No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This • Hacker News Board

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

#651

Post by bluedino » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #467

arthurcolle wrote: post #102

On Twitter, he claims that he was recently made homeless due to an apartment fire, and asks the community to send funds to help him avoid homelessness, which seems reasonable enough. He later goes on to describe "fake news written by the NY Post." I searched for this, and found an article that might be the article he describes (timing fits) [0] Pretty crazy story, all in all! He seems to be in some pretty dire strait…

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…

Debian (for example) has 51,000 free software packages. How do we decide which ones to fund and how much they get? Do you earn money for being the maintainer. LOC you commit? Bugs you report or fix? What about people that write documentation or packaging?

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

#652

Post by 013a » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

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…

The other option is: Pick any of the above licenses and don't tie your entire financial identity to this thing.

I think its a legitimately weird thing specific to software where people release something interesting as open source and free, it gets used, they feel an obligation to make building it their job, and then they feel anger when they don't make money from it. I understand the feeling of being slighted when there are billion dollar corporations using your software, but it was also a situation you opted in-to in the first place, with no expectation of reciprocity until now.

I support the idea of asking people to pay for your time. That's totally fair. I think its also a little icky to say "pay me six figures or fork it"; so, is there no intention to actually make this an open source project? One where people contribute code instead of money and its supported by its users in that way? This project has over 100 contributors.

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

#653

Post by mamunamu » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #467

arthurcolle wrote: post #102

On Twitter, he claims that he was recently made homeless due to an apartment fire, and asks the community to send funds to help him avoid homelessness, which seems reasonable enough. He later goes on to describe "fake news written by the NY Post." I searched for this, and found an article that might be the article he describes (timing fits) [0] Pretty crazy story, all in all! He seems to be in some pretty dire strait…

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…

Honestly, he should have used the GPL and allowed other licensing options for commercial entities. Frankly I wouldn't use MIT license for personal open-source projects.

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

#654

Post by amelius » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #505

Fordec wrote: post #52

I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately. Years ago software was fully build on the backs of a multitude of giants within their niche domain. But for a while now large companies have been adopting a model of taking from open source contributions and raking in billions. The original social bargain of "pay it on" has been broken by the Bezos of the world raking in billions. And yes, as o…

> I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately. Open source is a niche. The vast majority of developers don’t participate in open source. If they do, it’s simple bug fixes that they need for their paid jobs. The number of people creating and releasing significant open source projects is vanishingly small relative to the entire pool of developers. I think it was a mistake to tell entry-leve…

> The vast majority of developers don’t participate in open source.

On the producing side, you mean.

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

#655

Post by amelius » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

jml7c5 wrote: post #267

lollmao wrote: post #189

Unrelated, but why do people prefer to assume gender over just using gender-neutral pronouns? Not a native English speaker but I've seen this a lot, especially on HN even when there's no indication of subject's gender whatsoever. Or is it just weird to use they/them? Thanks

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…

Many constructs in languages are ambiguous. On the positive side, there are many jokes based on language ambiguity.

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

#656

Post by NeutronStar » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #619

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…

For most people, the funding mechanisms on the Internet pretty much all carry an expectation that they're to support ongoing work that will be used to either explicitly deliver a product, as with Kickstarter, or is to fund an artist's/coder's/etc. ongoing work. Not many people are making donations based on past effort. I sold a (non-open source) shareware product way back when. Money definitely provided the incentive…

Donating isn't funding. The distinction has to be made.

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

#657

Post by Nbox9 » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

arthurcolle wrote: post #102

On Twitter, he claims that he was recently made homeless due to an apartment fire, and asks the community to send funds to help him avoid homelessness, which seems reasonable enough. He later goes on to describe "fake news written by the NY Post." I searched for this, and found an article that might be the article he describes (timing fits) [0] Pretty crazy story, all in all! He seems to be in some pretty dire strait…

> building some kind of SaaS API is probably not really possible for something that can be trivially implemented and operated locally

A SaaS that allows you to deploy APIs and handles Auth/Billing/Customer Support/Usage Metrics etc would be a viable service. There are plenty of 1 man APIs that could be built by an engineer if the heavy business aspects were taken care of.

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

#658

Post by wang_li » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

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…

Also, if we extended this idea of paying for all the software people use, the whole thing would fall over very quickly. I don't think most developers here have ever sent Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler any money for zlib/gzip? And how many have sent checks to the people who've been contributing to the linux kernel? And gnu file utils and bin utils and compilers? And the openssl project? And OpenBSD for openssh? And any of the other hundreds of bits of code that they rely on on a daily basis to get their work done.

At the end of the day if you want to get paid for your work, don't give it away under a free license. This is the second major story -- that I've seen anyway -- in the last couple of weeks about people wanting to be paid for the software that they freely give away. It reminds me of the time I went to Rome and a man came up to me and slipped a string bracelet around my wrist. When I told him I didn't want it, he said "no, no, it's free. just a friendly gift." and when I said thanks and turned to walk away he got mad that I didn't give him any money. Apparently it's a typical scam. "Give a gift" but then demand a return donation of money.

https://romevacationtips.com/avoid-the-african-bracelet-scam...

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

#659

Post by carapace » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:27 PM UTC

jabl wrote: post #426

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…

> Seriously. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? To nitpick: They are not stealing it, they're using it per the license terms. Don't like that? Well, choose a different license. That being said, I think there's an underlying point here. The "business-friendly" open source movement co-opted the idealistic free software movem…

> The "business-friendly" open source movement co-opted the idealistic free software movement.

Yeah, this. To me, as an admitted Free software person, the Open software movement looks like it was designed to undermine the Free movement. I don't think it actually was deliberately designed that way, just that it looks that way in hindsight.

I also don't really get the point of Open licenses because you could always already just give away your code, so to me it makes it seem like the only folks really benefiting from OSS are the people using the code but not sharing their improvements and the people (often the same people) who want to lock you out of [editing the software in] their products.

> idea of causing social change by coding free software

FWIW, that also seems to me to be a later gloss. If anything, computers and software are new enough that it's not so much a matter of social change as it is of founding new social norms around these (physical/virtual) machines. RMS just wanted to edit the software in his printer. Look at the restrictive B.S. that tractor makers are foisting on farmers to see the relevance. Is the idea of being able to fix your own tractor a "social change"? :)

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

#660

Post by nickjj » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

This reminds me of a lot of DHH's keynote about open source from last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBwWbFpkltg

Even if you're not a Rails developer it's worth watching.

From what I remember from the talk he is totally fine with and doesn't hold any grudges against Twitter, GitHub or Shopify making hundreds of millions of dollars off Ruby on Rails while getting zero compensation in return.

Mainly because he open sourced Rails with no monetary / fame expectations and then worried about generating income from services around his open source project.

I don't know Marak's history but I do know developing a good faker library definitely isn't trivial, so I'm sure his work is very much appreciated by the folks who use it but I think if you're doing open source work for money and other non-pure byproducts you're only setting your self up for disappointment.