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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

#341

Post by Aeolun »

trevyn wrote: post #181
dehrmann wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks like a pretty popular project, so I assume he's decently talented. How does he not have a day job? Passion projects are great and all, but they're not known for paying the bills. Especially for solo maintainers, it's almost like playing a gig at a coffee shop for tips. Want to make a career out of it? You need talent, marketability, and be ready to compromise on your vision.

Playing a gig at a coffee shop for tips and not compromising on your vision seems like a solid choice to me.

Until your house burns down.

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

#342

Post by black_puppydog »

trevyn wrote: post #181
dehrmann wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks like a pretty popular project, so I assume he's decently talented. How does he not have a day job? Passion projects are great and all, but they're not known for paying the bills. Especially for solo maintainers, it's almost like playing a gig at a coffee shop for tips. Want to make a career out of it? You need talent, marketability, and be ready to compromise on your vision.

Playing a gig at a coffee shop for tips and not compromising on your vision seems like a solid choice to me.

> Making the world a better place by allowing big corporations to generate solid fake test data for their QA flows.

--- Random Guy in a random Silicon Valley episode

Not compromising your vision? Not to belittle Marak's work here, it's certainly valuable, but it doesn't sound like something that one does to make the world better, but like something that is useful (nearly) only in a corporate context and should be done for a decent salary.

But you know, that's just like, my opinion...

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

#343

Post by FeepingCreature »

The point of open source is that you can't make money off of (selling) it (directly).¹ Neal Stephenson memorably described open source as a tar pit that eats up opportunities for profit in software development. I realize that sucks if you need an income, but if you write open-source software, that is what you are supporting. (And I say that as an open source dev.)

When you license a piece of code under the GPL, you are saying "people who write opensource code should not have to put effort into remaking this." When you license a piece of code under BSD, you are saying "Nobody should have to put either effort or money into remaking this." Like it or not, that's what the license means.

¹ Yes yes, distribution fee, I know. And you know damn well that's not a workable commercialization strategy.

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

#344

Post by icebraining »

tubularhells wrote: post #299
rorykoehler wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just stopped watching things. Kind of a strange outcome but I'm also more happy with it than expected.

I haven't watched a lot of things the past 10 years. A couple movies with friends, but I can count those on one hand. I don't really miss it. Some friends find t weird and try to push recommendations still, and I thank them and tell them I'll put it on the list. Then I promptly forget what they talked about, but they seem to have been satisfied with this. No harm done, right? On the other hand, they seem to be all ab…

Oral sharing has been the human way of transmitting stories for tens of thousands of years. Your newfangled "written books" are just a novelty :)

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

#345

Post by prepend »

StavrosK wrote: post #273
boublepop wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You certainly can, but why? It’s a problem easily solved by not giving away free lunches or adding terms.

It seems odd to me to have the solution completely within my power to fix, but not fix it, and complain about the situation.

In my view, the license is specifically made to allow reselling. That’s why I pick MIT, Apache, and BSD. If I don’t want people to resell then I pick GPL or some other license.

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

#346

Post by kd5bjo »

icebraining wrote: post #329
kd5bjo wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like an aggressive copyleft license plus a paid commercial license to avoid the copyleft terms. If someone wants to charge for a software library, is there a good royalty-free, one-time payment license template out there somewhere?

The problem with dual-licensing is that it impedes collaboration. If one contributes a big feature, shouldn't they also get some cash from those sales? If so, who decides how much?

That would be a negotiation between the library maintainer, who is running a business selling commercial licenses, and the potential contributor, who wants to be a paid supplier to said business. If the negotiations fail, the contributor’s code is neither merged into upstream nor sold as part of the commercial offering.

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

#347

Post by kybernetikos »

ratww wrote: post #306
puranjay wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This 1000x. I used to work at a company that pivoted into "growth hacking" and it seriously made me sick how at the end we had 1500 freelancers being paid peanuts to write about subjects they had minimum knowledge about, using other similarly shallow articles as their only reference. Today I can't search anything on the internet without coming across those. It's always the same: a shitty Wordpress blog and a 1500-wor…

Review sites are the worst. I frequently start reading reviews I've looked up on google that seem pretty legitimate, only to realise by part way down that it's clear the 'reviewer' has never actually seen the product and is just aggregating content from amazon reviews and spec sheets.

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

#348

Post by watwut »

tlarkworthy wrote: post #25

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…

This landover should not be surprised if workers start tp show up late as a rule. After all, showing up late means same money for less work.

In modern world, of course business owner can set salaries however, but should accept consequences on turnover and company culture.

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

#349

Post by StavrosK »

prepend wrote: post #345
StavrosK wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You certainly can, but why? It’s a problem easily solved by not giving away free lunches or adding terms. It seems odd to me to have the solution completely within my power to fix, but not fix it, and complain about the situation. In my view, the license is specifically made to allow reselling. That’s why I pick MIT, Apache, and BSD. If I don’t want people to resell then I pick GPL or some other license.

Because I want to give my software away to individuals and small companies, but if someone gets big enough that they can afford to pay, I want them to pay me then. I don't want to discourage them from using my thing when they're small.

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

#350

Post by ForHackernews »

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…

The FSF has been saying this for decades.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry that so many proponents of non-copyleft software are belatedly discovering that grasping corporations will take and take without ever contributing back.

Now do you people see why the GPL matters?

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