Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

811–820 of 966 posts

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

#811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, original author of the Peer Production license here. AMA

Hi Dmytri, in your work you mentioned that PPL isn't intended for software. (As it is based on CC-BY-NC-SA which is also not intended for software) Do you have licensing recommendations for software along the lines of copyfair/copyfarleft?

For the most part the PPL is intended for consumer information commodities, this could be software, but not captial information comodities like server software or programming languages, but rather books, movies, video games, end-user consumer desktop top software, etc.

For capital information goods I recommend the GPL, or even BSD style licenses depending on what it is and who is making it and what their plan is.

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

#812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah well, just saw the house fire tweet and sent him a few bucks. Guess I'm on one more list now. There seem to be a few articles that are at least not half filled with the ramblings of an elderly neighbour: https://www.qgazette.com/articles/more-charges-possible-for-... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8737513/NYPD-discov... https://abc7ny.com/suspicious-package-queens-astoria-fire/64... Emotional distress se…

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.

I am deeply involved in the same open source communities he’s in and got a bunch of texts when he was arrested because none of us were surprised

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

#813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the mainstream internet is the nasty place. The "old" Internet is still out there, at places like https://tilde.town .

I would like the spirit of the old internet with modern graphics. I don't understand why sites like that need to look like they're from the 90s.

> I don't understand why sites like that need to look like they're from the 90s.

Nostalgia and signalling (that leverages said nostalgia), basically.

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

#814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The reason why presumption of innocence is so important is, you don't need a smoke bomb making materials to get the public to think someone is a bomb maker. Are we forgetting the time a splayed out alarm clock became a national scandal? You could go into someone's home, pull out a Raspberry PI and some loose jumpers and hold up something that the average citizen thinks of as proof this person is some sort of mainfram…

You've made the point about the clock several times, but it's kind of dishonest. Anyone who actually takes a look at the photos of what the "clock" looks like will immediately think it looks like a bomb. Now imagine ANYone, literally anyone, doesn't matter what race or what skin color, taking that around school and showing it off to teachers or other random people who won't know any better when they see it and get spooked, and for good reason. It could've been the last thing they ever see. They are lucky it was just some kid's joke clock this time.

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

#815
post #545

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.

Apple and NVIDIA are excruciatingly unpopular amount the "techie" crowd precisely for choosing proprietary licenses and closed, proprietary environments. Every single time they are brought up you can be guaranteed a screed about how Linus gave NVIDIA the finger that one time, or people don't like the extent to which NVIDIA supports Wayland (which is not zero!).

People absolutely do not accept the explanation that these companies are businesses that spend R&D money developing novel hardware and software and won't immediately race to interoperate with copycat standards from competitors who want to leech off that R&D once it's proven commercially viable. Nor do they have to expand the scope of their work to implement that one feature 0.1% of users want, nor are they obligated to open things up to allow you to implement the things they won't. And nor are you obligated to use their product if you don't find it satisfactory.

I guess it really goes to show how much Copyleft has won the war that people are immediately hostile to proprietary licenses today, particularly in consumer-facing technology. Oddly this does not seem to apply to more industrial or embedded use-cases, you don't see anyone ranting about the awful proprietary Xilinx toolchain or Broadcom's awful binary SOC blobs any time those products are brought up. But then again it does apply to software APIs and such?

It's probably not unfair to say that "anything I use should be free and open but also enough people should pay me that I should be able to make a living" is not an unfair characterization here. Everyone wants nice things, they don't want to pay for them. That's why gmail and Windows 10 and other spyware-funded services are so popular.

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

#816

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.

I imagine you would feel differently, if you were right at the threshold where doing a good job requires all your efforts, where people rely on your work, but where you can't pay your bills that way.

A lot of good projects are getting stuck in that rut, and it behooves us to find ways to get them through it.

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

#817
post #757
post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes! That's a good idea, feature and customization based Pricing. Just imagine Linus would be such a winy Rumpelstiltskin...well he is, but not a winy one ;) BTW: Whats with the 211 others that help him?

The person who does the work gets paid. Each feature request could have a optional bounty against it.

If they're doing work for their own enjoyment, why should they complain?

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

#818

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 would agree to most of those conclusions. If a project is created as a recreational activity, as something a person is doing because they enjoy programming and is filling a personal need, then that is the payment in itself. Recreational activities may be identical with professional activity in terms of code, and some people can turn an recreational project into their way of earning a living. If it however stop being recreational then forcing yourself to do it would just be working for free unless you convert into getting paid as an professional.

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

#819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My claim was a response to an assertion which has now been edited, so... meh. You win teh Internets.

> My claim was a response to an assertion which has now been edited, so... This is certainly something I sometimes do, but not here. What are you talking about?

Weirdly, at one point, your reply no longer seemed to contain the phrase "term of art." It's back now; I must have been mistaken about the initial change, since you'd have had to edit it well after the expiration period.

In any case, "open source" isn't a term of art. It did not originate with ESR or with anyone else in the software development field, so it means whatever anyone wants it to mean.

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

#820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a term of art, it's someone's opinion. "Open source" means whatever I say it does, whatever you say it does, whatever Apple says it does, whatever ESR says it does, and whatever RMS says it does.

No, the OSI has precedence: https://opensource.org/history

No, it doesn't. Just saying something doesn't make it so. Trying to enforce a trademark on "Open Source" as a development methodology would be good for a few laughs in a courtroom, but that's it.
Post reply on HN