611–620 of 966 posts
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Then what is the better solution? Saying it's wrong without giving alternatives isn't a very useful comment imho. edit: And the solution needs to apply to the US, with all it's brokenness, not some other country with different social structures.
The media doesn’t do this is the U.K. or Australia. We have much stronger libel laws. Nobody has been “disappeared” by the police, either.
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I for one wouldn't use a library licensed like this. There are ideological reasons, but more practically, let's say I run a server that provides a public service. At some point, it gets a lot of traffic and I want to accept donations or use ads to fund the hosting. Under such a licence, I'd be completely at the mercy of the author, who could effectively shut down the server.
Or you could pay the author for his/her work from your income. I could be wrong but it seems obvious to me that semi-commercial licenses would explode the amount of open code available, because instead of devs working for corporations, corporations would end up working for them. Commercial licensing - open code, free for non-profits, per-seat or per-user pricing for for profits with an official license, forks are con…
More likely it would implode the open code available, since usage would drop like a rock.
1) Once you're required to pay money, people start comparison shopping and proprietary software is optimized to win that game.
2) Nobody wants to spend the engineering, accountant, and lawyer hours to keep track of assorted semi-commercial licenses for a zillion dependencies and what they're owed. Half the point of FOSS is that you don't have to keep track of licenses and compliance, as the periodic sob stories on HN/Slashdot about "Oh no, I got audited and wasn't in compliance and had to pay. I'm going to switch everything to FOSS; that'll show them!" show.
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> Serge quickly discovered, to his surprise, that Goldman had a one-way relationship with open source. They took huge amounts of free software off the Web, but they did not return it after he had modified it, even when his modifications were very slight and of general rather than financial use. “Once I took some open-source components, repackaged them to come up with a component that was not even used at Goldman Sach…
That's a great read. I don't understand the prime number part though: > 3599 = (3600 – 1) = (602 – 12) = (60 – 1) (60 + 1) = 59 times 61. Not a prime number. Where does the (602 - 12) come from? Can someone explain that to me? Also, use a leading space to keep things out of your bash history.
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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…
You might see that as “volatile”, but I think I can see what he’s getting at. A charitable reading of his whole stance: • We can enter into a formal contract where I actually do owe you work-on-this-project in exchange for pay; • but without such a contract, donations to me are just that — donations — and don’t influence my work; • but this is an open-source project, so you’re free to put whatever work you like into…
That implies that if people donate then the funds will be used to improve the project.
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You might see that as “volatile”, but I think I can see what he’s getting at. A charitable reading of his whole stance: • We can enter into a formal contract where I actually do owe you work-on-this-project in exchange for pay; • but without such a contract, donations to me are just that — donations — and don’t influence my work; • but this is an open-source project, so you’re free to put whatever work you like into…
Yeah, bringing money into free software equation complicates things. It comes down to donors expecting something back for their donation, while authors expect something back for all the effort they put so far into the project that is obviously useful to other people. For my open source project I made a hard decision not take any money. This curbs expectations and puts users at disadvantage, but lets me take as much t…
donation
A voluntary gift or contribution for a specific cause.
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> Developers have made massive gains overall by commoditizing their complements Sorry, I am not following. What is the implication here, that application developers and Free Operating Systems are complemetary products? > How many fewer developer jobs would there be now if every OS installation cost what Solaris used to cost? Of course the market would be much smaller without FOSS, but how does this relate to what I a…
> application developers and Free Operating Systems are complementary products Yes, that was my point (or at least application development and OSes are)
Anyway, the point from Joel's article that I think so many people miss is that *every smart business should try to commoditize their complements". If you are an OS developer, you will try to commoditize you hardware, If you are an application developer, the smart thing is to commoditize your OS, and so on up the stack.
So, I don't understand the remark about Linux costing as much as Solaris. I am not expecting the final consumer to look at Windows and Linux and say "yeah, we need to pay for Linux". What I do believe is that smart application developers would never voluntarily lock themselves into a closed platform.
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You might see that as “volatile”, but I think I can see what he’s getting at. A charitable reading of his whole stance: • We can enter into a formal contract where I actually do owe you work-on-this-project in exchange for pay; • but without such a contract, donations to me are just that — donations — and don’t influence my work; • but this is an open-source project, so you’re free to put whatever work you like into…
This is more of a matter of, if some Internet rando has a comfy development job, it's easy to go and flame nonconformists like Marak on the Internet. Even if Marak was a jerk or a liar, he still deserves to be paid!
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You might see that as “volatile”, but I think I can see what he’s getting at. A charitable reading of his whole stance: • We can enter into a formal contract where I actually do owe you work-on-this-project in exchange for pay; • but without such a contract, donations to me are just that — donations — and don’t influence my work; • but this is an open-source project, so you’re free to put whatever work you like into…
Yeah, bringing money into free software equation complicates things. It comes down to donors expecting something back for their donation, while authors expect something back for all the effort they put so far into the project that is obviously useful to other people. For my open source project I made a hard decision not take any money. This curbs expectations and puts users at disadvantage, but lets me take as much t…
I sold a (non-open source) shareware product way back when. Money definitely provided the incentive to put more work into it than I otherwise would have. On the other hand, it made me treat it as a business, albeit a part-time one.
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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...