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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

#571

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…

This is a interesting topic because it exposes one of the great sins developers commit - we don’t pay each other. I’m not talking about nickel and dimeing your fraternity, but there is certainly a reasonable price for a lot of these packages and plug-ins we install that can create financial autonomy for a lot of people via modest efforts.

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

#572
post #556
post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I meant you’re wrong about Redis. It was in a unique position for a long time, if you pulled it out there would be nothing to really replace it.

RedisLabs does charge for redis (extensions, and support) and seems to be doing pretty damn well for the matter.

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

#573

I know a couple of comments have mentioned this already, but this apparently grows out of him being in a pickle financially at the moment and resenting the time he has put into doing free work: https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272 I'm sympathetic. I don't have any funds to spare to help him out. I'm chronically broke myself. I've done lots of nice things for people over the years for free. A lot of th…

The 'Automating Inequality' book is 1/3 about homelessness issues, you might be interested :

https://virginia-eubanks.com/

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

#574
There a couple of categories of comments on this thread that I think are missleading.

1) Judging the author's decision based on his previous behaviour or current speculation over his situation 2) Judging the author's decision to write OS and "demand" to be paid.

Both categories, imho, are missleading the real issue at hand which is this: We, as developers, as companies and as a society, who decided to depend uppon one man's work to make a living, our interest is to keep maintaining this library to keep our software running and evolving properly. Time (thus money) has to be spent for that.

So the question is for the rest of us here: Do we want to keep replacing various OS libraries on our depedency trees because some people can't keep maintaining them? Or shall we pay them? Or shall we maintain them ourselves? Somethint has to give.

To me, his point is at it's core very correct: pay me or fork it.

The rest is chit chat

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

#575
post #169

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…

If the police would ransack my family home after a fire you could probably write the same article. Charred RPi's and lots of computer parts, enough wiring for a new house, lots of chemicals (cleaners, fertilizers, other chemical agents with regular gardening use cases), ultimate survival guide and related parts ("This guy was prepping for something!"). The naming of suspects is just adding insult to injury. If he's i…

Fair enough, but would you take all of the most suspicious-looking items in your house that could possibly implicate you in a crime and put them all into one crate, including printed material and books that explain how to perform said crime?

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

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, doesn't GPL also specifically allows reselling ? https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html (And GNU even encourages it.) See also about selling exceptions to GPL, like Qt does : https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html

It allows reselling, yes, but since anyone who buys it could give it away to everyone else for free, it doesn't really happen much.

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

#577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the term "free software" is a marketing failure because you'd always have to add "as in free speech, not free beer". In German you can differentiate that, "frei" vs. "gratis".

I'd go as far as saying that the term "free software" is a complete an utter fail. In my mind "free speech" is speech that is entirely unrestricted. Almost all FOSS licenses come with "restrictions", such as you must leave the copyright notice in place, you must add the "PROVIDED AS IS" spiel somewhere the end user can read it, you must release your derivative work's source code under the same license etc., so it is…

the freedom part is not for the software developer, it is for the end user running the software.

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

#578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is wrong. If someone works a day job, they won't have time to work on their OS projects. As everybody knows, every OSS maintainer doesn't have a day job. > Corporation should pay contribution to the OS projects they use to make billions/year. Impossible to accomplish, because "OS project" is not a legal entity to whom one could pay. > We should have license that requires only high income companies to pay for u…

> 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…

> Using "commerical licenses" hurts every use cases that is not profit based.

At the end of the day, people still have to eat.

The direct consequence of releasing you work under a copyleft license is that you have to figure out an alternate source of income in order to sustain yourself.

You could do that by providing paid consultancy, or by selling a product. It's perfectly valid to have a full time day job as an employee to sustain yourself, and do related or totally unrelated open source on the side. It's valid to start your own business providing consultancy based on your own open source project. Or maybe own a business on something entirely unrelated. To put it even to the extreme: you could be homesteading in the outback, living on cans of beans and rice while writing open source code on a dingy laptop powered by a generator and a satellite uplink each night.

My point is that covering your primary needs by making an income should come before any considerations to provide free labour.

In fact, this principle extends beyond open source code and to any creative endeavour. For instance, many famous writers didn't write full time. Kurt Vonnegut managed a Saab car dealership and J.D. Salinger was an entertainment director aboard a cruise ship at one point.

Copyleft isn't a business model. And one should interpret "business model" in the broadest sense of the word here: figuring out your personal finances and how you make an income is privy to the notion.

Copyleft protects the creator exactly because it isn't a business model in itself. Copyleft doesn't guarantee any support or continued maintainership towards users. It is not an SLA. There's zero obligation on your part, as a creator, to maintain anything you release on account of what users might want. You're entirely free to walk away.

As far as users are concerned, if they decide to rely on open source, they also accept the risks that comes with using third party code which doesn't get maintained or even gets abandoned. That's not a problem of the creator, that's entirely the problem of those who rely on open source code. Copyleft protects users to the extent that they are entirely free to fork your code and do whatever they want with it as long as they use the same copyleft terms if they decide to publish their modifications.

The perceived robustness of Linux by users actually translates into a due sense of trust in an emerging collective behaviour: that there will always be a wide community of maintainers working on the codebase either being paid or voluntary. But that trust isn't a formal, legal SLA at any given point.

Those are the consequences that come with deciding to maintain or use open source software.

Yes, it's true that there are several companies who have leveraged open source to unrivalled financial and business success. And it's also true that there are plenty of maintainers who barely see a tuppence for their long hours at night herding issue queues and reviewing pull requests.

Pitting them against each other isn't the way forward. If Amazon or Facebook are using open source software in order to sell their services to the tune of billions of dollars, then that's not solely because of Torvalds' decision to put Linux out there under the GPL license. It's equally because they understood and managed other aspects such as legal compliance, financial / asset management, human resources management, sales, marketing, acquiring and mergers,...

The problem there isn't the apparent 'abuse' of copyleft tools in it's own right. It's a far more complex set of economic, political, financial, cultural, ideological,... variables that created a unique context that allowed those companies to emerge.

The biggest fallacy open source maintainers face is that they are somehow obliged to boundlessly cater to the wishes, desires and needs of communities that emerge around their projects for next to nothing. Even when those communities attract developer teams from Fortune 500 companies.

They are not, that's the whole premise of both copyleft AND copyright.

If you want to give your work away unrestricted and free while pouring in endless amounts of hours, days and weeks, that's totally fine. Just don't be surprised that doing that full time without further consideration won't make you rent at the end of the month. At the end of the day, there simply isn't such thing as a free lunch.

After 20 years, I can tell you that neither closed or open source are better in absolute terms. They both have their drawbacks and their advantages. I've ran into specific business cases where closed source solution clearly was the better option; and vice versa as well.

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

#579
post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree wholeheartedly with that.

I thought you were proposing a form of hybrid paid-OSS as many seem to want now. If you want to make a living, make it a business (yes, someone will have to deal with the business stuff).

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

#580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

... what? You realize the concept of innocent until proven guilty is not a unique concept to HN readers right? That presumption of innocence is not " act like maybe he was making bombs until proven guilty"? It sounds like you've let the media erode your understanding of a very basic human right, but do not try and cast it on others as some sort of tribalism. He is innocent until proven guilty . Not "reasonable chance…

Obligatory Reddit-type response: "Sir, this is a Wendy's drive-thru. Not a court of law."

HN response: Of course, everyone is free to say what they wish. First amendment. Freedom of speech. Freedom of thought. Freedom is the basic human right.

Wikipedia says, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 11, states: "Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defense."

Notice that this covers the rights of someone "who has been charged with an offence" in "a public trial".

There's not actually a "human right" preventing people from having or expressing opinions.

Does that make sense?

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