
Show HN: Turn GNU command line tools into SaaS – Stupid Hackathon Project - diafygi
https://github.com/diafygi/gnu-pricing
======
diafygi
FYI, the fake announcement post was really fun to write:

\------

$150 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz!

We are extremely excited to announce our new funding from some long time
friends in venture capital, Andreessen Horowitz. They lead a $150 million
dollar private equity round at a $52 billion dollar valuation, which we will
use to start generating revenue and take our software to the next level.

"We've scaled enough. It's time to monetize." -Richard Stallman, Founder, FSF

As part of this deal, we will begin to add per-use fees to many of the popular
GNU software we maintain, such as "ls", "dd", "cat", "grep", and many more.
You can check out our pricing update and documentation on Github. Supported
tools now include a "\--pricing" flag so you can keep track of how much you
owe us. For example, you can type "gcc --pricing" to get the amount you owe
from compiling all those continuous integration deployments.

"GNU is sitting on a hundred billion dollar opportunity, and I'm really
excited they are capitalizing on it." -Sam Altman, YCombinator

Thanks very much to all of our current contributers that have made this step
possible. If it weren't for the hard work of you, we wouldn't be able have
such an incredible position in the market and rich go-to-market strategy. As
part of this fundrasing, we will be setting aside 10% of the investment to
give back to the community that have made us so very, very happy.

"They got embedded in all the huge enterprise companies on the backs of
volunteers! Now they can flip on the revenue stream. I really respect Richard
for his cutthroat business strategy." -Larry Ellison, Oracle

Unfortunately, some long time friends in the Linux community will not be
joining us in our journey, namely the Linux kernel, so we will be using $50
million from this funding to complete the GNU Hurd kernel on an accelerated
timeline so that our current users don't experience any interruption of
service.

\------

[https://diafygi.github.io/gnu-
pricing/website/](https://diafygi.github.io/gnu-pricing/website/)

------
fiatjaf
Finally these GNU guys discovered that the Freemium model is broken. You
should charge high prices, and if your customers are fleeing it is because
you're not charging high enough.

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li-ch
Every 'transaction' should be automatically deducted from user's bitcoin
wallet. Call it GNU Premium.

------
GhotiFish
I really like that one, those tools are so foundational it seems easy to take
it for granted.

How do I confirm that I've paid my due?

~~~
diafygi
The wrapper counts each use of the supported commands. You can see the total
you owe by adding --pricing to any command (e.g. "cat --pricing").

~~~
beering
I think poster wants to be able to let your tool know that the amount has been
paid, which would reset the outstanding balance or something.

~~~
diafygi
Ah. Pull requests welcome!

~~~
hurin
You can verify donations to the FSF Bitcoin address via. user signed message
from the sending address! Also are there nags? There have to be nags.

------
orblivion
Actually yeah this basically crossed my mind as well. I was thinking more that
it should be part of Ubuntu by default. In the traditional market, the loops
of funding things are more or less closed. If you want something you pay for
it and therefore fund it. If it doesn't get enough funding, it's because it's
priced incorrectly, or it's not desired. The Free Software gift economy, for
all its benefits in the area of user freedom, is entirely missing these price
signals. See: Werner Koch. There has to be something to remind us who exactly
we should be paying if we are so inclined.

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toyg
Does it work with scripts as well? E.g. if I run a makefile, will my gcc fees
go through the roof? Maybe it should have safety warnings.

The real killer feature would be a periodic upload of your transaction
database to the cloud. You could call it "OneGNU". The possibilities are
endless.

~~~
diafygi
Yes, it does! This basically overrides the path to the commands and MITMs the
pricing counter.

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jv22222
What I really like about this is, finally we have a way to calculate the
salary of sysops workers.

Run .. gcc --pricing .. once per month and multiply the total by 1000.

It's totally ungameable and measures the direct value each sysops worker
brings to your company.

Genius!

~~~
1_player
Well, a good sysadmin will run gcc once and get a working build, while an
inexperienced one will run it dozens of times because he forgot to install
dependencies and apply patches.

------
moreoverlords
This would be quite funny if it had not been attempted _seriously_ in a major
Gnu project already!

Check out the SHAMELESS Ole Tange and his bizarre attempts to simultaneously
force people to obey academic citations while at the same offering you the
chance to throw the academic process in the bin for a mere 10000 EUR payment
to him.

I wish I was joking. GNU Nagware! It literally nags you with a warning message
every time you use it until you tell it you agree to cite him or pay him 10000
EUR.

I have no idea how the Gnu foundation allows this!

Take a look at
[http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parallel.git/tree/src/paral...](http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parallel.git/tree/src/parallel)

sub bibtex { # Returns: N/A print join("\n", "Academic tradition requires you
to cite works you base your article on.", "When using programs that use GNU
Parallel to process data for publication", "please cite:", "",
"\@article{Tange2011a,", " title = {GNU Parallel - The Command-Line Power
Tool},", " author = {O. Tange},", " address = {Frederiksberg, Denmark},", "
journal = {;login: The USENIX Magazine},", " month = {Feb},", " number =
{1},", " volume = {36},", " url =
{[http://www.gnu.org/s/parallel](http://www.gnu.org/s/parallel)},", " year =
{2011},", " pages = {42-47}", " doi = {10.5281/zenodo.16303}", "}", "", "(Feel
free to use \\\nocite{Tange2011a})", "", "This helps funding further
development; and it won't cost you a cent.", "If you pay 10000 EUR you should
feel free to use GNU Parallel without citing.", "", "If you send a copy of
your published article to tange\@gnu.org, it will be", "mentioned in the
release notes of next version of GNU Parallel.\n\n", ); while(not -e
$ENV{'HOME'}."/.parallel/will-cite") { print "\nType: 'will cite' and press
enter.\n> "; my $input = <STDIN>; if($input =~ /will cite/i) { mkdir
$ENV{'HOME'}."/.parallel"; if(open (my $fh, ">",
$ENV{'HOME'}."/.parallel/will-cite")) { close $fh; print "\nThank you for your
support. It is much appreciated. The citation\n", "notice is now silenced. You
may also use '\--will-cite'.\n", "If you use '\--will-cite' in scripts you are
expected to pay\n", "the 10000 EUR, because you are making it harder to see
the\n", "citation notice.\n\n";

~~~
detaro
Does any distro keep that in their packages?

~~~
gcr
GNU Parallel is a wonderful tool! I use it all the time.

If and when I ever write an academic peer-reviewed paper that heavily relies
on GNU Parallel as part of my data processing pipeline, I'd be happy to give
it a two-line citation. Until that happens, the `--will-cite` flag silences
the error message. So does the patch that disables the message (this is GNU
after all :)

~~~
moreoverlords
Also, do you follow the 'rules'?

==== "If you use '\--will-cite' in scripts you are expected to pay\n", "the
10000 EUR, because you are making it harder to see the\n", "citation notice.
====

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fit2rule
Well joking aside, its funny because things really used to be this way -
sessions/jobs were an invoice line-item, but .. kidding aside - if one tried
to practically apply such follies - I think this might be another place that
Bitcoin - and micro-transactions - would be useful.

I'd be quite happy to lend my CPU to appservers, knowing it was going to have
transactions in my favour somehow.

So maybe there will be a Linux distro that plugs into Ethereum, somehow? Or
hell, containers, sorry pardon me ..

------
formulaT
I never quite got why it's ok for the stupid hackathon projects to be
negative, demeaning, and have NSFW content, even though these things are
completely verboten in every other tech event. Is there some kind of
certification[0] that the hackathon organizers got to be allowed to do this?

EDIT:

[0] What I meant was that it is as if organizations like this hackathon have
some kind of certification that allows them to have this kind of content,
without being attacked by the social justice movement. E.g. if Microsoft had
sexual content at one of its conferences, or organized a "fun" conference with
sexual content, they would be immediately attacked and forced to apologize. My
claim is that having progressive politics and being implicitly endorsed by the
progressive community, acts like a kind of certification.

~~~
GuamPirate
How is this any of negative, demeaning, or NSFW?

~~~
formulaT
see [http://stupidhackathon.github.io/](http://stupidhackathon.github.io/) and
[http://www.stupidhackathon.com/](http://www.stupidhackathon.com/) and also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9521510](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9521510)

~~~
davidgerard
Given the comment you've just linked there leads with "This hackathon is a
good example of the hypocrisy of the progressive movement", and you think
"hackathon" is some sort of brand name requiring certification ... I urge you
to consider the possibility that the problem lies not in the rest of the world
outside yourself.

~~~
formulaT
See my footnote at the start of this thread. And please stop progressive-
splaining to me.

~~~
angersock
"progressive-splaining* means what, exactly? I have a similar issue with the
misused _mansplaining_ , for what it's worth.

~~~
davidgerard
Please don't feed the sincerely querulous poster.

~~~
formulaT
_When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g.
"That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."_

