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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

#21

Post by echelon »

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 managed, but you're forever a renter.

They've destroyed our open web, replaced RSS with DRM, left us with streaming and music options worse than cable and personal audio libraries.

The web is bloated with ads and tracking, AMP is given preference, Facebook and Twitter are testing the limits of democracy and radicalizing everyone to cancel one another.

Remember when the Internet was actually pleasant? When it was nice to build stuff for others to use?

Stop giving your work away for free when the companies only take.

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

#23

Post by dtech »

ganafagol wrote: post #20

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…

It's also fully his choice to no longer do that...

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

#24

Post by miken123 »

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?

I guess this didn't help:

"I lost all my stuff in an apartment fire and am barely staying unhomeless. Lost access to most of my accounts. All precious metal is missing. If anyone could bless paypal@marak.com with a little cash it would help me from freezing on the street. lol."

https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272

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

#25

Post by tlarkworthy »

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 said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat(E) of the day.’

13 “But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend.(F) Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? 14 Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. 15 Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’(G)

Matthew 20:9

(Marek has the right to renegotiate. The fortune 500s had the right to use the work he offered for free, as that was the terms set)

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

#26

Post by throwii »

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…

Similar on Github, how do you announce new forks and get people to come to you instead of opening issues which can be closed?

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

#27

Post by bdcravens »

Fordec wrote: post #11
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?

Actually it looks like NPM has a process with some discretion here

https://www.npmjs.com/policies/disputes

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

#28

Post by lacker »

I empathize with the sentiment, but if you want to get paid for your open source work, surely it would work better to set up a Patreon and point people to it, rather than write "send me a six figure contract or fork this!" in a GitHub issue.

It's also weird to use a license that explicitly lets Fortune 500 companies use the code for free, and then write that you don't want them to do so in the issue. Just change the license if you don't want to license it freely to big companies!

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

#29

Post by SomeoneFromCA »

ganafagol wrote: post #20

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.

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

#30

Post by MaximumYComb »

ganafagol wrote: post #20

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…

I feel that the author started open source out of passion but is at the stage where he is sick of incredibly valuable companies using his work for profit without contributing back.
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