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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

#41

Post by adwn »

lacker wrote: post #28

I empathize with the sentiment, but if you want to get paid for your open source work, surely it would work better to set up a Patreon and point people to it, rather than write "send me a six figure contract or fork this!" in a GitHub issue. It's also weird to use a license that explicitly lets Fortune 500 companies use the code for free, and then write that you don't want them to do so in the issue. Just change the…

> Just change the license if you don't want to license it freely to big companies!

Marak doesn't want to prevent big companies from using his (?) code, he's saying that he won't support them for free anymore. Read the Github issue again, carefully.

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

#42

Post by flippinburgers »

ganafagol wrote: post #20

You sir have misunderstood the concept of open source software. As an open source author or maintainer you don't do the work for others and then expect some kind of compensation. The idea instead is to do the work that you would have done anyway because somebody else paid you or because you did it for fun, and then you publish it to use the community to help you fix issues. A philantropic motivation is nice but not n…

Have github issues been elevated to the level of articles?

There comes a time with all open source where the person developing goes away for some reason and someone else has to take charge. That is open source. Expecting him to feel bad about this choice is bad form.

I hope the developer gets financial support if the project is truly that popular. The reality of getting support is likely to be thin.

While not as mission critical, stories like these remind me of openssl.

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

#43

Post by qz2 »

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…

We should fork everything and relicense for the end user’s sake. Have said this for years.

Also start looking at a plan B for the www. Gopher is a winner there because it’s difficult to use it for anything other than information delivery.

While this is extreme, we need a contrasting platform to fall back on always.

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

#44

Post by chillee »

One issue with "getting paid for open source" is how much marginal value the project is generating. For example, take left-pad. At the time of its infamous removal, it was relied upon by thousands of packages, including Node and Babel.

But does that mean that it was worth millions of dollars? Of course not. Because if it wasn't available, anybody could have replicated it in a few hours of work.

I don't know if that's the case for this project, but just wanted to note that "being used by " does not necessarily mean that you're providing that much value.

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

#45

Post by echelon »

ganafagol wrote: post #32
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 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…

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 prevent or prohibit users from running their own software"

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

#46

Post by ganafagol »

MaximumYComb wrote: post #30
ganafagol wrote: post #20

You sir have misunderstood the concept of open source software. As an open source author or maintainer you don't do the work for others and then expect some kind of compensation. The idea instead is to do the work that you would have done anyway because somebody else paid you or because you did it for fun, and then you publish it to use the community to help you fix issues. A philantropic motivation is nice but not n…

I feel that the author started open source out of passion but is at the stage where he is sick of incredibly valuable companies using his work for profit without contributing back.

I can see that a passion to please can be disappointed if there is no reciprocity.

But a passion to build great technology should not depend on who starts using it.

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

#47

Post by pmontra »

chillfox wrote: post #7
CravingLogic wrote: post #4

I'm curious what the motivation was for doing this now after supporting faker.js for 8+ years. Also, isn't faker.js a completed project? What is there to maintain?

I am guessing it's the usual, either money or time problems. Could also be burnout I suppose.

Or a change of work environment. Too much paid work or no more JavaScript, who knows.

I've been offered to take over the development and maintenance of a small Ruby gem many years ago. I think I contributed a patch or something. I needed that gem in my current Rails project, probably not in the next one. Furthermore I don't work only with Ruby. So I refused.

Something like faker is useful in nearly every project and I contributed to the Elixir faker (my customer agreed to that, we needed it.) I learned a couple of things of the Elixir environment in the process. By the way, nice team and great tooling. Would I take over that package if offered? Again no, because I don't use Elixir full time and I'd rather drop another contribution whenever I need it. No time to work on fixes and look at issues not related to my work.

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

#48

Post by Karupan »

ganafagol wrote: post #32
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 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…

> The right reaction is not to stop producing open source software. The right reaction is to adjust the license.

The right reaction is whatever the author/maintainer wants to do. If they want to re-license, that is fine. If they want to just shut the whole thing down, that is fine too.

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

#50

Post by mytailorisrich »

lacker wrote: post #28

I empathize with the sentiment, but if you want to get paid for your open source work, surely it would work better to set up a Patreon and point people to it, rather than write "send me a six figure contract or fork this!" in a GitHub issue. It's also weird to use a license that explicitly lets Fortune 500 companies use the code for free, and then write that you don't want them to do so in the issue. Just change the…

He's not complaining about use, he's complaining about support.

This is not a licensing issue.

He is frustrated that companies that use his software for their business raise support and feature requests and expect him to work on them for free again and again.

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