Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

791–800 of 966 posts

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

#791

Post by okareaman »

WalterBright wrote: post #769
okareaman wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was seriously thinking of contributing to open source this past week when I started going over all the articles I've read from open source authors about entitled users and wealthy companies that don't donate but make profits off the projects. It's beco0me clear to me that large corporations like Microsoft have jumped into open source whole heartedly in a big part because they get tons of free labor. Not only that,…

It pleases me when corporations use D to make money with, even if they don't contribute. After all, D is licensed to specifically allow this - I have no business complaining about it.

That's what I meant when I said there were great open source projects like yours. Rust is another one. The energy, spirit of cooperation and welcoming community is a big plus for me. It would be nice if corporations kicked you a few bucks. For the life of me, I can't understand why the 100 millionaires and billionaires at the top of some of these corporations don't donate more.

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

#792

Post by runawaybottle »

deckard1 wrote: post #719
fierarul wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Like which npm package? This would be a great tale to hear :p

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

#793

Post by coward8675309 »

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…

Dear sir or madam,

Thank you very much for your interest in ${PROJECT_NAME}; we’re so happy to hear you find it useful! We offer a variety of extended support options that provide customer support, prioritized bug fixes, and preferential scheduling features on our product roadmap. Below please find our pricing schedule along with links to our store:

...

Regards, ${THE_MANAGEMENT}

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

#794

Post by jabl »

Qwertious wrote: post #450
jabl wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think the first misstep the Free Software movement made was relying on corporate money. Not because "corporations are evil lololol", but because they aren't focused on the what we care about. For instance, when a webpage is bloated with ads/trackers the website itself is usually relatively lightweight, but has to embed ads/trackers to make money, and the ad/tracker companies don't care about the user experience. Fu…

I think you're on to something. We might see a further bifurcation of open source and free software.

Open source will mostly be corporate developers developing OSS on the payroll, where the corporations deem that releasing (some, not all!) software as OSS is better for the bottom line.

Individual developers may release stuff as OSS if they think building an OSS portfolio makes them more employable. Otherwise I think we'll see more, say, "source-available free for non-commercial use" style licenses, because people don't want to be schmucks that are taken advantage of.

Free software will be more clearly focused around trying to drive social change, together with traditional political activism approaches. E.g. right to repair legislation, forcing opening of network protocols so users can access services with their own software and devices, anti-DRM work etc. And as you say, this will clearly be focused on individual computation devices, or small scale servers that individuals can and have a reason to run. That some huge corporation runs or doesn't run free software on their server fleet is irrelevant.

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

#795

Post by jokethrowaway »

WalterSear wrote: post #690
AntiImperialist wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

That's fascinating, I had the opposite experience.

Never once have I been asked which school I went to or anything about my CS degree. I had multiple people contacting me after finding me on Github (and my OSS work is very unpopular and mostly unmaintained) and one of them was a C-Suite who offered me a job.

I never found a job with a recruiter - just networking, so it may be a form of self selection for more personal interactions.

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

#796

Post by outworlder »

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…

I have hired a guy that was applying for his first job at the highest salary we could afford because of his phenomenal open-source contributions. We knew right away that it was a particularly strong candidate. We were right.

Most Github repositories I've seen since then are net negative and it would be better if they hadn't been included at all.

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

#797

Post by allenu »

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 wonder how much of the software pricing side is people not seeing the person working on the software? Maybe we assume all this good software we use is built by some large corporation and so are more likely to not toss them some coin, whereas with buying a coffee or a beer, we actually interact with a human being. (That said, obviously they may themselves work for a big multi-national like Starbucks.)

I wonder if we could ever get to the model where when you pay for an app or service, it's somehow clear that you're funding a individual or small team, to make it more personal.

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

#798

Post by merb »

treis wrote: post #761
nineplay wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He - acknowledges and understands the problems and - could certainly fix them if paid a Google-sized salary But he won't dance to the tune of the "Cracking the Coding Interview" juggernaut so to heck with him. Better to spend time memorizing the Floyd Cycle Detection algorithm than produce useful code. ( OK, I may be a bit bitter )

I mean he says he doesn't really know what a b-tree is. That's a pretty basic data structure and kind of table stakes for being a software engineer. Even then, Google gave him a good look with 7 interviews. Just speculating here, but they probably would have given him a chance if he wasn't "often a dick" and "often difficult".

the only interaction with b-tree's i had was:

CREATE INDEX index ON table (column);

so I doubt the knowledge of b-tree's are that important for 90% of the users/people/developers. heck I know how to write a multipart parser/formatter, which I doubt that many people do. especially people who know how a b-tree works. well most people which do know how a b-tree works, do not know when to use it.

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

#799

Post by yiyus »

Igelau wrote: post #702
yiyus wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that was the terms set The terms do not include free support. Basically, Marak is just saying he won't go back to the vineyard to work for free, but he will if he gets paid a fair salary. Else, the landowner will have to search for new workers.

It's a parable wherein the landowner is the Christian god, the work of the vineyard is the work of his will, and the denarius is salvation. It doesn't have anything to do with people getting paid fairly, it has to do with the Christian god's generosity disrupting notions of fairness.

Sorry, but I don't get your point.

I think that, independently of the original meaning of the parable (which is not at all what we are discussing here), it indeed is a nice example of having to accept the terms you negotiated without looking at what terms others get. I used the same example to explain why I think this situation is a bit different. But it is just an analogy, nobody is claiming this is the right interpretation of the biblical text.

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

#800

Post by WoodenChair »

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 agree with you, but I also feel the entitlement problem goes both ways. Just because you choose to work on an open source project and it becomes popular, it does not mean you are entitled to be paid by the people who use it. If you ultimately want to be paid, don’t spend thousands of hours of your life working on something that has no guarantee of you being paid.
Post reply on HN