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

831–840 of 966 posts

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

#831

Post by gogopuppygogo »

StavrosK wrote: post #269
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like a catch-22 though. If I start a company using open source and must give away the software I then build on top of it as open source then I likely fail to capture revenues and my company fails. What would be a nice option in GPL 4 is a mandatory commercial licensing fee structure to pay either to author of software or to EFF / FSF if the author doesn’t provide payment details. That would give a commercial inc…

> It’s like a catch-22 though. If I start a company using open source and must give away the software I then build on top of it as open source then I likely fail to capture revenues and my company fails. How is that the open source author's problem? Open source is meant to enable user freedom, not to save corporations money. If you want to use something, contact the author and get a commercial license.

It's a problem for the community that it still creates no long term motive for people to invest in the code. There needs to be sustainability (profits) that funnel back into the community somehow.

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

#832

Post by I-M-S »

leib wrote: post #711
Igelau wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Flattery gets you far, bribery gets you farther

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

#833

Post by BoorishBears »

salamimonger wrote: post #814
BoorishBears wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sp…

You're clearly missing the point, if you've read so many of my comments then you've seen my point about the raspberry pi...

The point is laypeople don't know what bombs or basic electronics look like. And why should they when there are pictures of TV shows using CPU coolers to represent bombs and computer power supplies to represent hard drives?

> Anyone who actually takes a look at the photos of what the "clock" looks like will immediately think it looks like a bomb

Kind of makes my point. You realize the thing was in a pencil box, not some full size briefcase? The most common image used:

https://media.shellypalmer.com/wp-content/images/2015/09/ahm...

doesn't actually convey the actual scale of it, the thing was barely larger than the original alarm and maybe an inch thick.

If you found this in a train unattended it'd be one thing, but the student says it's an alarm clock, anyone with a modicum of electronics knowledge would immediately look at it and say "yes that's an alarm clock". Which is exactly what both teachers did.

No one ever thought it was an actual bomb, the confusion was the intent behind it since Texas has a law about hoax bombs that treats them seriously based on intent not just appearance.

-

And more generally I bring it up because it should show, laypeople are easy to convince of guilt if your standards are literally adding "allegedly" to every claim.

People in general are vastly overestimate their own reliability and underestimate their suggestibility. It takes a few weasel words to fool people into creating alternate realities so far and away from reality they almost seem absurd compared to the truth, yet they're absolutely convicted about them.

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

#834

Post by carapace »

jabl wrote: post #786
carapace wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "business-friendly" open source movement co-opted the idealistic free software movement. Yeah, this. To me, as an admitted Free software person, the Open software movement looks like it was designed to undermine the Free movement. I don't think it actually was deliberately designed that way, just that it looks that way in hindsight. I also don't really get the point of Open licenses because you could always alr…

> To me, as an admitted Free software person, the Open software movement looks like it was designed to undermine the Free movement. I don't think it actually was deliberately designed that way, just that it looks that way in hindsight. Yes. I think the original idea was just to present the hippy free software idea in a more business-friendly form, and thus cause more FOSS to be written. > > idea of causing social cha…

Yeah, I agree with you.

It's hard to avoid feeling like the free software movement has failed pretty comprehensively at its stated goals.

For me, as a computer nerd, it's always been hard to understand why normal people aren't fascinated by computers like I am, but the plain fact is they're not. Something like two billion people think facebook is the internet, eh? Everyone has a radio-connected supercomputer in their pockets but it's a locked-down mall and video game arcade, and that seems to be all most people want.

I try not to think about it too much. Maybe this is the shape of human destiny? To be cells in some vast AI body?

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

#835

Post by gtsop »

carapace wrote: post #672
gtsop wrote: post #574

There a couple of categories of comments on this thread that I think are missleading. 1) Judging the author's decision based on his previous behaviour or current speculation over his situation 2) Judging the author's decision to write OS and "demand" to be paid. Both categories, imho, are missleading the real issue at hand which is this: We, as developers, as companies and as a society, who decided to depend uppon on…

You know the Bash shell is maintained by a single unpaid volunteer? He also maintains the GNU readline library.

What is your point? He can maintain it without pay. Good for him, good for us, good for all. This case is different.

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

#836

Post by growse »

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".

> That's a pretty basic data structure and kind of table stakes for being a software engineer.

It really isn't. You don't need to know what a b-tree is to do most modern software engineering.

> 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".

I think you're right on this one.

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

#837

Post by tomcam »

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…

i could be wrong here but I'm sensing a theme

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

#838

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

allenu wrote: post #737
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 just released an app in Apple's app store a week ago and am seeing this attitude as well. I'm charging for it and don't provide a trial since I think it's worth the price for what you get (maybe even priced too low). A few people immediately ask if I'm planning on open sourcing it or else act disappointed that it's not open source/free. It's frustrating to work on something and have somebody just come along and say…

Source availability and pricing are orthogonal. The most famous example is Doom: it's open source but the game is shareware.

Many people believe that modern software places too many unreasonable restrictions on end-users. I should be able to modify any of the software running on personal devices for my own purposes, at the very least. It's frustrating that I would typically have to use a disassembler instead of getting to directly tweak the source code.

Going back to the artist example: it's akin to buying a poster which says that it must be placed on a wall facing a specific direction, at a specific height, with a specific axial tilt, and that it only be illuminated by natural sunlight. But I just want the poster because I really love a specific section. Once I get home, my scissors go to town on the poster, allowing me to only retain the parts I loved. Then I glue it to a circular sheet of metal and I hang it from the ceiling! I'm quite content to recognize the artist's work in crafting the poster and compensate him fairly. But find his list of restrictions on how it should be used to be utterly absurd, and since it's my poster I do whatever I want with it at home.

Here's the thing: given all the restrictions which you place on your app, it absolutely has to justify its price tag because, even if they have the knowledge and skills to do so, the end-user can't fix the bugs you missed nor tweak it to suit their specific needs. Even if you manage to get 95% of the way there with your app, if that final 5% is really crucial and the end-user has no way of closing the gap, then it doesn't make much sense to invest one's limited capital on something that leaves their problem unresolved.

I've bought open source software in the past and will continue to do so in the future.

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

#839

Post by salamimonger »

BoorishBears wrote: post #833
salamimonger wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sp…

You're clearly missing the point, if you've read so many of my comments then you've seen my point about the raspberry pi... The point is laypeople don't know what bombs or basic electronics look like. And why should they when there are pictures of TV shows using CPU coolers to represent bombs and computer power supplies to represent hard drives ? > Anyone who actually takes a look at the photos of what the "clock" lo…

See, here's the thing. If I make comments implicitly about going to shoot up the neighborhood school, even though I didn't do it yet, do you presume me innocent and leave me alone? No, it's going to be investigated and I'll likely get a nice greeting from some men in black soon after.

This wasn't some genius, novel clock that kid invented. He put the internals of a clock into a very specific kind of pencil case to bring around school to show people until it was confiscated by a teacher due to the very fact that it looked like a bomb. So don't tell me that no one thought it was an actual bomb. That doesn't matter. It's not the best example for what you want to say about presumption of innocence - which I agree with you on by the way.

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

#840

Post by orthecreedence »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #824
orthecreedence wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Why would I bother publishing it or creating it? I'm well fed and I don't need to sell myself.

Your only motivation in life is making enough money to meet your basic needs?
Post reply on HN