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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

#671

Post by dang »

tubularhells wrote: post #515

Anyone arguing how 'this is not the way to do it', 'lol open source Dev what did he expect' or explains how they have been using his software 'but it's not that important' are the Republicans of the development community. Fucking shameful to see people talk like this about folks who do good, open and free work to make things better. Go and look yourself in the mirror and repeate those words. One day your corporate ow…

Hey, can you please not break the HN guidelines like this? They specifically say "Have curious conversation" and "Please don't fulminate".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(Edit: It looks like you've been doing a good job of sticking to the guidelines in your other comments and we appreciate that.)

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

#672

Post by carapace »

gtsop wrote: post #574

There a couple of categories of comments on this thread that I think are missleading. 1) Judging the author's decision based on his previous behaviour or current speculation over his situation 2) Judging the author's decision to write OS and "demand" to be paid. Both categories, imho, are missleading the real issue at hand which is this: We, as developers, as companies and as a society, who decided to depend uppon on…

You know the Bash shell is maintained by a single unpaid volunteer? He also maintains the GNU readline library.

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

#673

Post by treis »

Spivak wrote: post #623
treis wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

That only works if Thoughbot's open source tools are good enough. People seem very happy to pay for JetBrain's suite of tools. Postman's collaborative offering makes good money. Sublime is still doing well. There are people still selling standalone pieces of software to developers and doing okay. It's hard to compete with huge companies with a build-over-buy culture but that's just their nature. It's way cheaper to j…

Tools are an easier sell. You can always switch to a different one without too much fuss. That's a lot different than writing five years worth of test cases and then having to go for a license renewal.

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

#674

Post by bcrosby95 »

013a wrote: post #652
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 th…

It's an interesting situation. I've often pondered what I would do in this scenario.

I have some hobby projects that I do purely for fun. Feeling an obligation to work on them because other people find them useful would really drain me. The point is to get away from work and rediscover the joy of programming, not add more work on top of work.

I guess I can just keep them private. But if someone really happens to find them useful, I would be happy if they forked them for themselves. Maybe a giant disclaimer at the top of the readme so I'm clear and upfront how the projects will be managed (they won't be).

Regardless, I'm sure it's a problem I'll never have.

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

#675

Post by john_moscow »

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…

That's because you need to understand the difference between a project and a product.

If you want your product to succeed, it must target decision-makers with a budget to buy your license, and it must make enough difference to them to justify the costs.

Most software libraries aren't products. They target other software developers who are not responsible for allocating funds. Furthermore, if there wasn't a library, most devs would absolutely love writing one ad hoc. Their salary would remain the same, had they been solving the problem from scratch (which most of us love doing) or adopting an existing one. It's the business people that would feel the difference, but business people don't understand the specifics of libraries. And they hate integrating closed-source parts into their codebase because it comes with tremendous risks should the vendor go belly up.

What could sell is a higher-level product that would automate boring/repetitive tasks that everyone hates. Like a GUI designer for some boilerplate stuff that everyone codes by hand (mind you many people like coding by hand, but some hate it and they will buy your GUI).

Your product can also be your consulting business. Don't add stuff based on everybody's requests for free. Make it open-source, welcome contributions, but if someone wants some specific stuff, give them a quote. From time to time, add commonly requested parts and write articles explaining how they work to gain visibility. You will have to deal with lots of entitled assholes, but you will also find people willing to pay you.

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

#676

Post by ClumsyPilot »

chillee wrote: post #44

One issue with "getting paid for open source" is how much marginal value the project is generating. For example, take left-pad. At the time of its infamous removal, it was relied upon by thousands of packages, including Node and Babel. But does that mean that it was worth millions of dollars? Of course not. Because if it wasn't available, anybody could have replicated it in a few hours of work. I don't know if that's…

But if I am not providing much value, why am I wasting time on the project?

Like even if I am willing to work for free, I select a project thats more valuable and meaningfull. So if open source is all free, its hard to tell what is meaningfull.

Also maybe fundamentally important packages should be more carefull with their dependencies.

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

#677

Post by DrAwesomeClaws2 »

hinkley wrote: post #642
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 m…

The work is the reward.

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

#678

Post by derefr »

andi999 wrote: post #618
an_opabinia wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do not think he 'deserves' to get paid. It is nice if he gets paid, but I dont even see a moral obligation (not speaking of legal). I mean the idea of gpl2 (at least from linus and my perspective) is nicely laid out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU Paraphrasing:'I give you my sourcecode and if you change it and give the software away, please give me the changes'. For MIT license (which Marak choose…

Everyone deserves to get paid (in the sense of moral desert; i.e. people "deserve" human rights.) You don't have a personal obligation to pay them, though.

Solving that discrepancy isn't going to be done in an HN comment; it's the Great Work of capitalist statecraft.

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

#679

Post by afiori »

ganafagol wrote: post #20

You sir have misunderstood the concept of open source software. As an open source author or maintainer you don't do the work for others and then expect some kind of compensation. The idea instead is to do the work that you would have done anyway because somebody else paid you or because you did it for fun, and then you publish it to use the community to help you fix issues. A philantropic motivation is nice but not n…

it's actually quite close to paying taxes, most people understand the benefits of a tax system (even libertarians with some caveats) but it is hard to be enthusiastic about paying taxes if you can see widespread evasion, corruption, and waste.

I am okay with paying 32% in taxes, but only if everyone else is doing it too

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

#680

Post by hvis »

ganafagol wrote: post #385
nmfisher wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this is a fairly trivial loophole to close if you have a lawyer who knows what they're doing. In fact, you don't even need to close the loophole. You just need to make FAANG employees pause long enough to worry that they might not comply, deterring them from using said library.

How does it help you if they don't use your lib? Why do you publish your work in the first place? To get donations? That's not what open source was invented for. If you don't want people to use your work, don't publish it. Publishing has the totally selfish goal of getting others to help you by trying things out, report bugs and improvements and some of them to contribute those things to you. Don't publish if you don…

> You think Linus Torvalds wanted donations when he published Linux?

If you look at the mailing list with the announcement, it was "look ma, no hands" kind of moment. Just letting people know of his experimental project, with entirely no expectations if it growing as much as it did decades later.

That's not to say Linux is a good example to go by, for an average free software project.

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