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

Post by jiofih » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #140

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…

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.

Post by BoorishBears » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 4:04 PM UTC

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #508

tastroder wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah well, just saw the house fire tweet and sent him a few bucks. Guess I'm on one more list now. There seem to be a few articles that are at least not half filled with the ramblings of an elderly neighbour: https://www.qgazette.com/articles/more-charges-possible-for-... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8737513/NYPD-discov... https://abc7ny.com/suspicious-package-queens-astoria-fire/64... Emotional distress se…

I agree it's terrible that the papers named him so early, and I do think we should give him the benefit of the doubt, but given the information out there right now, there is a reasonable chance he actually was making a bomb. It seems to me like people are willing to jump to the opposite conclusion simply because he's "one of us". Let the investigation play its course.

Post by jiofih » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

jgilias wrote: post #163

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…

Post by xiphias2 » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

nevon wrote: post #432

xiphias2 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be happy if somebody asked for timelines for feature requests, because it would mean that I have the option to extract money by prioritizing those features. Just make the companies bid against eachother, writing a bidding system (maybe second price auction for a work point where you set the number of work points needed for a feature) is really easy.

I already offer both sponsorship as well as tailored consulting, but I haven't found any success in trying to sell that in response to issues. The moment I mention that I can provide commercial support, they tend to become silent. Maybe it's viable if you have a truly massively successful product like Redis or something, but it hasn't been for me at least.

Post by cbm-vic-20 » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #445

AllegedAlec wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem here is that selling your closed source project requires a significantly distinct skill set from writing good code. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Venn diagram of a good project and being able to sell the project for a decent living is much smaller than 5%.