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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

#871
post #652

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…

The other option is: Pick any of the above licenses and don't tie your entire financial identity to this thing. I think its a legitimately weird thing specific to software where people release something interesting as open source and free, it gets used, they feel an obligation to make building it their job, and then they feel anger when they don't make money from it. I understand the feeling of being slighted when th…

> One where people contribute code instead of money and its supported by its users in that way?

I suspect this is really hard to do. You can get contributions now and then, but to get someone to take long term ownership is hard.

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

#872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citizens of rich oil sheikhdoms in the Gulf have had de-facto UBI, and a high one, for a long time, even though the formalities were a bit muddled. In practice, if you were lucky enough to be born as a Saudi or Qatari citizen, your needs would be covered. It did not lead to any explosion of creativity, arts and science there. People are morbidly obese and spend their money on gambling, drugs and sex. I am not very op…

Capitalism + UBI = still capitalism. Of course people are fat and lazy, there's an entire economic apparatus convincing them to be. This is why I prefaced the entire point with "abolish capitalism." If you were financially independent, what would you do or build? I know I'd never stop producing useful things.

I don't know whether you should be so sure that you're not mixing up cause and effect here. It might as well be that we have the economic apparatus because people naturally gravitate towards becoming fat and lazy. Or, most likely, both options are true to some degree.

> I know I'd never stop producing useful things.

I think few people are this driven.

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

#873
post #641

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…

So the plan is to abandon the project? It will work some individuals, but we need something more sustainable for the industry.

If your finances are not in order, you can't be worrying about sustainability of some library or tool, or the industry for that matter. The industry is made out of people. If there are individuals who have to slave away to maintain an important tool or library, it's not going to be sustainable either.

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

#874

I think this is fair for him to do, and well within his rights. He’s clearly frustrated. 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. I feel like open source would have more luck if Issues could have attached bounties. I may not think to donate to faker.js, however as someone with access t…

I ran out of TV to watch months ago and have been working my way down Youtube videos. Several people I follow have a call in their video to "donate to help protect our independence," and I think maybe we need to call that out more. If you don't pay for this video, then either there is no video, or advertisers pay, and advertisers want something in return that is probably not in your best interests. I'm not sure wheth…

> been working my way down Youtube videos. ... If you don't pay for this video, then either there is no video, or advertisers pay

Youtube Premium which helps pay for videos is right here:

https://www.youtube.com/premium

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

#875

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'.

I think it's a part of a bigger problem I see. People are hung up on where they want to work. If you HAVE TO work for certain companies, and you want your finances in order, you're doing it wrong. Priorities!

Also, you don't need most companies or all companies to value your open source project. You need one.

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

#876
post #288

> Seriously. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? I work on pg8000 https://github.com/tlocke/pg8000 which is used by Amazon, Google etc. I'd argue that pg8000 and any Open Source software doesn't give them a competitive advantage, because in order to have a competitive advantage you have to have something that your competito…

How is the Web a centralized architecture ??

In a URL, say https://www.example.com/ a particular location is specified for the content. In contrast, with a decentralized system a hash of the content would be used to find the actual content, so-called content-addressable. See https://ipfs.io for more info.

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

#877

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean if we're sharing stories: "I started a project to learn javascript and node.js through rap," Nodejitsu co- founder and New York expat Marak Squires" I think he is terrible at being frugal, spent all his money, and is now begging for handouts.

Starting a company doesn't make one rich. There's no evidence he had any significant money to spend. In fact, it's likely the founders got nothing after the VCs were paid off.

He's reported as being an early bitcoin investor too, so your point might stand ignoring every opportunity this guy had, and every privilege. Ask your average inhabitant of Queens how much their last startup sold for, or how much they made off of Bitcoin. Otherwise not so much.

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

#878

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone running at you with a knife? Where the hell does public opinion come into it? Look, you decided to build your entire argument on this extreme form of innocent-until-proven-guilty-nonsense. So I took an extreme example to demonstrate to you that your position was too strong. Let me try to explain in more detail: if you must assume that "everyone is innocent" until they are proven guilty in a court of law, th…

> Look, you decided to build your entire argument on this extreme form of innocent-until-proven-guilty-nonsense. This is complete and utter nonsense. In your own damn comment you're saying: "For what it's worth, I think the most likely explanation for the stuff found is that he was geeking out some harmless experiments." In your own goddamn comment you're saying your primary thought is this was innocent experimentati…

> Your entire comment is essentially "I have no objection to anything you actually said I said but I still want to build a strawman to tear down"

I laid out very specific objections to very specific claims made by you. In particular, I used the knife attack example to demonstrate that - contrary to what you claimed - "innocent until proven guilty" is not an obligation that people must apply to their thoughts and opinions. And I very specifically asked "If you still disagree, please explain how this obligation should work out in the context of the knifeman attack." Based on your tone I get the impression you're still holding on to your extreme belief about "innocent until proven guilty", but you're not willing to reconcile it with this example. Instead, you're trying to weasel out with vague claims about strawmanning. You know, if someone actually was strawmanning, you would be able to point out how the strawman is different from the actual argument presented. In this case you don't even attempt to do that, because there is no strawman, you were very clear that people have an obligation to assume everyone is innocent until proven guilty (in their thoughts and opinions, at all times).

Since you're not willing to address the claim you made in the context of my example which clearly demonstrates that your claim was nonsensical, there's no point in continuing this conversation beyond this.

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

#879

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'.

> No interviewer has demonstrated anything but perfunctory interest in my open source work, popular or not.

In he past when I did candidate screening I used floss work extensively to evaluate a candidate. To me, personal projects are an excellent way to assess skillsets at multiple levels.

Perhaps you've been interviewed by people who place a greater focus on soft skills, or HR headhunters who can only read CVs?

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

#880
post #229

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…

5. Do nothing. - Die poor

6. Quit IT, buy a farm

  - Get crushed by the market
  
  - Die poor
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