrote: 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…

Are you familiar with the TimescaleDB license[1]? It basically means open source but companies cannot just take the product and offer it as a (paid?) service. They are allowed to provide other services services that are built with timescale underneath but not offer the product itself as a service.

[1]: https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/blob/master/tsl/LIC...

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

#168

Post by cblconfederate »

salamimonger wrote: post #165

Anyone wanna make a stock market for free/open source software? I'd like to be able to invest in software that have a chance of becoming acquired or adopted by big corporations that make them a lot of money, and then get some kind of ROI for it :P

wasnt that the model of ICOs?

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

#169

Post by wjnc »

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 in good faith... Anyone could lose it after a house fire plus being named a 'unabomber' by your neighbours.

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

#170

Post by ghayes »

cercatrova wrote: post #132
3pt14159 wrote: post #63

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…

That's just a proprietary license, just write the license like that if you want as I don't see how anything is stopping you from creating or using such a license. Just don't make the assumption that it's open source, it's just another form of a proprietary license like much of the paid software currently present. However, don't complain later on that you can't modify software or run it on your own device like you can…

There are a ton of real world problems here though: if a small company gets acquired, do they have to stop using the license? Negotiate with you to pay for it? FOSS licenses are meant to be free to anyone, including big orgs, so long as they play by the rules. AGPL might be your target.
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