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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

#261

Post by hobofan »

gkoberger wrote: post #54
ganafagol wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop painting open source as a donation-based development model. That's completely distorting what it is about.

Okay? This particular project is soliciting donations: “Support us with a monthly donation and help us continue our activities.” I’m not really sure what your point is, because you never actually made one. You just said I was wrong.

There is a difference between one-off bounties and continuous sponsorhips.

- Stable income vs. unplannable amount of bounties

- Bounties generally don't cover general maintenance work for a project (e.g. updating dependencies)

- Bounties (as they are implemented today) generally only pay the contributor, and not the maintainers, which can also have significant cost in reviewing a feature

- Bounties traditionally have been so disproportionally small compared to the work required that they don't come close to provide a reasonable hourly rate for contributors

(I think you'll find enough articles that go into more details on the difference between the two.)

Bounty platforms have been around for ages, and I don't know a single project that is able to finance itself from that. Even for the OBS example you mentioned, it the bounty was a good way to get the ball rolling on a specific issue, but the overall maintenance is still financed by monthly sponsoships.

One-off donations might be a nice supplement, but they don't form a solid foundation.

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

#262

Post by echelon »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #108
echelon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

> But now there's Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, Showtime Anytime, Peacock Premium, etc. Outside of the USA there’s far less choice, so less subscription overflow

It's coming for you...

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

#263

Post by chii »

cercatrova wrote: post #193
kybernetikos wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pattern that works very well - many large companies have standing policies that they can't use copyleft licensed software so they have to get the paid license while those happy with the copyleft social contract get to enjoy and contribute for free.

Correct, although not every company shies away from copyleft, namely Amazon which will package your AGPL product wholesale and sell it. They are after all not required to open source their infrastructure code.

> package your AGPL product wholesale and sell it.

if anyone has a problem with that, then they have a problem with software being open source.

Or they are discriminatory and just don't want anyone they personally dont like to benefit.

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

#264

Post by corty »

arthurcolle wrote: post #105
corty wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Interesting you should mention that, New York Post claims he was arrested for having bomb-making materials in his apartment which may be related to the apartment fire he discusses on his Twitter! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032426

I'll have myself checked for psychic abilities...

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

#265

Post by roel_v »

nmfisher wrote: post #251
roenxi wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

I mean, this is a fairly trivial loophole to close if you have a lawyer who knows what they're doing. In fact, you don't even need to close the loophole. You just need to make FAANG employees pause long enough to worry that they might not comply, deterring them from using said library.

"I mean, this is a fairly trivial loophole to close if you have a lawyer who knows what they're doing."

In the same way that it's trivial to write a twitter clone in a weekend, yes.

Hundreds of goverments have tried for decades to do what you claim is trivial. Good luck.

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

#267

Post by jml7c5 »

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

It's a weird problem with the language. Despite many attempts, with proposals like "xe" and "thon"[0], English never picked up a good gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun. [Yeesh, that's a mouthful of adjectives.]

As recently as 15 years ago, using "they" to refer to a single individual was derided by many as grammatically incorrect. It was common in colloquial speech, but frowned upon in writing, mostly because it increased ambiguity. The thinking was that if you accept "they" as a third person singular pronoun, then sentences like the following would become unclear: "Sally and her friends went to the mall, then they left".

Of course, this is correct: singular "they" is ambiguous, and often frustrating. But it's what we've ended up with. The recent acceptance comes down to two factors: linguistic descriptivism finally overshadowed linguistic prescriptivism, and non-binary gender identity (and concern about accidental misgendering) became more prominent.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages...

(^ Note the "Spivak pronoun". Courtesy of the same Michael Spivak who wrote Calculus on Manifolds.)

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

#268

Post by gohbgl »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #243
waynesonfire wrote: post #93

Used the open source licence to get popular and now you're butt hurt? You would have zero users if your project was closed source.

And zero of the extra stress associated with maintaining a large project for free on your spare time.

Doctor ...

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

#269

Post by StavrosK »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #64
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…

It’s like a catch-22 though. If I start a company using open source and must give away the software I then build on top of it as open source then I likely fail to capture revenues and my company fails. What would be a nice option in GPL 4 is a mandatory commercial licensing fee structure to pay either to author of software or to EFF / FSF if the author doesn’t provide payment details. That would give a commercial inc…

> It’s like a catch-22 though. If I start a company using open source and must give away the software I then build on top of it as open source then I likely fail to capture revenues and my company fails.

How is that the open source author's problem? Open source is meant to enable user freedom, not to save corporations money. If you want to use something, contact the author and get a commercial license.

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

#270

Post by IshKebab »

wjnc wrote: post #169
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 i…

Do you have any ammonium nitrate though? I mean, chances are he was just some pyro and not actually interested in bombing/killing people. But it's dumb to do that in a flat.
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