Companies I've worked at make it fairly easy for me to expense a purchase, with just manager sign-off or similar. I just need some sort of up-front price for pre-approval, and a receipt afterward to send to accounting. As soon as you get any contracts involved, this becomes very difficult to get through the system. Are there open source projects out there which successfully make enhancement requests look like "purchases", rather than consulting?
No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
551–560 of 966 posts
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
No problem per-se, but to give a simple example: Suppose a developer, let's call him Salvatore, lives in a modest apartment in, say Italy, and would live very comfortably indeed on three hundred thousand euros a year. And let's say three cloud providers, call them, Jungle, Blue, and Lots, agree to give Salvatore a hundred thousand a year each to keep developing a, I don't know, a high-performance in-memory database.…
The problem with this is that Redis isn't used because it is particularly good. It's used because everyone else uses it. And everyone else uses it because it's free. If you tried to charge for Redis then "everyone else" would stop using it and pretty much all of the value disappears. It becomes a niche product that you shouldn't build on. You're vulnerable to high license fees and experienced developers become harder…
You couldn’t be more out of touch with reality.
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#553So 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. Use https://commonsclause.com or another commercial use restriction with an open source license. - Get bashed for not being a real open source by fellow nerds - Get licensing fees from larger companies
This is just a special case of option 3. Why would this get you licensing fees when it wouldn't?
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
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%.
Sounds like providing that skill set would a good business opportunity.
Make it a SaaS!
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#555Seriously. 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…
What billion dollar industry is built on top of faker.js?
None, but think of it in the context of time = money. Discussions about self hosting development environments will be filled with people claiming it's not worth the opportunity cost to spend the time setting up and maintaining anything yourself when you can pay $X per month and make it someone else's problem.
In the same context, how long does it take to write something like faker.js? I've never used it, but I see commits that are at least 6 years old and there are 200+ contributors. Is that 1000s of hours? I honestly don't know.
Let's say it's 1000 hours just for an example and that someone worth $100k / year could write it. At $50 / hour that's $50k if you have have to build it in house and you lose out on the value of having 200+ contributors that are familiar with part of the codebase plus tens of thousands of users exposing bugs and edge cases.
So IMHO when you have codebases like this the corporate donations should be in $10k increments.
I would never publish a line of code under the MIT license. It's great for companies that want to popularize their platforms (like Microsoft is doing), but it's terrible for small developers and you'll rarely get any value from those projects.
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with this is that Redis isn't used because it is particularly good. It's used because everyone else uses it. And everyone else uses it because it's free. If you tried to charge for Redis then "everyone else" would stop using it and pretty much all of the value disappears. It becomes a niche product that you shouldn't build on. You're vulnerable to high license fees and experienced developers become harder…
You couldn’t be more out of touch with reality.
Ok, name one building block type piece of software that isn't open source and is a market leader.
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#557I 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…
The way I see it, the landowner is exploiting the workers and not paying them the just price for their labour.
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Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As everybody knows, every OSS maintainer doesn't have a day job. We could still have many more if it was viable to do it without being forced to have a day job. Especially when your software is used by many succesfull companies. > "OS project" It stands for open source project. I don't get your quotes here. > Impossible to accomplish, because "OS project" is not a legal entity to whom one could pay. You talk about…
I suggest you do some research. It is perfectly fine to have “mixed” licenses. Redis operates like this and has no problem making money, as do many others. “adds a lot of difficulty” is a terribly weak argument - you want to make it your job and get paid for it, of course it will take some effort. Nobody owes you anything.
As a developer, I want my job to be about producing software. Handling the nitty gritty of commercial licensing is something I will happily leave to people who studied to do it.
I also reject the notion that everything should be commercialized, OSS is the antithesis of it.
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
For all those people in this thread praising his work, now's the time to put your money where the mouth is. If you have used his work, push your companies to sponsor/donate. Asking irrelevant questions like whether he has a job does not help the situation. The community's response to events like this is what determines the future of open source. People like to complain about copyleft vs libre licenses. But if you hav…
I use his work, but for me the situation is more complicated my prior experiences with the author. He's been making similar complaints about his lack of renumeration for quite a while. In an older GitHub where he requested contributions, I pointed out that he had barely worked on the project for many months (at that time), and not published a new version to npm in years[1], despite making a $600 withdrawal from his O…
It looks like the package may have duplicate entries on NPM; the more-regularly-released package is posted here:
Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This
#560Seriously. 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'm going to replicate one of my recent replies ([4] which unsurprisingly got me downvoted, but I regret nothing) here because it seems relevant. Specifically, Marak seems to grok the exploitatitive nature of the current setup (chosen in part by themselves) but lacks real negotiation leverage because they have no organization behind them (besides people cheering them on in the comments). With this in mind, I think it…
> * too obvious a trap, and thus ineffective. No sane capitalist company will go anywhere near AGPL code (and we just had an example on HN of someone trying. it wasn't pretty)
Source plz ?
> the "F" in FOSS
It's free as freedom, not beer. GNU seemingly doesn't want to use 'libre' because Indians might not understand it or something, which IMHO is ridiculous considering how often this confusion is made !
Otherwise, I get that E.S.Raymond has furiously anti-leftist political views, and I can respect that, but IMHO he should be held accountable for the current situation…
EDIT : Also, isn't it fairly ironic of someone using the closed and Microsoft-owned Github to complain about these issues ?