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

91–100 of 966 posts

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

#91

Post by krasin »

3pt14159 wrote: post #63
ganafagol wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your sentiment, but this is not the right reaction. It won't improve anything. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? You are free to adjust the license to prevent this. But then tomorrow everybody comes and rants about that the GPL is too restrictive. That's the price we pay for this. It's the license that keeps…

I don't want GPL. I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That's it. That's all I want. MIT-Billionaires. Want to take funding from A16Z? That's a million a year for the license or something that maybe scales with a market cap just to level the playing field between a funded startup and Apple Computers. Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don…

Unreal Engine license is along these lines: it's free if you are small / no significant revenue, and it's 5% of your revenue otherwise.

That said, not every shared-sources project would be used, if its license requires to pay royalty.

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

#92

Post by MildlySerious »

ganafagol wrote: post #39
gkoberger wrote: post #31

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…

Please stop painting open source as a donation-based development model. That's completely distorting what it is about.

One size does not fit all. It's good that OSS exists, as is the case for public domain work.

But it's only natural that there is only so much goodwill in a person when their work is used by billion dollar companies that enrich a select few and can't even pay their employees fair wages, let alone share their success with those whose work it is built upon.

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

#94

Post by ricardobeat »

gkoberger wrote: post #31

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…

BountySource did this. It failed.

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

#95

Post by waynesonfire »

echelon wrote: post #21

Seriously. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? Apple is telling us we can't run our own software on their goddamned devices, yet they built their empire on open source. Look at Facebook, Google, Amazon. They've extracted all the blood they can and given us back scraps. AWS is repackaged software you pay more for. Yes, it's…

> if companies just steal it

just like how biden stole the election? how is using the software stealing when it's used as licensed?

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

#96

Post by orangeshark »

SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #29
ganafagol wrote: post #20

You sir have misunderstood the concept of open source software. As an open source author or maintainer you don't do the work for others and then expect some kind of compensation. The idea instead is to do the work that you would have done anyway because somebody else paid you or because you did it for fun, and then you publish it to use the community to help you fix issues. A philantropic motivation is nice but not n…

Open Source has nothing to do with Free Software. There is a plenty of OSS products which are not free to use.

Free Software doesn't have to be free to use either (free as in free beer).

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

#97

Post by llaolleh »

diordiderot wrote: post #86
tlarkworthy wrote: post #25

I am not religious but labourers in the vineyard stuck with me from school: The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. 10 So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. 11 When they received it, they began to grumble(D) against the landowner. 12 ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they…

Making an ethical judgment based on religious text is a serious folly.

Yeah but there are some timeless truths in many religious texts. This one seems to be applicable.

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

#98

Post by Robin_Message »

gkoberger wrote: post #54
ganafagol wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop painting open source as a donation-based development model. That's completely distorting what it is about.

Okay? This particular project is soliciting donations: “Support us with a monthly donation and help us continue our activities.” I’m not really sure what your point is, because you never actually made one. You just said I was wrong.

One issue is that donations implicitly promote a cost-plus pricing model (I'd like to earn 10k a year doing open source, so that's how many donations I need to fund me working on this).

Whereas something like dual-licensing promotes a value-based pricing model (our fortune 500 doesn't need to pay 5 engineers for a year to build and maintain this distributed system; we would happily pay equivalent of an engineer per year for that.)

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

#99

Post by unishark »

shermanmccoy wrote: post #49

I think people initially work on some of these projects, at least in part, to beef up their CV and make themselves more hirable. Every second tech job advertisement these days brainlessly asks you about your 'open source contributions'.

Yes I've always found this off-putting. People in HR departments are literally earning six figure salaries in return for making job ads advising people to do a bunch of unpaid labor which, by the way, the company benefits from.

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

#100

Post by fabianhjr »

neltnerb wrote: post #76
MaximumYComb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Australia the streaming options for music/video are better than our previous options for CD's/cable. A three month subscription to Spotify costs less than a single album would cost me 20 years ago.... not even account for inflation. A monthly Netflix subscription is 20% of the price that cable would cost here 5 years ago.

You might honestly be right, for anyone who expects to buy five albums a year. The downside being that all the music you've "bought" might just disappear if the service goes down. It might be worth it, but the best of both worlds would be nice. I'm not sure what that should be, but unlimited local copies of everything for a small amount of money doesn't sound fair -- but Spotify hardly deserves a big cut of it either…

It already exists on both fronts: stream2own and a cooperative.

https://resonate.is/

Post reply on HN