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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

#221

Post by lollmao »

adwn wrote: post #211
lollmao wrote: post #189

Unrelated, but why do people prefer to assume gender over just using gender-neutral pronouns? Not a native English speaker but I've seen this a lot, especially on HN even when there's no indication of subject's gender whatsoever. Or is it just weird to use they/them? Thanks

If I had written "Marak doesn't want to prevent big companies from using their code [...]" , the gender-neutral "their" could have refered to the companies' code, giving the sentence a different, incorrect meaning. I would have had to completely restructure the sentence just to avoid the sin of accidentally misgendering someone; instead, I placed a "(?)" after the pronoun, to be on the safe side.

Yes I see now, it does seem to not sit well in many cases. Thanks for clarifying :)

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

#222

Post by randartie »

jstgord wrote: post #57
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…

Another potentially _right_ solution is for programmers to have a union, and put pressure on employers such as google/amazon/facebook/apple to donate x% of their profits back to open source initiatives.

If an app from google uses 1000 open source projects (probably more in practice), how do you distribute the x%?

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

#223

Post by wolfgke »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #199
echelon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPLv4 needs to address a number of new problems: * "any user data serviced by this software must be easily exportable; no attempt must be made to block other 3rd party companies or services from consuming this data" * "if this software is itself sold as a service, any automation or tooling built in service of this system must also be made available as open source" * "any devices using this software must not actively…

What about actually including a clause about pushing your changes upstream because from my recent HN readings, that clause is not present.

The source code has to be provided. From this, one can easily generate a diff. The only thing that such a clause will do is having to inform the original maintainer of this.

But I don't think that such a clause is a good idea: very often these internal modifications are not of the required quality. Also, I can easily imagine that some projects might drown in low-quality upstream pushes.

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

#224

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

wolfgke wrote: post #223
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about actually including a clause about pushing your changes upstream because from my recent HN readings, that clause is not present.

The source code has to be provided. From this, one can easily generate a diff. The only thing that such a clause will do is having to inform the original maintainer of this. But I don't think that such a clause is a good idea: very often these internal modifications are not of the required quality. Also, I can easily imagine that some projects might drown in low-quality upstream pushes.

Bug fixes is what I am thinking about.

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

#225

Post by HugoDaniel »

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…

One reason why I use the EUPL license for most of my hobbies.

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

#227

Post by boublepop »

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…

> Seriously. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down?

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.

Open source software is provided under a license and if Apple or Amazon or whoever do not violate that license they are not steeling. If you didn’t want them to use the software under the license you provided the software under chose a different license.

The point of open source is exactly to provide software under open source terms. If you want to add additional terms like “unless you make money then I want to get paid”, then just do that! It’s your software and your license! But you cannot have Heisenbergs open source software which is open source only until someone picks it up and makes money at which point it retroactively becomes proprietary in order to force that moneystream past you.

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

#228

Post by wolfgke »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #224
wolfgke wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source code has to be provided. From this, one can easily generate a diff. The only thing that such a clause will do is having to inform the original maintainer of this. But I don't think that such a clause is a good idea: very often these internal modifications are not of the required quality. Also, I can easily imagine that some projects might drown in low-quality upstream pushes.

Bug fixes is what I am thinking about.

It is often not clear what is a bug and what is "unexpected/surprising (but 'correct') behavior". Also, many bug fixes of authors that don't have a good understanding of the code cause lots of additional regressions or don't fit the original architecture of the software well.

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

#229

Post by drran »

jgilias wrote: post #163

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 no…

5. Do nothing.

  - Die poor

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

#230

Post by alangibson »

imtringued wrote: post #220
alangibson wrote: post #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

https://issuehunt.io/

This one looks interesting. The top project has gotten $7,858.50. Not too shabby.

The docs are pretty thin though, so it's not clear if it's possible for devs to attach a price to feature requests themselves. I've been looking for service with a flow like

1. User opens feature request 2. Dev responds with "Not useful to me, so I'll do it for $200. Click this button to pay."

Edit: Issuehunt.io seems to be a side project of the people that make Boost Note. That may explain why BoostIO/Boostnote is the most funded project, and why there doesn't seem to be much ongoing effort to promote the service. I get that "we made it for us, but you can use it too" vibe from their site.

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