Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 966 posts

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

#61

Post by LukeShu »

echelon wrote: post #45
ganafagol wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Two of those are already in the GNU AGPLv3 (2007).

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

#62

Post by snemvalts »

MaximumYComb wrote: post #38
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…

Here in Australia the streaming options for music/video are better than our previous options for CD's/cable. A three month subscription to Spotify costs less than a single album would cost me 20 years ago.... not even account for inflation. A monthly Netflix subscription is 20% of the price that cable would cost here 5 years ago.

That's coming out of the musicians' pockets...

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

#63

Post by 3pt14159 »

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…

I don't want GPL. I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That's it. That's all I want. MIT-Billionaires. Want to take funding from A16Z? That's a million a year for the license or something that maybe scales with a market cap just to level the playing field between a funded startup and Apple Computers.

Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don't love this hyper-centralization of wealth and it would be better for the world if we defanged the power that billionaires have.

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

#64

Post by gogopuppygogo »

echelon wrote: post #45
ganafagol wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s like a catch-22 though. If I start a company using open source and must give away the software I then build on top of it as open source then I likely fail to capture revenues and my company fails.

What would be a nice option in GPL 4 is a mandatory commercial licensing fee structure to pay either to author of software or to EFF / FSF if the author doesn’t provide payment details. That would give a commercial incentive to startups to pursue using open source AND provide real revenues back to the community.

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

#65

Post by anonymou2 »

qz2 wrote: post #43
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.

how about Project Gemini? https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

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

#67

Post by pjmlp »

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…

That is what happens when the hipster folks attack GPL and push for MIT like licenses.

Had Linus not chosen it for Linux and I bet I would still be using a mix of Solaris, Aix and HP-UX on the server room.

Dual licensing is the only true path, it was already so in the shareware days, and it will be back to be the daily reality.

Bills have to paid.

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

#68

Post by dannyw »

deepstack wrote: post #8
bdcravens wrote: post #5

Certainly his right; his project (though it has a very permissive license), his time. It sounds like he's tired of working on it, and he requires sponsorship to make it worthwhile. Let's say he doesn't, and the project is forked. This begs an interesting question: does he own the npm name? "faker" has mindshare, not just in JS; if he's unwilling to work on it, would it make sense for the NPM organization to reassign…

He ought to keep the name, however there should be some way to keep track of the public forks via something that is github oriented. Maybe something in DHT like IPFS. It maybe something npm/yarn can work out.

Let's just use domain names?

ytld.org/youtube-dl

google.com/rust_icu

facebook.com/react

Don't have a domain name?

marak.github.io/faker

Not everything needs to be reinvented.

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

#69

Post by qz2 »

anonymou2 wrote: post #65
qz2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

how about Project Gemini? https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

Haven’t read about that. Will look into it.

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

#70

Post by stiray »

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…

Well this somehow reflects what I am seeing for last 20 years.

Hobby or just passion of open source is fueling the industry to forge massive profits while on other side provide peanuts for authors, far less than if they were their employees (or lets rather say: 0).

I was working on multiple close source projects for different companies that were avoiding anything GPL, searching for permissive replacements and in never giving back anything - not even bug fixes.

Like openssl[1].

Actually even GPL is not a protection here, with sources given away they become almost a manual how to re-implement it which is far simpler than making it from scratch (oh and yes, people are doing that without copy pasting).

What open source has accomplished was for sure making technology more available, but on the other side, to name just a few:

- lowered expenses of companies on buying software, especially on various SaaS companies that dont distribute software

- keeping the need for experienced developers and vages down while on the other side raised paychecks of system administrators and system integrators

- creating a viability to hire anyone as a developer while on the other side driving anything complex out of industry as companies were avoiding doing projects where complex knowledge is needed (I am not talking about top of gauss curve companies)

- lowering a quality of software - putting together lego blocks and if they dont fit writing a little glue is hardly ever as efficient as writing tool for problem solving dedicated to the problem. Not to mention free availability of tons of over-complicated "does it all" frameworks that dont really fit to solving any particular problem perfectly, but are good enough to avoid solving complex problem where you have no workforce that would actually be able to solve it.

And guess who profits - engineers certainly not.

Actually we are denominating our work by giving it out for free (try to get someone to paint your walls, to lay down some ceramic tiles, to fix your car,... for a price of mentioning who did it behind the bumper, under a tile,...)

[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisstokelwalker/the-internet-is-b...

Post reply on HN