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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

#631

Post by BoorishBears »

curryst wrote: post #626
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #508

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.

> It seems to me like people are willing to jump to the opposite conclusion simply because he's "one of us". Because many of us have our own collection of weird oddities. I literally have cannon fuse sitting on the shelf behind me, that I got to make my own smoke bombs/devices (just sugar and potassium nitrate, nothing insane or dangerous). I would take a hard look at the worst thing someone could accuse you of build…

The reason why presumption of innocence is so important is, you don't need a smoke bomb making materials to get the public to think someone is a bomb maker.

Are we forgetting the time a splayed out alarm clock became a national scandal?

You could go into someone's home, pull out a Raspberry PI and some loose jumpers and hold up something that the average citizen thinks of as proof this person is some sort of mainframe hacking nutjob anarchist.

(And more importantly, there are police out there right now who would jump to the same conclusions. See a simple hobbyist electronics bench and take it as something nefarious.)

That's why you don't go around presuming people are guilty of things.

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

#632

Post by keithlfrost »

donmcronald wrote: post #533
patrickk wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That should read as 60^2 - 1^2 -- the twos should be typeset as superscript.

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

#633

Post by todd3834 »

I remember Marak from the very early days of Node.js on IRC. He was extremely active answering tons of people's questions. I don't know him personally, although he helped me a lot on IRC back in the day. I was excited watching Nodejitsu startup and sad to see it kind of disappear. In a lot of ways people like Marak and TJ Holowaychuk have done so much for the community that it wouldn't look the same without them.

Let's not forget about the infamous node.js rap https://soundcloud.com/marak/marak-the-node-js-rap

We often talk about the responsibilities of companies to pay open source engineers. I think this would be great but in my experience companies are very often looking for ways to cut costs to meet goals. Giving money to open source is likely one of the first things that would get cut in these situations. I'm not saying that is a good thing but a reality. That being said if the donations are so small that they aren't going to move the needle for a goal either way then it is unlikely to be cut. I don't know what the sweet spot is but it would be cool if it became standard for software companies to expect to give some portion of their budget to open source.

This also leaves the question open for what the responsibility for individuals are. I'm not proud to say it but I haven't given very much money to open source developers. However, I have a list of about 10 that have had a very positive influence on my career. I would bet I'm not alone. I do feel conviction over this and posts like this are helping me re-evaluate this.

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

#634

Post by formerly_proven »

jmiskovic wrote: post #591
derefr wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've participated in a project using Bountysource some years ago; in total I received something on the order of 1500-2000 $. Which is nice. I assume a lot of people did a lot more work than I did back then and never saw any money for it. So I probably have no right to complain or lament about these transactions in any way. But, in a way, it is very hard to not think about dollar per time, especially with Bountysource being attached to solving specific issues. I believe this contributed to my mentality souring over time, because in the back of my head I never got rid of the idea that I'm sort-of at work here, but at about 2 $/hr average wage. I stopped contributing to that project completely after about just two years or so.

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

#635

Post by reaperducer »

jonrimmer wrote: post #539
ampdepolymerase wrote: post #467

Earlier 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…

If you're using his work, pay him something. Everything else is just excuses.

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

#636

Post by reaperducer »

serverholic wrote: post #620
thomasfedb wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Then he shouldn't take the money.

See also: "Let them eat cake."

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

#637

Post by tyrex2017 »

totally fine, but I really believe he would see 10x the job offers if he had phrased it more politely. 6 figures should be easy for his skill level.

i am afraid many super cool bosses will avoid him because he reminds them of people who are pissed off and cause issues.

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

#638

Post by 0df8dkdf »

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'm a big promoter of open source software. However, I do see a fine line between getting open source and charging. In general if something is generic enough like Kernel of an OS or MVC framework for web dev, then yes open sources it.

However, it if it becomes specific and company clearly are benefiting and/profiting from it, then yeah charge for it!!

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

#639

Post by elil17 »

derefr wrote: post #569
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…

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…

By my understanding, in the US, if you solicit donations and say you will do something specific with them (e.g., use them to pay yourself to work on a project), then those aren't really donations. They're payment for a service. You may not think that you entered into a contract with the "donors" by accepting the "donations," but you did. You made an offer to perform an action in exchange for money and someone accepted that offer by paying you. That's a contract and anyone who donated could take you to court to get the money back.

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

#640

Post by carapace »

I don't think you should write FOSS software if you want to get paid for copies of it or the use of copies of it. That kind of defeats the whole point[1].

Either: 1) Be comfortable being extremely poor. This was the route I initially took: I was homeless during the time I learned UNIX and Python, etc. and had plenty of free time to work on writing code.

2) Be wealthy already. The easiest is to be born to wealth, but if that didn't work out for you you'll have to acquire wealth yourself. There is a wealth (pun intended) of information on this already, and it's beyond the scope of this comment, but I'll recommend "The Art of Money Getting or, Golden Rules for Making Money" by P. T. Barnum (Yes, that P. T. Barnum!) esp. the last chapter: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm and "The Richest Man in Babylon" which "remains in print almost a century after the parables were originally published, and is regarded as a classic of personal financial advice." ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon_%28...

3) Get paid for the writing itself (which is hopefully solving someone's immediate problem, eh?) (This is what RMS himself does, FWIW.) (Can be combined with option #2 to bootstrap wealth.)

[1] The "whole point" being something like, "Let's accelerate the techno-singularity and go live in Star Trek with cool aliens who like us." yeah?

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