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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

#601

Post by mcintyre1994 »

tnli wrote: post #367
adwn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I find that those companies that add issues and support requests _ought_ to have the decency to also donate to him. But, I guess, companies don't have any decency to donate unrequested, so maybe he should put up some sort of notice to request payment for any work they request from him. Oh, wait...

There's also probably distance between the arm of the company that donates to open source and the developers who are opening issues when they spot a bug. And that distance probably gets longer for companies with the most money to donate too.

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

#602

Post by AntiImperialist »

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…

OR,

    - release it under a permissive license

    - wait until it reaches reaches a significant level of popularity for your purposes (see below)

    - flex it to get a good job at a good company

    - abandon the original project altogether or find new maintainers

    - focus on your new job, build skills and connections

    - invest most of your income in bonds and experiment with profitable side ventures which don't require much economic contribution from your side

    - most probably die relatively well-off

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

#603

Post by treis »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #516

Problem: You want to make money for all the work you do your open-source project. But no one pays for it. Reason: Developers choose your project, and developers are at the bottom of the food chain. They have no authority to spend money, usually, or they get pushback and delays if they do. Solution: Band together with the authors of related projects and create a new closed-source product, taking bits of your various c…

>For instance, what if Faker.js and other similar libraries banded together into a corporation, and sold a multi-language mocking/stubbing/faking toolset?

Nobody would use them. Ultimately they would lose out to someone like Thoughtbot that puts out open source tools as a loss leader to drive consulting business.

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

#604

Post by pietrovismara »

jiofih wrote: post #579
pietrovismara wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

And that's true, but then we circle back to the OP (original problem), if you can't make a living out of OSS you're generally very limited in how much you can achieve, which then stiffles innovation in all other sectors that depend on OSS.

So the question stands, how do we allow OSS maintainers to contribute without forcing them to find ways to monetize their project, which would be against the very nature of OSS?

And I'm loving this discussion, because then why can't you apply it to other fields, like arts? In fact similar discussions are already happening in most creative fields. I know where this is going, and it's great.

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

#606

Post by erdos4d »

thomasfedb wrote: post #585
jonrimmer wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> despite making a $600 withdrawal from his Open Collective fund in June 2018 with the explicit purpose of releasing v5[2]. I just want to point out how crazy it is that we expect people to releasing a whole major version for $600 Meanwhile in the commercial world, changing the colour of a button in your iOS app will cost you $1000s...

Having been on both sides of that pay discrepancy, I have come to the conclusion that most of our economic theory about the nature of business and competition is bullshit. I now see corporations as social organizations which exist to keep educated people fed and controlled, everything else is secondary. The sums are big because the money has to get divvied up amongst everyone, even if the work involved is just changing a hex value by the lowest paid and probably most technically skilled person in the network.

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

#607

Post by pjmorris »

diordiderot wrote: post #86
tlarkworthy wrote: post #25

I 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…

Making an ethical judgment based on religious text is a serious folly.

What's your preferred alternative for making ethical judgements?

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

#608

Post by runawaybottle »

quells wrote: post #497
slooonz wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish there was a better way for open source projects to solicit donations. It’s hard to get your boss to pay for software; it’s extra hard when you get no additional value. That’s the big issue IMO. It’s easy for one developer to say "if you make money you can pay me a tip". When you have hundreds of dependencies, tracking developers wanting donations is almost a full time job… If I were npm CEO, I would : 1. Pro…

Besides the fact that this would limit access to those projects for those unable to pay, there are the issues of multiple contributors and transient dependencies. Say a project is started by one person, made open source, and becomes popular. They start accepting contributions from the public, including substantial features and bug fixes. They later move on and someone else becomes the lead maintainer. Who would recei…

Let the maintainer monetize release versions. If new releases have major contributions from others, charge for the new release and dole out funds to the contributors.

Certainly some thought needs to be put into how to monetize this, but we haven’t ever even tried. I’d say something like NPM is sort of like how Uber/Lyft built and validated the ride sharing infrastructure - it works, it’s normalized. Now how do you manage the money between the drivers and riders.

It’s not like software devs and companies are broke and are unwilling to pay modest amounts, and we will always support free for non-commercial.

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

#609

Post by hokumguru »

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…

I think the Tailwind css model seems the most sustainable right now - build an open source project until it reaches a suitable level of success and then build commercial support/other projects around it.

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

#610

Post by waterhouse »

joshuaissac wrote: post #537
jml7c5 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a weird problem with the language. Despite many attempts, with proposals like "xe" and "thon"[0], English never picked up a good gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun. [Yeesh, that's a mouthful of adjectives.] As recently as 15 years ago, using "they" to refer to a single individual was derided by many as grammatically incorrect. It was common in colloquial speech, but frowned upon in writing, mostly beca…

> As recently as 15 years ago, using "they" to refer to a single individual was derided by many as grammatically incorrect. > The recent acceptance comes down to two factors Here is a couplet from Shakespeare's "A Comedy of Errors" (1623): > There's not a man I meet but doth salute me > As if I were their well-acquainted friend And the King James Version (1611) of the Bible has this for Deuteronomy 17:5: > Then shalt…

How about singular "they" for a named individual?
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