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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

#771

Post by austincheney »

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…

If you work with web standard technologies your code is probably inherently open. Even still most developers in that space cannot write any original code to save their lives. They are utterly reliant on mountains of shit that does everything and they string a few build tasks together. As an experiment take NPM, Angular, React, or SpringMVC away and observe the forth coming violence like a zombie apocalypse in a third world nation. The entitlement runs deep.

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

#772

Post by WalterBright »

onion2k wrote: post #758
makecheck wrote: post #722

Not limited to software but modern society has a REALLY serious entitlement problem. (To the point where if I see a video on Reddit of someone screaming at a retail employee, it is not even surprising anymore.) I’ve had free and open projects for years, with evidence of thousands of users. Yet I could count on one hand the number of times anyone has bothered to thank me, much less donate. I do occasionally get E-mail…

Most people are living either in poverty conditions, or can see themselves living in poverty if anything goes wrong. Consequently people are understandably very reluctant to give up any of their precious limited resources. And yet, despite that, everyone is expected to get things done, to show they're interesting and creative, and to build social capital by being useful members of society. These antagonistic forces e…

Anyone who feels entitled to this or that is going to be very, very disappointed. And no, that isn't fixable.

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

#773

Post by bartvk »

cwyers wrote: post #669
ampdepolymerase wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you have used his work, push your companies to sponsor/donate. That's not how any of this works. Most people work for companies that do not just donate to random software developers. If you want companies to send you money, you need to have something on an invoice. You don't actually have to make the commercial edition different than your community edition, especially if you're charging a low amount, finance isn…

What I do, is ask for a receipt before I donate. Then it becomes a business cost to me.

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

#774

Post by mrskitch »

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…

This is how we framed it at browserless.io. Libraries generally aren't a product, and even though some of them do a lot, it's hard to charge folks for an `npm i`-style product. I tried a lot to look into this and it just didn't pan out. I think there's an opportunity for a library marketplace that does all of the curation, security checks, and other validation as it would provide a lot of value to organizations so they don't have to build all this themselves. Seems like all of this already exists, just not in a concise package.

On that, I feel like docker could provide a much much better storefront, and charge folks for their packages, but just hasn't. Did you even know they had a store? That's what their hub is supposed to be, but they don't charge for anything! How great would it be if they built out a marketplace?! This has even more potential, IMO, since images are generally a whole service and not just a library.

The opportunity and value definitely are there, and the need is there, it's just not something that anyone has tackled in a way that makes sense with software.

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

#775

Post by WalterBright »

jaymzcampbell wrote: post #752
makecheck wrote: post #722

Not limited to software but modern society has a REALLY serious entitlement problem. (To the point where if I see a video on Reddit of someone screaming at a retail employee, it is not even surprising anymore.) I’ve had free and open projects for years, with evidence of thousands of users. Yet I could count on one hand the number of times anyone has bothered to thank me, much less donate. I do occasionally get E-mail…

I recently set up a pihole at home with the whole Covid situation and as soon as I noticed the donate link threw them £5 thinking "the least I can do is buy a London priced pub pint - I'm not exactly spending it elsewhere" . I don't know why it's so different with software - I should really know better but even to this day my gut reaction is to, initially, balk at an app charging £5 - yet I'll walk into a pub (well,…

I know a successful CEO who started a business making business software. He gives it away for free. But he also sells support contracts for it. He says 90% of the users just take the free version. The rest buy support contracts.

Enough to have made him a wealthy man.

The business model is essentially give away the razors, sell the blades.

The only unhappy people are the ones who use the product but expect free support :-)

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

#776

Post by johnjboren »

There is a small-cap Crypto project that is coming out of Japan. Dev Protocol.

https://devprtcl.com/

Making open activities sustainable with staking

They allow people to stake the Dev Protocol token and split the rewards with the Open Source project. They are already integrated with GitHub.

This doesn't answer immediate concerns, but supporting Open Source is their entire angle.

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

#777

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

I wonder whether it would be possible to have a licensing scheme that was compatible with a package manager config to help solve these problems.

    # new environment with explicit config
    pyenv virtualenv myEnv —-licensing=personal
    pip install some-free-package
    # Success
vs

    # new environment defaults to restrictive
    pyenv virtualenv myEnv
    pip install some-free-package
    # failure
    ERROR: PACKAGE LICENSE INCOMPATIBLE WITH PIP CONFIG
It would be just as much on the honor system as things are today, but I think people are generally honest. If a package I want isn’t compatible with my license config at work, I think I’m more likely to find a different package or try to get a license than I am to change my package manager confit away from the team sanctioned settings, potentially opening my employer to what I now explicitly know to be legal risk.

I’m thinking about the packages I usually use and I don’t know their licenses. Pandas? Pytorch? I assume I can use them at work because everyone else does. If my package manager told me otherwise, I don’t have to be proactive.

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

#778

Post by bonestamp2 »

makecheck wrote: post #722

Not limited to software but modern society has a REALLY serious entitlement problem. (To the point where if I see a video on Reddit of someone screaming at a retail employee, it is not even surprising anymore.) I’ve had free and open projects for years, with evidence of thousands of users. Yet I could count on one hand the number of times anyone has bothered to thank me, much less donate. I do occasionally get E-mail…

One of the problems with large companies using these free libraries and tools is that the people who are choosing to use these free resources are just developers themselves -- they usually have little power to allocate the much deserved resources to the shoulders that they're standing on.

Because of this, there is a huge untapped opportunity to allocate resources better to pay open source contributors for their hard work.

It would be useful if there was a github (or whatever) license type that required payment above a certain threshold. A student might get free use, but a commercial endeavor might pay a little or a lot depending on the value they're getting.

Then, any libraries that you use with that license type would draw on the monthly deposit for your license level (more of your budget would go toward the libraries that you get more value from). For example, if your company pays $100/month, 50% of that may go to one library that provides a lot of value, while 1% might go to a library that provides less. Proper allocation would require the user to guage this, and it might be a little unfair but it's more fair than the 0% they're getting now.

Any resource you're using would have to get at least 1% of your allocation. If you're only using two libraries and you don't allocate value manually, each library would automatically get 50% of your monthly budget.

Repos could also choose to allocate a percentage of their draw to go toward bounties to resolve bugs, make improvements, etc. To help pay and incentivize others to contribute.

Is there anything like this out there?

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

#779

Post by WalterBright »

d33lio wrote: post #709
john_moscow wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This comment is golden! Most qualms on indie hackers and similar sites could be quickly settled with this line of reasoning. Not growing fast enough? -> buy ads -> "but I don't make enough money to spend on ads" -> is it really a product then? -> etc... It's always blown me away (as a person of average intelligence relative to many on HN) that brilliant people who can actually conjure up entire libraries, frameworks…

Creating a software program is only 10% of the work. The rest is marketing, promotion, sales, support, accounting, paying taxes, attending conferences, creating manuals and videos, etc.

Most developers fail because they stop after getting the program to work.

"Build it and they will come" is a stupid Hollywood myth.

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