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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

#711

Post by leib »

Igelau wrote: post #687
diordiderot wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

It's surprising Jesus din't make the point that being good is its own reward, instead of focusing on the ultimate payoff of heaven.

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

#712

Post by jlokier »

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.

I remember Stripe getting bashed on HN for releasing a commercial feature that took months to develop, by someone saying they could do it "in a weekend"...

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

#713

Post by anuila »

say_it_as_it_is wrote: post #705

459 closed pull requests, 85 open pull requests. 211 contributors. There's your payment, Marak. You didn't work alone.

I figure you've never received any pull requests. PRs RARELY are good to go, most of the time I have to put as much work as they did to accept them.

Except for a few contributors, most just pushed a single PR, which means they never get to learn how to contribute autonomously.

I've turned to reject PRs that are half-assed and ask me to finish their work.

They don't help me, they only push me to work more for free for something that they want.

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

#714

Post by withinboredom »

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…

> They start accepting contributions from the public, including substantial features and bug fixes.

I spent a considerable amount of weekends helping out with a FS2020 mod. The maintainer now accepts donations and makes a considerable sum. I got none of that. Personally, it left a bad taste in my mouth. I maintain a private fork now, because I don't like the idea of someone profiting off my rare nights and weekend work. It would be one thing if he recognized the work and/or gave back to the contributors in some way, but they don't... so I stopped contributing publically.

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

#715

Post by leib »

nix23 wrote: post #698

>Take this as an opportunity to send me a six figure yearly contract or fork the project and have someone else work on it. Oh yeah, for sure i would hire someone with that attitude.

Seriously, he should just inform people to send him feature requests and in return he'll send an quote estimation; no need to be petulant.

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

#716

Post by gpanders »

bartvk wrote: post #89
lacker wrote: post #28

I empathize with the sentiment, but if you want to get paid for your open source work, surely it would work better to set up a Patreon and point people to it, rather than write "send me a six figure contract or fork this!" in a GitHub issue. It's also weird to use a license that explicitly lets Fortune 500 companies use the code for free, and then write that you don't want them to do so in the issue. Just change the…

About your first point, I've had people open issues on one of my Github projects, asking for new features. I then politely replied "I currently don't do free support for this project. If you have a budget, then I can make time. Let me know." For me, this is the best way. It's clear and states that the ball is in their court.

I think this is a great approach

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

#717

Post by paloaltokid »

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…

Your insight and the comments in the Github thread all back up the same point - the current economic model is not set up to empower or distribute wealth to the little guy.

I think it was phk who many years ago pointed out that Free Software is really anti-capitalist at heart; it makes sense that it would come from America (and MIT!) because of how the economic system works there.

The licenses are a distraction. The bigger issues are structural in terms of how the economy is set up. Our current free market system is predicated on folks at the bottom of the pyramid getting squeezed for their labor. It is only when it starts happening to us and not folks somewhere else that we begin to do something about it.

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

#718

Post by drummer »

john_moscow wrote: post #675
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, m…

> Most software libraries aren't products. They target other software developers who are not responsible for allocating funds.

Perhaps devs and engineers should manage the funds. Like AMD's current CEO.

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

#719

Post by deckard1 »

fierarul wrote: post #670
kome wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately." it's open source vs. free software open source = free labor for private profits.

It's as if open source was invented to make part of free software more palatable to corporations.

Even in 1998 it didn't take a genius to see what a Faustian bargain that Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond were leading us to sign.

Now we have SaaS, PaaS, and AWS. L-O-L. Bigly L-O-L. MySQL and PHP alone probably contributed to half of Zuckerface and Bezos billions.

Imagine writing an npm package that the FAANGs install as a dependency of their giant website and not being able to pass the leetcode gatecheck to even get a job there. Dystopias aren't much fun when you live in one.

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

#720

Post by jlokier »

runawaybottle wrote: post #696
imhoguy wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’ll have to be cultural shift. The same way you get free food and beer, or a budget to buy your own gear, we need to start allocating a no-nonsense dev budget to get licenses. Of course, we’d have to create a marketplace that has modest price points. The marketplace isn’t supposed to be filled with enterprise grade Jira solutions that cost - I can’t even imagine what it costs. I’m not above paying a few bucks for a…

> It’ll have to be cultural shift. The same way you get free food and beer, or a budget to buy your own gear, we need to start allocating a no-nonsense dev budget to get licenses.

+1 insightful. I wonder when we'll see the first company do that.

(I must admit, though, I've never worked at a company that offered me free food, beer, budget for gear, books, or anything else. They might as well be silicon valley myths. I have worked a few places with an on-site vending machine, where you pay for the snacks.)

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