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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

#311

Post by csala »

I am honestly surprised at the amount of people here trying to say that open sourcing your work and making money out of it is incompatible. While the OP may have plenty of reasons and be totally entitled to make this decision, I do not thing their case can be directly compared to all the different open source projects out there.

Being myself a full-time open source developer, I have seen several cases in which businesses are built around free software, either because multi-billion companies hire third party teams to build software for them under the conditions (imposed by the hired team) of open sourcing what is built, or by developing free software while offering high-end paid support for it, or even by wrapping the open source software in commercial enterprise-level, services-oriented applications.

So no, I do not think that it is reasonable to paint open sourcing is an equivalent to being stolen by big tech companies. It is just a particular way of doing things, originally based on certain principles and which sometimes succeeds as a business strategy and some other times does not, just like any other business strategy out there!

Having said that, I wish the best of luck to Marak and I hope they figure out the way to remake their life after what happened and continue to push on their awesome work on open source software while managing to make a living out it!

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

#312

Post by onion2k »

gkoberger wrote: post #51
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…

Hmm, I agree with you, but this is a bit different. It’s not like someone took faker.js and started charging for it. It’s a tool that the author chose to give away, and other companies used. There’s literally nothing even asking people to pay, other than sponsorships at the bottom of the README. You can’t expect companies to pay if you never ask! I’d love to see GitHub create more avenues for paying for software. Sha…

It’s an employee typing “npm install faker.js”, and genuinely never thinking about it.

That's the problem.

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

#313

Post by arethuza »

nmfisher wrote: post #271
roel_v wrote: 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 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.

Writing clauses in a license is one thing, I suspect enforcing them through ultra complex international corporate structures is quite another.

Edit: Sadly, I think these kinds of battles are rather one sided.

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

#314

Post by rglullis »

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…

I agree with the sentiment, but the responsibility is as much as (if not more) from consumers as from companies.

If consumers only look at sticker price of every product and ignore all externalities, then companies will work to give them that. It is up for consumers to refuse software that takes their freedoms, locks them up in golden cages, makes their lives super convenient at the expense of underpaid/exploited labor, etc.

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

#315

Post by pjmlp »

Fordec wrote: post #52

I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately. Years ago software was fully build on the backs of a multitude of giants within their niche domain. But for a while now large companies have been adopting a model of taking from open source contributions and raking in billions. The original social bargain of "pay it on" has been broken by the Bezos of the world raking in billions. And yes, as o…

I already realized that during the first .com wave, it is naive to think otherwise, rainbows and happy songs can only last so long.

It is easy to be idealistic when the source of income is not selling software.

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

#316

Post by tingol »

cercatrova wrote: post #218
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up. Besides, it would have to be a lot more formal; another commenter mentioned the Unreal Engine, which states something to the tune of "free to use until you earn over X, then you pay us Y% of your revenue". Cynically, open source libraries need to use the err, hook-and-sinker approach? Be really good at bootstrap…

> I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want usage, you can make it MIT and then suffer while they capitalize your code (as they are with in their rights to do), or if you want protection but low usage, make it AGPL or proprietary even. I don't really see a scenario where you have high usage, high prot…

What's the point you're making? There's a lot of proprietary software that's

- high usage - high protection - high profit

What's the argument that OSS software (which you could use for free indefinitely until you gain profitability) is somehow not capable of the same?

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

#317

Post by icebraining »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #280
thaumasiotes wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, can you define each word you've used in your post?

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

#318

Post by pjmlp »

reader_mode wrote: post #202
pjmlp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what happens when the hipster folks attack GPL and push for MIT like licenses. Had Linus not chosen it for Linux and I bet I would still be using a mix of Solaris, Aix and HP-UX on the server room. Dual licensing is the only true path, it was already so in the shareware days, and it will be back to be the daily reality. Bills have to paid.

Have you actually looked at his project ? It's a library that helps you write tests by generating dummy data - even if this was GPL it would have no impact (except maybe scaring some people from using it or making it a non starter in companies with policies banning GPL). You will never distribute your tests to the client and if you're running test you already have access to the code. And this is trivial but tedious c…

I didn't need to, it is just yet another example of someone realizing the hard realities of business life.

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

#319

Post by maccard »

imtringued wrote: post #201
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

A lot of people simply know that he is male. The nypost article is pretty high up and refers to "him" and "he".

A quarter of that article is an elderly neighbor saying "he definitely was up to something" because "he never let his young son play outside". I wouldn't put too much faith in the article having done the diligence to figure out what Marak's preferred pronoun is.

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

#320

Post by icebraining »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #307
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…

Apple already evades use of GPL3 software, so GPL currently does solve the problem. You can also dual license, like mysql, if you want to provide non-GPL use.

Apple writes software mostly for distribution, so the license affects them heavily. It might not be enough for companies that run the software on their servers and just offer it as a service.
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