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

#681

Post by baobabKoodaa » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 7:06 PM UTC

BoorishBears wrote: post #543

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.

... what? You realize the concept of innocent until proven guilty is not a unique concept to HN readers right? That presumption of innocence is not " act like maybe he was making bombs until proven guilty"? It sounds like you've let the media erode your understanding of a very basic human right, but do not try and cast it on others as some sort of tribalism. He is innocent until proven guilty . Not "reasonable chance…

> He is innocent until proven guilty ... Not "reasonable chance" according to your random opinion, but a judge and jury and various council go through a legal case and legally find him guilty.

If someone is running towards you with a knife shouting religious scripture, are you going to stand still and think to yourself "I'm going to assume this person is innocent until they are convicted of my murder in a court of law"? No, you're going to consider the possibility that they actually might intend to murder you, and you'll take appropriate precautions.

Innocent until proven guilty is a concept for the court of law, not for the court of public opinion. People are allowed to hold opinions and thoughts regarding how dangerous other people are.

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

#682

Post by imhoguy » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 7:08 PM UTC

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…

This. The other fallacy is that a work is not yet good enough to charge for it.

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

#683

Post by toast42 » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 7:08 PM UTC

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…

Looks like they lost all their possessions in an apartment fire: https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272

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

#684

Post by baobabKoodaa » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

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…

> I'll grant you, ammonium nitrate isn't a terribly common substance to have around an apartment. I still don't think it's very compelling evidence that he was building a bomb, and weaker evidence that if he was building a bomb, it was to hurt people. Maybe he was just trying to make his own fireworks. He shouldn't be doing that in an apartment, cuz risk of accidental explosions, but it seems hasty to start painting him as a domestic terrorist.

For what it's worth, I fully agree with this. All I'm saying is, we shouldn't outright dismiss the possibility that he was building a bomb, simply because he's an open source developer.

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

#685

Post by black_puppydog » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #560

black_puppydog wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to replicate one of my recent replies ([4] which unsurprisingly got me downvoted, but I regret nothing) here because it seems relevant. Specifically, Marak seems to grok the exploitatitive nature of the current setup (chosen in part by themselves) but lacks real negotiation leverage because they have no organization behind them (besides people cheering them on in the comments). With this in mind, I think it…

> * too obvious a trap, and thus ineffective. No sane capitalist company will go anywhere near AGPL code (and we just had an example on HN of someone trying. it wasn't pretty) Source plz ? > the "F" in FOSS It's free as freedom, not beer. GNU seemingly doesn't want to use 'libre' because Indians might not understand it or something, which IMHO is ridiculous considering how often this confusion is made ! Otherwise, I…

> Source plz ?

The dominance of permissive licenses in the industry (compared to GPL) and the relative non-impact of AGPL software. I can't think of many AGPL (or similarly licensed) projects that have similar industry standard status as react or tensorflow have in their respective niches.

> It's free as freedom, not beer.

I'm sorry I should have made this point more explicit I guess. Of course I am well aware of the double meaning of free, and that it relates to freedom in this context. My point is that yes, that freedom allows you to do and read things, of course. But what? In an (exaggerated, and not entirely fair) analogy, it would be like claiming/securing the right to wear clown shoes during coffee breaks in the office. Yes, it's a right you may not have had otherwise, and it will brighten up your day, but ultimately it won't change the material relationship to your employer.

In the same way, being allowed to read, modify, and distribute software is not in itself a solution to this specific problem at hand here, i.e. the strategy of Fortune 500 companies, as a stand-in for capital to get free labor from OSS devs. (note the omission of the "F" in this case because again, for the most part, this will happen with open source work, but not so much with libre projects).

-------

As an aside, I'm unsure how to interpret the tone of your comment, so just to clarify: please don't mistake this as an attack from me on AGPL and similar. I think they're better than nothing and I personally prefer contributing to strongly copyleft projects. But they won't be a mechanism that can have a similar impact on the software industry as widespread unionization had on employer/employee relationship a hundred years ago. I lived in the Ruhr Area in Germany for a few years and the impact was really impressive, quite hard to imagine it happening like this today... The conclusion of the podcast I linked above is that IT work (and programming in particular) has developed from something where the individual holds significant negotiation power (and thus individual choices matter a lot) to a market in which workers are essentially interchangeable (since they all work with the same tools anyhow) and thus individual choices like Marak's are relatively less likely to be effective.

Of course I hope that Marak gets hired and paid accordingly asap, but following this argument, in the long run programmers (the non-glamorous term for anything to do with code) will have to organize and/or accept significant drops in their salaries.

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

#686

Post by nineplay » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 7:20 PM UTC

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…

There's an article that makes the rounds now and again on HN about a engineer who wrote a widely used opensource tool and then didn't get past the Google interview process. FAANGs are still more interested in seeing if you can solve the Knapsack Problem then seeing that you can write good, maintainable code.

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

#687

Post by Igelau » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 7:21 PM UTC

diordiderot wrote: post #86

tlarkworthy wrote: post #25

I am not religious but labourers in the vineyard stuck with me from school: The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. 10 So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. 11 When they received it, they began to grumble(D) against the landowner. 12 ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they…

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

You're painting in broad strokes and getting some flak for it, but there's definitely some truth to this. The context surrounding the story is extremely relevant.

The Workers in the Vineyard is a story being told by Jesus within the larger story of the Gospels. It is a parable. It's not a beast fable with some clearcut moral. The whole story itself is intended as a metaphor for salvation and heaven.

He's not even indirect about it this time, he makes it clear from the beginning:

> For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard..."

The workers object because (surprise) this actually is unfair in a landscape of mortal human struggles. It's jarringly so. It defies common sense and notions of fairness. In that confusion, Jesus is trying to make a point about just how incomprehensible the generosity of the godhead is. He's saying it breaks your prior notions and that salvation doesn't map to time and money.

There's literally no other point being made by the parable, and it's a total error to try to divine another message.

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

#688

Post by MaxBarraclough » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

huhtenberg wrote: post #333

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…

5. Use https://commonsclause.com or another commercial use restriction with an open source license. - Get bashed for not being a real open source by fellow nerds - Get licensing fees from larger companies

> commercial use restriction with an open source license

Any licence which explicitly forbids commercial use is by definition not a Free Software licence or an Open Source licence.

Or do you mean something like the AGPLv3, which isn't explicitly anti-commercial but which has strong terms that scare off many companies?

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

#689

Post by imhoguy » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

runawaybottle wrote: post #571

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…

This is a interesting topic because it exposes one of the great sins developers commit - we don’t pay each other. I’m not talking about nickel and dimeing your fraternity, but there is certainly a reasonable price for a lot of these packages and plug-ins we install that can create financial autonomy for a lot of people via modest efforts.

On the other hand devs in corporation usualy have no spending budget. Going thru official management ask and procurement process is a real PITA. The last thing a dev wants is drowning in a red tape swamp.

I do sometimes pay for software with my own cash. However that is mostly limited to personal productivity tools because I can't transfer licenses to the company.

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

#690

Post by WalterSear » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 7:24 PM UTC

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…

No interviewer has demonstrated anything but perfunctory interest in my open source work, popular or not.

It's a myth, like 'nobody cares where you went to school so long as you can do the work'.