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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

#271
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Extending restrictions to affiliates/related bodies corporate is absolute bread and butter commercial legal work. Most lawyers are writing these kind of clauses week in, week out.

What you are presumably referring to is transfer pricing, which is a completely different beast.

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

#272
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…

The internet is now positively a nasty place. Everyone is optimizing for "engagement" which essentially equates to "controversial content". You can't find any genuine advice because Google has been gamed to the point where top 50 pages for any query are affiliate pages. Forums and the communities they fostered are dead. Their replacement, Reddit, has a structure that favors the hive mind. There are ads everywhere and…

>Forums and the communities they fostered are dead.

Not really - I still use forums (that use my native language) and they feel great! way better than Reddit and have significant active user base.

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

#273
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…

> 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.

No, but I can be miffed if I offer people a free lunch and they turn around and sell the free lunch I paid to make and keep all the money.

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

#274
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Which is their right as long as they are not discriminating against a protected class, as it's their work, but they should have put that in the license.

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

#275
post #167
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...

The TimescaleDB license can only apply to TimescaleDB.

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

#276
Timely post, I'm just about to embark on an experiment with my open source project where I will restrict access to the newer versions. Not what I wanted to do when I initially open sourced it but seems like the only way I'll be able to keep it sustainable:

https://medium.com/@weebrix/the-future-for-propertywebbuilde...

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

#277

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: Don't release the code and sell your product. Taking pride in your work also means valueing it properly. - 95% chance you die poor. 4.999% chance you make a decent living out of it. 0.0001% chance Facebook buys it for enough money that you can buy your own island on Mars.

6: release parts of your closed product as open source (saying it was sponsored by the company that sells the moneymaker, so not some dual licensing of the entire product)

- 5% chance you make a living etc + fame and glory

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

#278

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.

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…

> might just disappear if the service goes down

The service doesn't even need to go down, the licenses with Spotify can be revoked/expire/etc. I love the convenience of having an almost unlimited library of music to listen to, I absolutely detest the fact that one day I might think, "Oh I'd like to listen to from my playlist." and suddenly it's no longer available, because .

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

#279
post #116

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…

What is wrong with saying “all rights reserved. You are free to use this software for educational and nonprofit purposes but once you start to make money off it you must request permission in writing” - I’ve seen a few licences like this. I guess the down sides are it might send some people elsewhere and you might be on your own trying to enforce it in court.

I for one wouldn't use a library licensed like this. There are ideological reasons, but more practically, let's say I run a server that provides a public service. At some point, it gets a lot of traffic and I want to accept donations or use ads to fund the hosting. Under such a licence, I'd be completely at the mercy of the author, who could effectively shut down the server.

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

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it may not be free software, but it is open source

The term of art is "source available" - "open source" means something different.

That's not a term of art, it's someone's opinion. "Open source" means whatever I say it does, whatever you say it does, whatever Apple says it does, whatever ESR says it does, and whatever RMS says it does.
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