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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

#641

Post by pradn »

AntiImperialist wrote: post #602
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 econom…

So the plan is to abandon the project? It will work some individuals, but we need something more sustainable for the industry.

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

#642

Post by hinkley »

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…

If you release under MIT and you don't have a plan for public speaking, or consulting then you have no way to profit financially from that work. Used to be that you could offer hosted solutions, but if you become too high profile the Cloud providers will have a 'better' offering.

Too many of us still fall into this Calvinistic work ethic that if we just put in the work the rewards will appear through some ineffable mechanism we don't (think we) need to understand. I am currently fighting this battle with myself on several fronts. That shit is hard, especially when you don't have a lot of role models.

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

#643

Post by theptip »

sm4rk0 wrote: post #616
jmiskovic wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Donors shouldn't expect something back, because per definition from Wiktionary: donation A voluntary gift or contribution for a specific cause.

This feels like a semantic non-sequitur. Maybe that's actually a great example of core of the problem at hand!

You're trying to argue a conclusion based on the specific word "donor", but many of these "donors" (or in this thread's case potential "donor") don't see themselves that way; they are not interested in "donating" with no strings, it seems like they are more interested in "patronage" or some sort of "sponsoring", where their money is not no-strings, but instead conditional on some specific threshold of level/quality of support/service.

Perhaps we just need a bit richer vocabulary for these discussions; if the project author is only interested in unconditional donations, that's their prerogative, and you're free to fork or fund accordingly. But also recognize that at the margin, "donate with no strings" is a much tougher sell for enterprises than "patronage will buy you X quality of service".

So if you're actually making an effort to turn an open-source project into revenue, I think you'll probably need to listen to your potential customers/patrons a bit more and give them the assurances they are looking for. Again, any open source author is free to do as they please! But as the GP notes, bringing money into the situation complicates things, and I don't think it's reasonable or rational to expect companies to start throwing donations your way without listening to what they want to get in return.

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

#644

Post by reader_mode »

jiofih wrote: post #545
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…

Who has ever been bashed for releasing a commercial product on HN? It is a startup forum after all.

This place seems like venting outlet for random people working in tech - the startup tone was drowned out years ago.

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

#645

Post by unreal37 »

an_opabinia wrote: post #588
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…

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!

I agree with the other commenter that "deserves" is a strong word.

If you want to sell something for money, you put a price on it. And people decide to buy it or not.

If you give it away for free, going back after the fact and asking for a donation is fine. But I don't think it's required. And it doesn't make people who choose not to donate bad in any way.

He should probably figure out his next business and get to working on that. Start a business, sell a thing, profit.

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

#646

Post by shadowgovt »

pradn wrote: post #641
AntiImperialist wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 econom…

So the plan is to abandon the project? It will work some individuals, but we need something more sustainable for the industry.

If the project is valuable, someone will step in to maintain it.

If nobody does, its value didn't justify the cost of maintenance.

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

#647

Post by mvc »

spottybanana wrote: post #110
diordiderot wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Personally I'm an atheist, but I still find this piece of religious text interesting. It tells us that this is as old problem as human civilization is. How do people share the work and the fruits of the labour?

> It tells us that this is as old problem as human civilization is

Only if you presume human civilization started with the bible. Fair bit of civilizing went on before that.

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

#648

Post by hinkley »

gkoberger wrote: post #31

I think this is fair for him to do, and well within his rights. He’s clearly frustrated. 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. I feel like open source would have more luck if Issues could have attached bounties. I may not think to donate to faker.js, however as someone with access t…

I ran out of TV to watch months ago and have been working my way down Youtube videos.

Several people I follow have a call in their video to "donate to help protect our independence," and I think maybe we need to call that out more.

If you don't pay for this video, then either there is no video, or advertisers pay, and advertisers want something in return that is probably not in your best interests.

I'm not sure whether the same goad works for open source, but given the boldness of forkers, perhaps it does.

We have new leadership in our engineering organization, I should bring up the idea of having a budget for open source donations that the developers vote/nominate and the company cuts a check based on how many votes each tool gets. Everyone writing a check for $5 is a lot of work on both ends. It's simpler if an org cuts 10 checks for $100-500.

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

#649

Post by NoodleIncident »

tomnipotent wrote: post #627
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're completely mischaracterizing my post. My point is that if faker were anything slightly above free, we really wouldn't have used it, and our code quality wouldn't suffer from not having it. It was more of a "ooh, that's kinda nice" thing when we used it. > And I'm not even going to _start_ on what I think of your attitude towards test tooling vs "central libraries" other than to note that if you don't consider…

> and our code quality wouldn't suffer from not having it Your code quality is irrelevant. What matters is did it save you time, and what is that time worth to you and your business.

Their whole point is that it didn't actually save any time; if it didn't exist for free, they wouldn't have done it themselves.

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

#650

Post by icedchai »

erdos4d wrote: post #606
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...

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 changi…

Yep, that money has to pay for not only the developer "doing the work", but all the overhead: the product managers, QA, release/deployment... then redo of work because someone used the wrong shade of blue.
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