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 nobody sees it.
- Die poor
3. Release it under a commercial license and:
- Get bashed on HN for doing so
- Nobody uses it
- Probably die poor
4. Dual license it as GPL and commercial and:
- Sue everybody as they are just taking the GPL version and never looking back. Especially if they can hide it somewhere.
- Die poor
That's because you need to understand the difference between a project and a product.
If you want your product to succeed, it must target decision-makers with a budget to buy your license, and it must make enough difference to them to justify the costs.
Most software libraries aren't products. They target other software developers who are not responsible for allocating funds. Furthermore, if there wasn't a library, most devs would absolutely love writing one ad hoc. Their salary would remain the same, had they been solving the problem from scratch (which most of us love doing) or adopting an existing one. It's the business people that would feel the difference, but business people don't understand the specifics of libraries. And they hate integrating closed-source parts into their codebase because it comes with tremendous risks should the vendor go belly up.
What could sell is a higher-level product that would automate boring/repetitive tasks that everyone hates. Like a GUI designer for some boilerplate stuff that everyone codes by hand (mind you many people like coding by hand, but some hate it and they will buy your GUI).
Your product can also be your consulting business. Don't add stuff based on everybody's requests for free. Make it open-source, welcome contributions, but if someone wants some specific stuff, give them a quote. From time to time, add commonly requested parts and write articles explaining how they work to gain visibility. You will have to deal with lots of entitled assholes, but you will also find people willing to pay you.
You're right, of course. But I am so, so tired of having to "sell" over and over just to have the value of my contributions recognized. And I think gp would agree.
The poster, marak, is a founder [0]. They definitely understand product-ization. Yet two weeks ago they suffered an apartment fire and have been struggling to keep a roof over their head [1].
I can definitely understand the kind of bitterness that comes out of going through something like that only to realize how little the fellow humans around you really value you. Realizing that for all the positive signals (such as "popularity") you received before, precious few are willing to actually put resources on the line for you.
So, I think gp and marak aren't coming from a place of misunderstanding the world as it is, but rather a depressing understanding of our world.
Imagine, if you can, a much different world. A world where helping or recognizing the efforts of others meaningfully didn't put you worse off. A world where your quality of life wasn't determined by your ability to take more than you give (or to have started off with enough resources that you can afford to give more than you take).
Once you really see what could be, I think it's difficult to suffer what is.
I wonder if this is advoidable by realizing what the popularity is actually for? It's not like it's for them personally it's for the fact that it's free and available. I feel like these values will always tend to conflict. I.e open source / free software and making money. They are opposed ideas in many ways.
I highly recommend not letting your personal happiness and feelings of success being controlled by random strangers on the internet. Getting approval from random strangers on the internet is fast food not real food.
Free exchange is a positive sum game when it is truly free. But if one party has significantly more leverage (like an employer or a landlord), that is no longer guaranteed.
That's assuming he could pay for a plan that covered his assets. I'm guessing that since he said "apartment" that he is renting, and the owners probably only cover the structure with their insurance and not the contents of said apartment.
This comment is golden! Most qualms on indie hackers and similar sites could be quickly settled with this line of reasoning. Not growing fast enough? -> buy ads -> "but I don't make enough money to spend on ads" -> is it really a product then? -> etc...
It's always blown me away (as a person of average intelligence relative to many on HN) that brilliant people who can actually conjure up entire libraries, frameworks etc fall short when it comes to understanding how to convert code into $$$ or anticipating how users will see the same concepts.
Creating a software program is only 10% of the work. The rest is marketing, promotion, sales, support, accounting, paying taxes, attending conferences, creating manuals and videos, etc.
Most developers fail because they stop after getting the program to work.
"Build it and they will come" is a stupid Hollywood myth.
There's a lot of the mentality of OSS where the project creator releases it permissively, and is fine with many little guys (who otherwise wouldn't have paid for an equivalent library) using it. Then as they get traction, a big company who _could_ afford to pay also benefits from said project, and the creator is whinging that they don't get paid by the big company - with the reason that the company _could_ pay, that's why they should.
yet, that's an entirely fair stance. The little guys, not having created the mechanism for value capture that the company has, are likely contributing to the ecosystem (or at least are active components of the ecosystem). the corporation, on the other hand, has ensured that they capture and process value such that they enjoy exclusive benefit from their output.
it's not unreasonable for an individual to decide that contributions to other open source developers are good, and contributions to a black hole are bad.
if you decide you don't want me to benefit from your work without profiting you, then you have to pay me for mine. if you want to play nice, then I'm willing to play nice, too.
Exactly. It's astonishing how little people understand this and just go post a rant about the big evil corporation not paying the little open source coder for their work.
It's all in the license(s). Make one that's fine for trials and other open source hackers, but draconian for proprietary commercialization, and another one for productization so that big corp pays you. That's it.
And if you don't care about the money aspect since open sourcing was never a way for you to make money anyway, then go with a single permissive license and be happy that your code gets widely used and hopefully contributed to.
If that scheme of dual-licensing with (A)GPL and commercial did actually work out in reality, we probably wouldn't have the precedent of MongoDB dropping AGPL in favor of their own SSPL.
You are explaining how a person can deal with the world as it is. But if you think of yourself as a builder, then you really ought to know better than to accept the world as it is.
Are there probably choices available to a skilled software developer where they could make more money than just working on something that they love and that provides value to the world? Sure. But why is that an acceptable world to live in?
If a work adds value to the world, shouldn't the worker rightly feel entitled to just compensation? Sure, not everything in the world is as it should be, and as a responsible adult the worker may have to deal with that, they can't just sit around whining about not getting their fair share and expect everyone else to solve their problems for them.
But are YOU someone who sees problems in the world and says "yep, that's how it is, deal with it, not my problem"? Or are you someone who sees problems in the world as something to be fixed?
I am a pragmatist that is accustomed to the physical, mathematical and social constraints of the world. One big constraint is the average attention span of your target audience. Do you have time to care whether a guy designing/manufacturing that USB cable on your desk got compensated well? Or the one making your clothes? Or cleaning the corporate toilet? You know, unless you have sewed your shirt yourself, it was probably made a by a person in a less developed country earning about $1 per hour [0].
The thing is, we physically don't have time to look at every situation from every stakeholder's perspective. There are just not enough hours in the day. Like it or not, that's a pretty hard constraint and there's no better way around it than understanding marketing and product management.
So ultimately, it boils down to:
* Strategy A that gives you a 10% chance of outperforming your corporate salary and 90% chance of getting bored and getting back to your 9-to-5.
* Strategy B that gives you a 0.2% chance of changing the world, 49.9% chance of giving up and another 49.9% chance of seriously burning out and getting into depression. The actual world-changing chance is likely even lower. You can guesstimate it by dividing the number of Linus Tordvaldses by the number of Github users with 1 or more repository.
Mind you, strategy A requires a lot of trial-and-error while learning how to do business (and getting burned multiple times), while the strategy B is about just doing what you like do and hoping that it will somehow bring the desired outcome. So please, please, please, be honest with yourself about wanting to change the world vs. just wanting to keep is as a stress-free hobby vs getting face-in-the-mud while learning an orthogonal skillset.
Sure, there aren't enough hours in the day for every person to fix every problem in the world. There are also not enough hours in the day to say everything worth saying about every topic on every forum on the Internet.
But you took time out of your busy day to comment on this thread, out of all the threads on the Internet, about this problem, out of all the problems in the world. You even came back and replied to me.
I am not suggesting you spend every waking moment of your life trying to solve every problem in the world. I am suggesting you divert a portion of the time that you're currently spending on advising people on how to live in this world, and instead spend just a little of it on thinking about how to build a better one.
while the strategy B is about just doing what you like do and hoping that it will somehow bring the desired outcome
Really? The only other option besides accepting the world as it is, is to do what you like and hope that the world changes to your liking, entirely on its own? You can't think of any other options?
I would say a lot of the constraints are more based on the incentives given by our economic system, which naturally aren't necessarily fixed either, but pretty hard to change
The problem is 'feeling entitled to just compensation'; it is not a good concept. Lets imagine you favourite fast-food joint offers all menu items for 1cent. Then one week later they ask for more money, because:'If a work adds value to the world, shouldn't the worker rightly feel entitled to just compensation". And lets not make it about the company, lets say it has to close down and leave the workers unemployed if people dont chip in. Do you really think they should be entitled? What about if they gave away the stuff for 0 cents, any difference?
I have no idea what you're saying. Surely you're not saying "we all agree fast food workers don't deserve to be paid, therefore software developers don't deserve to be paid either"?
Of course fast food workers should feel entitled to be paid for their work, and fast food joints should feel entitled to charge money for the items on their menu. What?
No I an saying, if people or companies give away stuff for (almost) free and other people take that, the entities which gave that away are in no way entitled to get more compensation afterwards. I think it is so obvious that it might be confusing.
If you make bad business decisions it is your decision. Because the only way to do price finding is to make an offer and have customers accept it. If the price is low more customers accept it. This doesnt mean at a higher price they would have done the same. So selling with a low (or free) price does not give you any moral rights later to say it was too low, give me more.
Because the only way to do price finding is to make an offer and have customers accept it. [...] So selling with a low (or free) price does not give you any moral rights later to say it was too low, give me more.
You're thinking of this in a very narrow way.
If I tell you "here, have this for free, no strings attached", and then after you use it, I jump out of the bushes and say "hey! That thing had value! You're morally obligated to pay me!", of course you are under no such obligation. That seems to be the situation you're thinking of.
What if you open your imagination a bit? What if I say, "if I tried to maximize the amount of money I made, I would have to price out people who wouldn't be able to pay anyway and their lives would be better off being able to use what I built. I don't care about maximizing the amount of money I can make, I'd just like fair compensation, so instead of setting a specific price I just ask you to 'tip' a fair amount if you can."
Am I "morally entitled" to any specific amount of money, if I didn't set a specific price? Not really, no. But it's not like I'm saying "please, have this for free, I don't want anything back, seriously", instead I'm saying "I would like something back, but I'm trusting you to decide on a fair amount".
Here's the more interesting question: if you're not obligated to pay a specific amount, can such a "trust" system work? Can I get fair compensation, and still allow anyone who wants to be able to use my work?
As it stands today, in most cases, probably not. But open your imagination a little. Can it be made to work? Can there be public pressure on major companies to contribute to TideLift and/or OpenCollective? Maybe non-commercial source-available licenses, which still contribute to The Commons, even if they're not the traditional understanding of "open source"?
I fully agree. Yes, I read the post like the situation you described I am thinking of. Was it different, actually?
About if the first approach can work: maybe. For the companies I know it would be very difficult to donate money. First from what budget, then I am not sure if such donations can be tax deducted, then there is always the thing if you give money to a person how do you distinguish this from hiring the person (oral employment contracts are legal), so authorities might be interested if you circumvent labor laws. So this support has to come from the top of the company. I think paying for bugfixes/features might be much easier and cleaner for companies (still takes 6 month to get him as a contractor into the ERP system)
There seems to be working examples for 'pay what you like' restaurant, but there might be much bigger social pressure.
There is room for debate about how clear or strong the expectation of compensation was, but at least we can agree it wasn't 100% on the far extreme of "here, have this for free, I'm not expecting anything at all in return", and then going back on their word afterwards.
can donations be tax deducted ... labor laws ...
Interesting points. I think one of the ideas of the Open Source Collective as a 501(c)(6) non-profit is to provide more of that kind of legal certainty (donations aren't deductible as a charitable contribution, but may be deductible as a business expense). I wonder if it works?
Yeah, it's possible social pressure has the potential to be effective, although I think it would have to be well-organized, with someone like OpenCollective (or maybe it would be better if it was an independent organization?) that monitors and publicizes which companies are "leeches" making a lot of money off of open source, and which are "good citizens", or something.
The difference with software is, for many reasons users most often need to know the recipe (code), but knowing the recipe is enough to trivially replicate the software for free. And incidentally, that's also the expected mode of acquisition (vs. feature films for instance, which are almost as trivial to copy for free but discouraged culturally).
With physical goods or services, knowing the recipe or at least composition is also often desirable, but the actual product/service itself is hard to replicate and brand inertia is heavier.
I believe some small changes in the delivery methods associated with a decent cultural shift could bring open-source software development into a position more similar to older creative professions. For instance, stronger security concerns could incentivize users to subscribe to privileged, paid update channels directly from the developers (like done by Unreal Engine or the TradingView charting library).
This is how we framed it at browserless.io. Libraries generally aren't a product, and even though some of them do a lot, it's hard to charge folks for an `npm i`-style product. I tried a lot to look into this and it just didn't pan out. I think there's an opportunity for a library marketplace that does all of the curation, security checks, and other validation as it would provide a lot of value to organizations so they don't have to build all this themselves. Seems like all of this already exists, just not in a concise package.
On that, I feel like docker could provide a much much better storefront, and charge folks for their packages, but just hasn't. Did you even know they had a store? That's what their hub is supposed to be, but they don't charge for anything! How great would it be if they built out a marketplace?! This has even more potential, IMO, since images are generally a whole service and not just a library.
The opportunity and value definitely are there, and the need is there, it's just not something that anyone has tackled in a way that makes sense with software.
You are correct but so is the parent of your post, the key term they used is "generally" and I would say that is a correct observation. General problem libraries tend to not sell. There are specialty markets where one can make money from licencing libraries or frameworks as you highlighted game/cinematic there is also some areas in medical and legal but for the most part if one is building a general purpose library or one that appeals to a broad market, they tend to not be commercially viable. Those that provide specific solutions for a vertical tend to have more success in commercial licencing.
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 there are billion dollar corporations using your software, but it was also a situation you opted in-to in the first place, with no expectation of reciprocity until now.
I support the idea of asking people to pay for your time. That's totally fair. I think its also a little icky to say "pay me six figures or fork it"; so, is there no intention to actually make this an open source project? One where people contribute code instead of money and its supported by its users in that way? This project has over 100 contributors.
It's an interesting situation. I've often pondered what I would do in this scenario.
I have some hobby projects that I do purely for fun. Feeling an obligation to work on them because other people find them useful would really drain me. The point is to get away from work and rediscover the joy of programming, not add more work on top of work.
I guess I can just keep them private. But if someone really happens to find them useful, I would be happy if they forked them for themselves. Maybe a giant disclaimer at the top of the readme so I'm clear and upfront how the projects will be managed (they won't be).
Regardless, I'm sure it's a problem I'll never have.
5: Don't release the code and sell your product. Taking pride in your work also means valueing it properly.
- 95% chance you die poor. 4.999% chance you make a decent living out of it. 0.0001% chance Facebook buys it for enough money that you can buy your own island on Mars.
The problem here is that selling your closed source project requires a significantly distinct skill set from writing good code. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Venn diagram of a good project and being able to sell the project for a decent living is much smaller than 5%.
You're not making code for the sake of writing 'good code', whatever that means. You're writing code to perform some sort of function. Otherwise it's not something to earn money with, but a nerdy art project.
I should add that I got excited for a moment at the thought of some one-stop shop for sales and marketing for software devs building a product.
But no, just packaging and delivery. Which is cool, and probably useful for some people. But it doesn't help address the biggest weak spot for solo devs, or small teams: sales and marketing.
Back in the days before the internet became a distribution platform, there actually used to be software distributors that acted like this, they would publish in hobbyist magazines as well as send out their own catalogs. Some were better than others and would get the small shops they represented to collaborate to make complementary products work better together. In those days you could be a one person shop and just write the software. I don't know how one would recreate that model in todays realities.
JetBrains Marketplace is like this. It's a store for plugins to their IDEs but they also say they'll do co-branding and marketing with you, you get access to their reseller network, they handle a lot of the accounting etc.
6: release parts of your closed product as open source (saying it was sponsored by the company that sells the moneymaker, so not some dual licensing of the entire product)
- 5% chance you make a living etc + fame and glory
If you release under MIT and you don't have a plan for public speaking, or consulting then you have no way to profit financially from that work. Used to be that you could offer hosted solutions, but if you become too high profile the Cloud providers will have a 'better' offering.
Too many of us still fall into this Calvinistic work ethic that if we just put in the work the rewards will appear through some ineffable mechanism we don't (think we) need to understand. I am currently fighting this battle with myself on several fronts. That shit is hard, especially when you don't have a lot of role models.
almost always true. The creator tends to be biased when judging value (of their own work).
Just because it was used a lot by many people because it's free, doesn't mean there's economic value. Charging for it is the only way to find out the economic value people assign to it.
We don't talk about the people who agree with you, because it doesn't come up.
Enjoyment of something can be substantially reduced when you find out someone else is taking all the credit for your work, however. And the transition can be a bit shocking. In many cases these are probably the people we are talking about, in other cases it's someone discovering that they don't have the luxury of doing this passion project for free anymore.
Just say it is commons clause, not ordinary open source.
I've even become convinced (based on someone digging out enough references) that the term ipen source was being used before OSI, but for the rest of the HN, just say "commons clause" without saying "open source" and I guess most bashing disappears.
There will always be that person annoyed that it isn't AGPL - or MIT for that matter - but for most if us we just want to know what the license actually is.
As far as I'm concerned, people can use whatever license they want. I just think it's borderline deceptive to claim something is an open source license even if it clearly doesn't meet the OSI (or FSF) definition.
Isn't the situation somewhat akin to what modern musicians face? i.e. very little money from selling music, but a lot of money from performances, merch, etc?
If I were hoping to make money off my OSS work, I would try to sell services related to the product. Consulting services, hosted instances, commercial forks, feature bounties, etc.
Complaining about compensation for OSS work is like musicians pining for the days where you could create an album and sit back while the money rolled in. You can vent your frustrations, but the world is what it is and complaining is only going to make you and your work less popular.
If you release software under a commercial license, you're essentially forming a software company. It's hard work and not guaranteed to succeed, but isn't that legit and well-traveled path to wealth? Also not mentioned is using your coding skills to land a decent tech job, which seems like a much better shot at financial stability than what many have.
This works if your product can target big corporations. They are unlikely to intentionally misuse the license; and would pay licensing fees for something that can be freely available online. There are several companies doing this already.
You just need a few contracts to cover a software engineer salary. So unless you are after maximizing profits, you don't really care about the dudes who are using it commercially for free.
I remember Stripe getting bashed on HN for releasing a commercial feature that took months to develop, by someone saying they could do it "in a weekend"...
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.
6. Get a job that pays the bills, write code in your spare time for the joy of writing code, publish code as PD to help others learn. Maybe blog about it. Die happy.
7. Get a job that pays the bills, write code in your spare time for the joy of writing code, or not write any code in your spare time at all. Die happy.
Yeah - I write open source code to learn things that I won't get to or be forced to learn from a day job (currently a data platform in Python) - implementing authn/authz, network programming, creating a small framework.
I enjoy it and I expect it to help me become a more well-rounded and therefore more employable developer.
At least you don't die poor and hungry. Maybe it's a permaculture farm and you also died knowing you contributed to less carbon emissions and more biodiversity.
This is a interesting topic because it exposes one of the great sins developers commit - we don’t pay each other. I’m not talking about nickel and dimeing your fraternity, but there is certainly a reasonable price for a lot of these packages and plug-ins we install that can create financial autonomy for a lot of people via modest efforts.
Developers are the toughest customers because we all think: "that's just a small script and a cron job" done in a weekend and basically worth $0. All the while staying each day in a meeting costing a cumulative $xx(x) just to announce what the job for today is.
I agree that is part of the problem, but I think the real problem is that even if you accept the premise that it would take just a weekend it is still the wrong analysis for the company. Even a job that you can complete in an hour is easily $100-200 worth of direct engineering costs.
I think the real problem is that most developers naturally plug in the value of their time on a hobby project/in school (which is ~$0/hr) when deciding if a time-cost tradeoff is worthwhile. Since the answer is almost always no if you incorrectly value time at $0/hr and management usually can not do the analysis themselves, management pattern matches and determines that spending money on developer tooling is essentially never worthwhile and that sums like $5k (which few people would spend on personal projects) are outrageous. If the correct time-value analysis was done, you would get outcomes more like electrical engineers (who generally make less than high-end software developers) where companies will spend literally $50k/yr/engineer on tooling to make them 50% more productive since that actually makes perfect business sense based on the amount they are being paid. In contrast, if you went to management in a software company pushing for a $50k/yr/developer expense they would probably laugh you out of the room or require some totally outrageous improvement like 10x for everybody.
On the other hand devs in corporation usualy have no spending budget. Going thru official management ask and procurement process is a real PITA. The last thing a dev wants is drowning in a red tape swamp.
I do sometimes pay for software with my own cash. However that is mostly limited to personal productivity tools because I can't transfer licenses to the company.
It’ll have to be cultural shift. The same way you get free food and beer, or a budget to buy your own gear, we need to start allocating a no-nonsense dev budget to get licenses.
Of course, we’d have to create a marketplace that has modest price points. The marketplace isn’t supposed to be filled with enterprise grade Jira solutions that cost - I can’t even imagine what it costs.
I’m not above paying a few bucks for all these things that I’ve used in my project if it was as seamless as npm install. But it’s not. Some take donations, some take bitcoin, some have a enterprise version with their own payment portal, some require you to call their sales staff, etc. There is a ton of friction here.
For these things to become profitable means we as developers have more places to generate income, it’s a win win.
> It’ll have to be cultural shift. The same way you get free food and beer, or a budget to buy your own gear, we need to start allocating a no-nonsense dev budget to get licenses.
+1 insightful. I wonder when we'll see the first company do that.
(I must admit, though, I've never worked at a company that offered me free food, beer, budget for gear, books, or anything else. They might as well be silicon valley myths. I have worked a few places with an on-site vending machine, where you pay for the snacks.)
It’s a tough one for sure. We recently had a whole debate about whether we should buy a solution that charges about $450. This is a company with a lot of revenue. No point in being cheap about this. I attributed it to the friction involved, which will require a mindset change.
Society, in general, is oddly cheap when it really doesn’t have to be. You won’t become millionaires by saving a few thousand bucks (at the company level) by forgoing decent things. No way to live.
I think the Tailwind css model seems the most sustainable right now - build an open source project until it reaches a suitable level of success and then build commercial support/other projects around it.
Think of Red Hat employees. Most of them are paid to contribute continually to Open Source (linux kernel, numerous libraries, etc), then they sell product and support licenses. The problem is that few developers are helping to maintain Open Source libraries. In what universe is it feasible for an large Open Source project maintainer to make a living without patrons?? For-profit orgs should be the driver for maintaining Open Source.
I'm a big promoter of open source software. However, I do see a fine line between getting open source and charging. In general if something is generic enough like Kernel of an OS or MVC framework for web dev, then yes open sources it.
However, it if it becomes specific and company clearly are benefiting and/profiting from it, then yeah charge for it!!
5. Make something cool and release it under any license which I feel like. Ruthlessly limit the project scope so I can finish it while still having fun and learning interesting things. (This means completely finished; documented, optimized for performance, and exhaustively tested with close to zero bugs remaining.) Then:
- Be very clear on the project page about what people can expect in terms of support and timely bugfixes. Let people make their decision to use the project or not, with knowledge of how much time and energy I am ready to give. Politely refuse to go beyond what has been stated.
- Make whatever amount of money I need through other means.
- Use the knowledge I gained from making said "cool thing" to make other cool things (whether for fun or for money).
- With a glint in my eye, reminisce about the great times spent hacking on computer code and all the fascinating discoveries made.
I see some open source authors having success with Patreon. I’ve been trying off and on since 2017, I think what I’ve lacked is production quality and consistent updates. Getting crowd funding is a job ontop of just developping, no doubt.
Your insight and the comments in the Github thread all back up the same point - the current economic model is not set up to empower or distribute wealth to the little guy.
I think it was phk who many years ago pointed out that Free Software is really anti-capitalist at heart; it makes sense that it would come from America (and MIT!) because of how the economic system works there.
The licenses are a distraction. The bigger issues are structural in terms of how the economy is set up. Our current free market system is predicated on folks at the bottom of the pyramid getting squeezed for their labor. It is only when it starts happening to us and not folks somewhere else that we begin to do something about it.
- 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 economic contribution from your side
- most probably die relatively well-off
That's fascinating, I had the opposite experience.
Never once have I been asked which school I went to or anything about my CS degree.
I had multiple people contacting me after finding me on Github (and my OSS work is very unpopular and mostly unmaintained) and one of them was a C-Suite who offered me a job.
I never found a job with a recruiter - just networking, so it may be a form of self selection for more personal interactions.
Seems to me, if a project is successful enough, one could leverage that network to get a job if they needed it. In many companies developers have an outsized influence on which other developers get hired. If I were in this gentlemens shoes that is the angle I would have taken (and maybe he tried). I would have posted a message to the fellow contributors that basically stated:
I had an apartment fire, I am in a jam and am looking for employment as such my contributions to this project may diminish while I focus on my finances, if anyone has any leads at their company please let me know.
Unless one is looking to only work at a FAANG, I suspect something to that effect would net leads for a top developer of a successful project.
I mean, I guess. On the other hand, if you have a niche side project (I have several in a rather niche language), then you become known in the community.
Most people's 'side projects' don't shine on their resume because the side project is just a replica of one hundred other projects that do the same thing. In order to be known for a side project, you have to make sure the audience is small enough for it to make a difference, but large enough that there is commercial interest.
> 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?
I've been a software developer for 15+ years now. It's been the same, every place I've ever interviewed. People place a lower priority on things they can't easily quantify.
Yes, they do. I also get the impression that many employers are looking for people who are more broadly interested in programming beyond C/C++/Java and are willing to pay.
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.
There's an article that makes the rounds now and again on HN about a engineer who wrote a widely used opensource tool and then didn't get past the Google interview process. FAANGs are still more interested in seeing if you can solve the Knapsack Problem then seeing that you can write good, maintainable code.
Sheesh I'd forgotten - he's right, everyone does use that tool. He backed off on a bit but the point still remains, I'm sure he's a better engineer than half of google.
I wonder if they asked Pike and Thompson to invert a binary tree.
I'm not so sure. By his own admission homebrew is not that great a piece of software. There's a lot more that goes into popularity than being good. Being first, marketing and network effects are as or more important than being good.
- 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.
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".
This is not a good analogy. Most cars work in roughly the same way. Most software does not.
Software engineering is a diverse enough topic that you can have two "software engineers" who, aside from very broad general concepts like control flow and modularity, have very little overlap in their areas of expertise. Developing microcontroller firmware requires a very different set of skills and knowledge to building an ML model in R.
Most pieces of software require zero knowledge of the inner workings of, different implementations of, or even existence of a b-tree structure in order to be able to successfully create, understand and maintain them. Let's not gatekeep by telling people they're not real software engineers unless they understand and can recite an arbitrary set of mostly useless topics.
It's actually not a good analogy because most mechanics nowadays specialize. You don't have an engine guy do an automatic transmission rebuild and you don't have your local car dealer do a coil-over 4 link suspension upgrade on your Jeep.
This is exactly analogous to software in that you don't need to know deep algorithms to build CRUD web apps. They are a different part of the machine and closer to the business domain. Looking for deep CS over skills like requirement gathering, collaboration, information theory gives false signals on competency for the task at hand.
The reality is front end, backend, embedded, desktop etc. etc. all have different requirements on the skill sets they need to be successful. People gain the skills they need via the process of working, then we have this ritual of interviewing where we act like all these things that never get used in their trade are so so important to know.
The direct analogy is I am hiring an engine guy,he will never touch a transmission. The guy knows fuel maps, timing and compression ratios like the back of his hand, but I keep insisting that he tell me how the sun gear of the transmission engages the planetaries and in what sequence because he has to know this to be any good as an engine guy and come to the conclusion in my head that if he does not know transmissions it is a signal that he is not fit to be an engine guy.
>The guy knows fuel maps, timing and compression ratios like the back of his hand, but I keep insisting that he tell me how the sun gear of the transmission engages the planetaries and in what sequence because he has to know this to be any good as an engine guy and come to the conclusion in my head that if he does not know transmissions it is a signal that he is not fit to be an engine guy.
Sure, but that's not what happened. The real story, in contrast to the tweet, is that he didn't really know what a b-tree was. And if you're hiring an engine mechanic and they tell you they don't really know what a transmission is, well, that's a pretty big red flag.
Agreed and I don't know what he was applying for, I was just highlighting that this happens a lot in our industry where we misapply (not saying everyone in the tech industry) what we do with the ritual of insisting that applicants are worthy via a cargo cult process of ensuring that they too have the smartest guy in the room mentality.
I hate to entertain this bad analogy further than necessary, but knowing what a gearbox is in the field of cars is not even remotely near the same level as knowing what a b-tree is in the field of software engineering.
I guess we'll just have to disagree. They're a pretty basic data structure that's used quite often to solve a class of problems. And they're not that hard to learn. How they work is pretty simple and the reason to use them is pretty easy to grasp. I would say that there are few good software engineers out there that aren't clear on what they are at a basic level.
You don't need to know what a b- tree is, just a binary tree.
The question was about a simple binary tree, which is really trivial, even you have no idea of b-tree's and you never inverted a binary tree yet.
The dick part might be true, esp. after getting 7 interviews.
so I doubt the knowledge of b-tree's are that important for 90% of the users/people/developers.
heck I know how to write a multipart parser/formatter, which I doubt that many people do. especially people who know how a b-tree works. well most people which do know how a b-tree works, do not know when to use it.
Actually writting good software (from an engineering perspective) is easier than coming up with a popular software. If you dont like the 'easier' statement, I can replace it with 'more important' or 'different'. So maybe he shouldnt work as a programmer for FAANG, but more like a product manager (and let the other people write code for him)
> I wonder if they asked Pike and Thompson to invert a binary tree.
Would surprise me if they couldn't. Writing compilers include lots of working with trees. Pike has literally written a book with a chapter on Algorithms & Data Structures, including trees.
If that's the answer you get, be glad. Dodged a bullet. Go find a job somewhere else where they value your skills. There was no good fit to begin with.
Perhaps all the people using it value it enough that they might pay (if they had no other choice to keep it), but might not be able to maintain it.
In that situation, it's valued but it only gets maintained if someone offers to do the maintenance for pay.
If the current maintainer is stepping down from the project if they aren't paid, but willing to continue for pay, it makes sense for them to let everyone else know they are willing to continue if paid, doesn't it?
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.
Not only my basic needs, I also had a strong urge to reproduce - but that would be irresponsible without being able to support the offspring.
When I was younger I always had an insane drive for making money, which translated into tons of business ideas and a true passion for working.
After having kids and after having enough money to buy a house in cash, a lot of that business drive disappeared. I definitely feel like I completed a part of my life.
There is still some drive - and it's focused at creating enough value to pay all my expenses: food, entertainment, private school for the kids.
After that is done, I will spend my days working out, growing my kids, cooking, gardening, travelling.
I know society sells the lie you should be working yourself off (possibly for some giant evil corporation), hoarding as much money as possible until you die - but I couldn't care less.
Removing economic incentives would see a steady decline of value creation in society. Stakhanovism was most likely Stalin propaganda.
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 optimistic about human nature when exposed to easy life.
My question and this truly is a question as I am not well read on UBI concepts and social theories is:
So it did not bring about nirvana and human nature is well human nature but did it eliminate suffering to a noticeable degree i.e homelessness, poverty, food security, healthcare?
It seems to me the two are not directly tied, people are always going to seek out the vices because they are the roots of pleasure but that does not mean that the other side of the equation is negative, if it does eliminate suffering then it would be a net positive. I am not advocating for UBI, I am completely ignorant on the subject, just trying to understand if it did produce positive results against suffering.
I definitely do not want to diss a concept that hasn't been tried out extensively, though I am more skeptical about it than many others - not least because people tend to discriminate "good" neighbourhoods from "bad" using rent level, so we might just see a general jump in rents and property prices that eats the entire UBI and a new unhappy equilibrium is reached.
That said, I think that rich Gulf states show us that it can be overdone, that a completely sheltered life of plenty sucks. It sucks in a very different way than hunger or homelessness, but it gnaws on human psyche too.
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'm sure you believe this in good faith, but most human beings are not as driven and are not as good natured as you.
This is also why governments or any form or redistribution is inferior to a perfect market without human interference: you will always have bad apples stealing resources or being as inefficient as they can be.
I know this because I'm a psychopath, I feel zero guilt or empathy and the thought that someone like me could be in a position of power is downright scary.
Do you happen to have some of this evidence on hand? Everything I've read on it suggests the exact opposite: that (at least here in the US) it'll not only work better than existing welfare systems, but would end up being cheaper.
It's hard to claim something is evidence or counter-evidence of anything in social science. Once you add one or more brains, the complexity skyrockets quite quickly.
I think it's a terrible idea for (at least) three reasons:
- More money is being forcefully redistributed from people that produce work to people who don't produce. This will make people lazier and less entrepreneurial. Yes, I'm against any form of taxation for the same principle and I think the terrible corporate lifecycle is caused primarily by people not being entrepreneurial enough.
- Taxes will increase, pushing businesses even more outside of here.
- The more money you give to bureaucrats the more they will keep for themselves, the more they will waste, the more will not go to the economy.
> More money is being forcefully redistributed from people that produce work to people who don't produce.
I think it's a bit presumptuous to declare that the people footing the bill are even most of the time (let alone all of the time) producing more work than the people receiving a net income from UBI. I would, indeed, argue the exact opposite: your average warehouse or restaurant or farm worker is almost certainly putting in significantly more labor than your average landlord or C-level executive or Bitcoin hodler while receiving a fraction of the income. This might not be the most popular opinion on a website that revolves specifically around the worship of venture-capital-backed get-rich-quick schemes, but I really have close to zero sympathy for those in the latter category; "won't you please think of the poor billionaires" is, frankly, insulting to those actually working for their money.
In any case:
> Yes, I'm against any form of taxation for the same principle
A land value tax wouldn't have this "problem"; it's arguably the one form of taxation that ain't "theft", since it's actually a service payment (i.e. you pay rent to the government that actually owns land - that is, the basis of a "fee simple" title system as used in e.g. the US and other common-law jurisdictions - in exchange for said government recognizing and enforcing your claim on that land). Even if it came from income taxes (which I'd agree would be a worst-case scenario), I've yet to see a single proposal that taxes anyone other than people who can readily afford those taxes. Taking things to an extreme, a billionaire with a 99% income tax is still overwhelmingly richer than (I suspect) the both of us combined.
But this all assumes we'd be pursuing UBI in addition to other welfare systems; I'd argue that ain't necessary. That is:
> Taxes will increase, pushing businesses even more outside of here.
There's every indication that the overall tax burden for all but the absolute wealthiest Americans would decrease substantially by replacing existing welfare programs with UBI.
> The more money you give to bureaucrats the more they will keep for themselves, the more they will waste, the more will not go to the economy.
By replacing existing welfare programs with UBI, you eliminate a considerable amount of that bureaucracy. Most of that bureaucracy revolves specifically around determining eligibility; if literally every US citizen is unconditionally eligible for a fixed income, we can immediately replace those bureaucrats with a pretty simple system:
def redistribute_tax_as_ubi(amount):
for c in citizens:
c.send_check(amount / citizens.count)
And from there it's just a matter of tuning how much tax needs collected in order to ensure every American can afford basic needs. And at that point, with that UBI flowing, it then becomes entirely unambiguous whether or not someone's poor due to circumstance or bad choices - that is, UBI eliminates that variable, and achieves actual equality of opportunity.
As an added bonus:
> I think the terrible corporate lifecycle is caused primarily by people not being entrepreneurial enough
UBI would directly enable all Americans to pursue entrepreneurial ventures without putting themselves in danger of starvation. People would be more entrepreneurial than ever when they know that even if their startups flop (because let's face it: the vast majority of startups crash and burn) they still have food on the table and roofs (rooves?) over their heads.
Hi yellowapple, thanks for taking the time to reply, really appreciated!
> on poor billionaires
I'm not talking about poor billionaires, they pay (almost) zero taxes through loopholes that their friends in the government allow to exist.
I'm talking about middle class who can't setup a foreign entity to pay zero taxes.
The problem with taxation (and progressive taxation in particular) is that it applies only to people who are too poor to meddle with the government.
I think middle class people are probably creating more value for society than poor people, which is way they're rewarded with more money.
> on land value tax
I would consider a land tax immoral as well, why is the land owned by the government? We're talking about a group of people who got everyone to agree they decide for everyone and they decide everyone needs to pay some money or they'll end up in jail.
> UBI would reduce burden for all but wealthiest
Does that account for wealthy people structuring their wealth in a different matter to avoid that?
When progressive income tax in the 60-70s reached 90% (for high tax rate payers), rich people just started getting loopholes added to the law to exempt specific cases.
> UBI would reduce bureaucracy
That sounds like an improvement
Given how much the government managed to grow in the last 2 centuries, I'm not very optimistic on this being the case for a long time.
> UBI would make people more entrepreneurial
Something I personally found in my entrepreneurial journey, is that living on passive money (MRR in my case, but a passive business nonetheless) doesn't affect positively my willingness to do much.
When I was a broke engineer counting how much proteins I could buy and living in a basement after having spent all my money on a startup that failed, I definitely had a different grit.
I think need is a powerful motivator, but I don't really have a cross population study on the subject.
> Hi yellowapple, thanks for taking the time to reply, really appreciated!
No problem :) Geolibertarianism is something I've become pretty passionate about over the last couple years.
> I'm not talking about poor billionaires, they pay (almost) zero taxes through loopholes that their friends in the government allow to exist. [...] Does that account for wealthy people structuring their wealth in a different matter to avoid that?
Well that's the great thing about LVT: you can't exactly move land overseas, so there's no room for loopholes there. If you hold land, you pay tax on its value; if you don't, you don't.
Wealthy people could certainly end up getting rid of their land holdings (particularly vacant or otherwise-unused ones), and I'd argue that's a good thing, since it opens up that land for use by others (provided they're willing to pay LVT on it), thus better achieving equality of opportunity than the current system. LVT, in other words, would promote land ownership as a means to an end rather than as an investment in and of itself, thus discouraging the sorts of speculation that promote NIMBYism and housing crises and all that jazz.
That is, indeed, the crux of why those billionaires are unjust in their holding of wealth: it's specifically around their ability to hoard finite resources - like land - without justly compensating the other members of society prevented from having that same opportunity to claim those resources.
> I think middle class people are probably creating more value for society than poor people, which is way they're rewarded with more money.
I disagree, at least in a general sense. There are certainly people in both groups creating a lot of value for society; the difference is usually whether they're adequately compensated for that value. This is a big reason why corporations tend to be hostile to unionization: because workers have an easier time negotiating for fair wages and treatment as a group than as an individual, especially when they work for large corporations.
And likewise, there are certainly people in both groups who don't create much value at all. One nice thing about UBI is that it makes it a lot easier to tell the difference between those who are just lazy and those who are victims of circumstance. That is: it maximizes equality of opportunity, and better ensures that the people who deserve to move from the lower to middle class actually get to do so.
> I would consider a land tax immoral as well, why is the land owned by the government?
Because it's within the territory of that government. All land "ownership" derives from a government granting someone a title to that land, be it indefinite (e.g. with a "fee simple" title) or limited-duration (e.g. the 99-year leases some countries use). This is, indeed, exactly why things like eminent domain are legally permissible in the US and other nations: land is really owned by the state, and leased to landholders.
That is: unless you have an allodial title (hint: if your land is in the US, you almost certainly don't), your land is already de jure leased to you by a superior landlord (that is: the state), and the recognition and enforcement of your claim to that land is a service provided to you by that government. Without that service, "land ownership" would be limited to what you can physically defend against trespass yourself (since land titles would be worthless pieces of paper without some authority backing them - much like paper currency, come to think of it).
> and they decide everyone needs to pay some money or they'll end up in jail.
Who said anything about jail? If you stop paying rent on something you're leasing, you don't go to jail (at least not for that reason); you simply lose access to that thing being leased. Land would be no different: a land value tax is simply the fair rent to lease that land ("fair" due to it being a tax on the land's value).
And indeed, the goal of Georgism and derived philosophies (like geolibertarianism) is to ensure that a land value tax is a "single tax" - i.e. the tax anyone ever pays, replacing taxes on sales, income, capital gains, payroll, inheritance, you name it. Therefore, the only possible punishment for tax evasion in a Georgist single-tax system would be eviction.
(Sometimes Pigovian and severance taxes (i.e. taxes on pollution and natural resource extraction, respectively) get thrown in by Georgist/geolibertarians, too; I'd argue pollution should be a criminal or civil court matter (i.e. treating it as reckless endangerment and property damage, and fining/suing accordingly) rather than a taxation matter, and that natural resources are an extension of land and thus would be included in LVT)
> I think need is a powerful motivator
That's definitely a fair assessment, and I agree with it. However, that raises a question: if the only reason you're doing something is because the alternative is to starve or freeze to death, are you really doing that thing voluntarily? This question is what underlies the socialist concept of "wage slavery", and socialists' perception of capitalism as inherently reliant on coercion (namely: by threatening risk of starvation or homelessness unless you submit to a corporation's terms, regardless of whether or not those terms are actually in your best interests). Seems to me the best way to address that concern (without abolishing capitalism entirely) is to make sure nobody has to do things just to survive.
That is: the only just motivator, in my opinion, is one's own happiness - which is consistent with the pursuit thereof being one of the three inalienable rights specified in the very rationale for this country's existence. People should do things because they actually want to do them - either because they enjoy doing that thing or because they're (fairly) compensated for it and using it as a means to achieve things they want.
And that's the other thing, too: since UBI would provide an option besides "work myself to death", you'd see interesting dynamics on wages. On one hand, jobs that few people want to do would command higher wages (or other benefits) to make it worth folks' while to take on those jobs. On the other hand, workers would be more willing to work for low or nonexistent wages (e.g. as volunteers) if the work itself is interesting. The free software movement, as one example relevant to this post, would flourish; so would the arts, education, and numerous other fields where people would be participating if it weren't for such activities not exactly paying the rent.
I think capitalism is fine and we need more of it.
We need to get rid of governments and minimise centralisation of power instead. I don't want any more wars, jailing of people committing victimless crimes or people being forced to give up half of their economic output to bureaucrats.
Every service offered by the government should be offered by multiple private companies.
People in need should get money through voluntary donations, not through taxes forcefully stolen from people.
Just because you made something cool doesn't mean you are entitled to make any amount of money from it. The world doesn't owe you anything. Even if you make something useful to people, that doesn't mean you are entitled to live rich. More than likely your solution is just good enough that people don't feel the need to make their own, but not good enough that no one can't compete with you.
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 requests for support but sadly at least half of them have had a complaining/entitled tone as if I am not doing every last bit of this for free. I have had zero offers to help with development, documentation, or really anything else. And interestingly, some of those E-mails have come from some pretty well-known large entities, be they government departments or large companies — organizations that should have more than enough resources to give a damn.
Sadly, it is not better in the for-pay universe. After publishing apps, I have found that essentially no one will outright “pay once” for something anymore, no matter how cheap (leaving things at the insultingly-low price of $0.99 for weeks does nothing). Similarly, people usually will not contribute even a rating to help you out, much less a review. The E-mail/web info links on the store have never been used by anyone to reach me. And App Stores make it impossible to know who your customers even are, otherwise. So a silent relationship is maintained, where random unknown people update their apps over time, continuing to benefit and all I can assume is that they are still happy or something.
So my conclusion after decades is this: you do the projects you like to do for your own benefit, and no one else’s. They are résumé builders so you have something to show when looking for a corporate job that actually pays. If anyone doesn’t like what you’ve built, you are 1000% allowed to ignore them. If someone happens to appreciate it, that is a bonus but not a certainty. And you must be prepared to receive no money at all from these projects, much less enough to live on.
I think one of the problems is the interface through which we access these tools. I know when I walk into a Walmart that I'm dealing with a huge organization and if I accidentally break something while I'm walking through an aisle, I don't necessarily feel that bad. If instead I was walking around in a mom-and-pop store and broke something, I would apologize profusely and demand that I pay them for their troubles.
When accessing open source projects, there's no visual trigger that makes me subconsciously distinguish between downloading tensor flow that's being developed by Google or some small personal project. It all looks the same.
The same thing goes for music, graphics (e.g. iconography, fonts, ...), and even things like physical products on Amazon - it all feels the same.
I wonder how one rectifies this. I feel like small open source developers have conflicting incentives here. If an open source project was clearly prefaced with "While this is professional and fully featured, it's also the effort of one human working 10 hours a week on the weeks he doesn't have the kids", would you use it?
Developers who want their open source projects used have incentive to make their project look serious and long term, and being a one man operation makes the thing have a large point of failure.
You could imagine a "smallware" movement, e.g. some centralized body that certified that a particular piece of OSS was written by a single person/team (a.k.a. I set up a website and list anyone that asks), and brand their libraries accordingly - it would be an implicit appeal for funds. But have I just reinvented a bootleg apache software foundation?
My personal take, maybe not suitable for everyone.
Don't use github. Github is that big faceless storefront. Use your own personal site, make it really simple. Now you don't have random "drive-throughs", who really don't care about your project, but are ready to give unsolicited advice.
No point to have public issue tracker, when developers are known and small group.
I like Drew DeVault projects, like sourcehut - doing things simple and off from big corp infra.
In the past I've found that very low prices attract loud and obnoxious customers that complain left and right, while much higher prices attract very quiet customers who never complain.
My conclusion is that when your software is new you price it low and sift through the feedback to get the gems. When the software matures you increase the price and enjoy the passive income.
Another thing I've found helpful is to publish my email on the start page of the app, so it's impossible to miss. Again, this is something you can dial up and down depending on how much feedback you want at any point.
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, "Hey, that looks nice. Could I get it for free?" I think it's akin to artists who get requests for free art. The people asking generally think that it takes zero effort to create the art and that they should be entitled to a drawing.
It's also kind of amazing that someone will easily spend a few dollars on games (often upwards of $60-70) or food + drinks, but they see software as something that absolutely has to justify its $5 or $10 price tag.
I obviously don't know what your users were thinking, or even what your application does, but for my part I use open source stuff because that means I know if I become dependent on it, and the original author drops it (or goes in a direction I don't like) I have options. The price is pretty much orthogonal. Just saying it's not necessarily just about entitlement and getting stuff for free.
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.
Unless your app target gamers, comparing to how gamers spend is apples to oranges. Gamers brag about how much they spend and buy more then they can play.
But that is specific subculture, majority of people are not behaving that way. Even majority of people who play games don't spend much money on them or have someone gift them.
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, I had a bad experience contributing to an open source project in which the author snidely told me I should have searched the code base because the bug was fixed when it wasn't, closed my bug report out and denied my pull request. So it seems to me a negative deal situation on both fronts. I'm know there are great open source projects, but I'll need to be very selective about them.
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.
If people are relying on your work, it is perfectly reasonable to ask them for a contribution. There are other options like kickstarter, too.
I know more than one open source project developer who made a nice program, but it never caught on and the developer wound up discouraged and embittered. A common thread, though, is they simply put it up on a bare bones web site. They actively refused to do any sort of marketing, promotion, outreach, evangelism, read any books on sales and advertising, etc., which pretty much guaranteed failure.
BTW, in Apple's early days, Steve Jobs was a master at getting attention focused on Apple's computers. No successful outfit neglects that.
Thanks for the D lang. My younger brother used it for his final year project. He got an A. He has nothing, but praise for it. Fast, small executable size, etc.
That's what I meant when I said there were great open source projects like yours. Rust is another one. The energy, spirit of cooperation and welcoming community is a big plus for me. It would be nice if corporations kicked you a few bucks. For the life of me, I can't understand why the 100 millionaires and billionaires at the top of some of these corporations don't donate more.
To put that into context, it was a lot of work to set it up (and message it properly) and there was no guarantee it would have worked.
I think your conclusion that you should do this for your own benefit stands in either case. I believe in alignment of interests. All parties should get something positive out of a relationship.
One of the problems with large companies using these free libraries and tools is that the people who are choosing to use these free resources are just developers themselves -- they usually have little power to allocate the much deserved resources to the shoulders that they're standing on.
Because of this, there is a huge untapped opportunity to allocate resources better to pay open source contributors for their hard work.
It would be useful if there was a github (or whatever) license type that required payment above a certain threshold. A student might get free use, but a commercial endeavor might pay a little or a lot depending on the value they're getting.
Then, any libraries that you use with that license type would draw on the monthly deposit for your license level (more of your budget would go toward the libraries that you get more value from). For example, if your company pays $100/month, 50% of that may go to one library that provides a lot of value, while 1% might go to a library that provides less. Proper allocation would require the user to guage this, and it might be a little unfair but it's more fair than the 0% they're getting now.
Any resource you're using would have to get at least 1% of your allocation. If you're only using two libraries and you don't allocate value manually, each library would automatically get 50% of your monthly budget.
Repos could also choose to allocate a percentage of their draw to go toward bounties to resolve bugs, make improvements, etc. To help pay and incentivize others to contribute.
At some point it becomes operationally risky for a company to freeload when they get to a certain size so you see things like enterprise support or hiring dedicated engineers to support the software.
I think you will find examples of this at lots of large tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon). Linux kernel is a good example here and key features like cgroups were started at Google
I agree with you, but I also feel the entitlement problem goes both ways. Just because you choose to work on an open source project and it becomes popular, it does not mean you are entitled to be paid by the people who use it. If you ultimately want to be paid, don’t spend thousands of hours of your life working on something that has no guarantee of you being paid.
I agree with your conclusions, but I disagree with your choice of calling it “entitlement”. Software is a non-scarce, non-rivalrous good. Once you create it and give it away, you should have no further expectations.
It’s a little bit like a live performance. Once you’ve performed, you can’t expect anything more coming from what people do based on watching your performance. Your pay, if you want to get paid, must be up front.
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.
I agree with you, I would argue that free software/open source developers are the ones who feel entitled to an income based sorely on the size of the audience they amass.
Something of incredible value was lost when Free Software was corporatized into Open Source, and instead of "True believers", we had more open-source-as-marketing. I am a frequent user of libre software, and I do it without paying (how many have donated to VLC, yet directly or indirectly depend on it or FFMPEG? Even closed-source applications remotely related to video likely depend on it one way or another). I pay it pack by contributing to open projects and making them better - granted, I have a day job that gives me this flexibility.
It would be a dark day (IMHO), if all open projects were to depend on the benevolence of F500s.
Most people are living either in poverty conditions, or can see themselves living in poverty if anything goes wrong. Consequently people are understandably very reluctant to give up any of their precious limited resources. And yet, despite that, everyone is expected to get things done, to show they're interesting and creative, and to build social capital by being useful members of society. These antagonistic forces end up making many, many people very unhappy, and that comes over as entitlement.
When it comes to spending money, I can sympathize and I do not expect people to shell out cash that they don’t have. (Indeed, when working on a free software project I hope that occasionally it finds its way to someone that literally could not get it any other way.)
On the other hand, 2-minute acts of appreciation (that cost practically nothing) are also extremely rare. Why should thank-you E-mails, app ratings, etc. come from a vanishingly small fraction of a user base, instead of almost everyone?
Because majority of people have no idea you want email with thanks and figures that best thing they can do is to not bother you. Like celebrities complain about people recognizing them all the time.
I recently set up a pihole at home with the whole Covid situation and as soon as I noticed the donate link threw them £5 thinking "the least I can do is buy a London priced pub pint - I'm not exactly spending it elsewhere". I don't know why it's so different with software - I should really know better but even to this day my gut reaction is to, initially, balk at an app charging £5 - yet I'll walk into a pub (well, used to) and have no problem spending that and more on one beverage... I've since managed to snap out of that and will, if I think I'm going to enjoy it, spend the £1, £5, £20 or whatever it is within reason.
This may be partly due to seeing in my day job customer feedback which in answer to "what would stop you using <essentially their business account + invoicing + tax reporting>?" - "if you charged me money". We basically run for businesses and even that cohort to a non-trivial proportion isn't prepared to spend (<£10 monthly) on software. We have other avenues and mechanisms to work work around that but it's a little demoralising when you see it so black and white. Makes me feel like I personally should at least be less inactive in my supporting of projects I like or just buying an app or subscriptions. I think the whole industry needs a reality check on how much "free" really costs.
I know a successful CEO who started a business making business software. He gives it away for free. But he also sells support contracts for it. He says 90% of the users just take the free version. The rest buy support contracts.
Enough to have made him a wealthy man.
The business model is essentially give away the razors, sell the blades.
The only unhappy people are the ones who use the product but expect free support :-)
I wonder how much of the software pricing side is people not seeing the person working on the software? Maybe we assume all this good software we use is built by some large corporation and so are more likely to not toss them some coin, whereas with buying a coffee or a beer, we actually interact with a human being. (That said, obviously they may themselves work for a big multi-national like Starbucks.)
I wonder if we could ever get to the model where when you pay for an app or service, it's somehow clear that you're funding a individual or small team, to make it more personal.
So my conclusion after decades is this: you do the projects you like to do for your own benefit, and no one else’s.
100x this. If people only understood this right from day one, a lot of frustration would be saved. And with it all the expressed entitlement on which this frustration is built.
You write some code because you need and want it, be it for your learning experience or to make a tool that you need or because to get paid for it. You open source something because you want to get the community engaged in it, to help you find or fix bugs or add features.
Conflating these two is a recipe for frustration and the type of post that has prompted this article and the 500+ thread contributions, 90% of which demonstrate that they don't understand the difference either. Which is the real sad aspect here.
This is par for the course with open source, and I knew that when I switched to doing all open source. On the other hand, it does attract collaborators, and D would not have been possible without the great people who have joined in an volunteered their time.
I believe that entitled people simply haven't reached your wisdom, yet.
All the same, people have no fault on their own, they're just the product of this particular society.
If we improve our society, the percentage of people who behave nicely will likely increase.
And if we don't, well, at least we'll have a model not to follow on the road to bettering ourselves.
Thank you very much for your interest in ${PROJECT_NAME}; we’re so happy to hear you find it useful! We offer a variety of extended support options that provide customer support, prioritized bug fixes, and preferential scheduling features on our product roadmap. Below please find our pricing schedule along with links to our store:
Of course people feel entitled to get your work for nothing when you give it away for nothing. People’s perception of value depends on how valuable it is (how much it cost). People do not have an entitlement problem. Open source programmers are the people with a serious entitlement problem. Of their own creation.
Why go socialist when freemium doesn't raise your taxes? If advertisers would pay for tattoos, we probably wouldn't have to worry about healthcare anymore.
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 to a company credit card, I’d definitely attach $100-$500 (or more!) to certain Issues. (Tobi from Shopify recently did a $10k bounty to get OBS working with Zoom, and someone claimed it.)
I do wonder why GitHub hasn’t done more here (I know sponsorships exist). It feels like they have the opportunity to build an open source Upwork... an army of people who create software and get paid a living, except in this case they also contribute to good. GitHub already changed how people work, and now they could do it again.
Additionally the FBI were called and Marak was charged with reckless endangerment for the potentially explosive bomb making materials found on the premise, including potassium nitrate, magnesium powder, sulfur powder, copper powder, aluminum powder, hobby fuse and mixing cups, and books about military explosives, booby traps. (https://abc7ny.com/suspicious-package-queens-astoria-fire/64...)
I was acquainted with Marak many years ago and he was an awful person then and probably still is. He put out some very well circulated revenge porn of his ex-girlfriend when she broke up with him long before that term was being used. He's a shitty person who seems to still be.
It was a pretty well known incident when it happened. This was back in the Kazaa days (p2p file sharing). He clipped the whole thing together and made it like one of those old mastercard commercials. The file was called "master card revenge." He's in the video himself and it's clear he made it because it was an explicit fuck you to her. He even put her email address and physical college address in it. I'm not sure what came of the incident. This was about 15 years ago.
>Next-door neighbor Debbie Riga said the box was suspicious, and so they decided to open it.
>"Obviously the man is sick," Riga said.
I guess that must be sick in the "pyrotechnics are fun" way, not sick in the neighborhood cat lady prying into other's possessions and then running their mouth about it to the news, sort of way.
If someone chooses to endanger their neighbors by bringing dangerous, explosive materials into a densely populated living area that shows a very bad decision making process at minimum, and at worst malicious intent. That's something that others need to know about, in order to protect themselves and their families.
What you are calling "running their mouth" is the community protecting itself from someone who has already considerably disrespected the safety and lives of the community.
Establish an industry standard with the programmer union that you will send any project they are using some agreed upon amount based on size per year. Distributed programming, distributed payment. Doesn't have to be a trick to it, just the slightest effort.
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 whether the same goad works for open source, but given the boldness of forkers, perhaps it does.
We have new leadership in our engineering organization, I should bring up the idea of having a budget for open source donations that the developers vote/nominate and the company cuts a check based on how many votes each tool gets. Everyone writing a check for $5 is a lot of work on both ends. It's simpler if an org cuts 10 checks for $100-500.
> 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.
That’s the big issue IMO. It’s easy for one developer to say "if you make money you can pay me a tip". When you have hundreds of dependencies, tracking developers wanting donations is almost a full time job…
If I were npm CEO, I would :
1. Propose the users (the ones using npm install/ci without publishing packages) to create accounts
2. You can put any amount of money on your account ; it will be monthly used to finance the packages you have downloaded that month
3. Developers (the one publishing packages) can flag their packages to be downloadable either publicly, only by registered users or only by paying users
4. Take a small fee
5. Profit
Then do the same with composer, apt, yum, and you have a pretty good coverage of the FLOSS ecosystem and potential monetary contributors just have to monthly fund 4 accounts.
Besides the fact that this would limit access to those projects for those unable to pay, there are the issues of multiple contributors and transient dependencies.
Say a project is started by one person, made open source, and becomes popular. They start accepting contributions from the public, including substantial features and bug fixes. They later move on and someone else becomes the lead maintainer. Who would receive the money in your scheme? The original author? The current maintainer? Divvied up among anyone who has ever touched the code? If the Digital Ocean tshirt giveaway is anything to go by, popular paid projects would be overwhelmed by "contributors" hoping to snag a slice for changing around a few words. It gets really complicated pretty quickly.
Say a project depends on one or more of these paid projects - does it now require payment of at least as much as the sum of its dependencies, and their dependencies, etc? That could add up quickly unless there's some scaling factor and you hope those projects make it up in volume. Surely there will be typosquatting projects which are (at best) wrappers for real ones and siphon off some of the fees.
And so on. All this is just to say that it's complicated and the details matter.
Also, if we extended this idea of paying for all the software people use, the whole thing would fall over very quickly. I don't think most developers here have ever sent Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler any money for zlib/gzip? And how many have sent checks to the people who've been contributing to the linux kernel? And gnu file utils and bin utils and compilers? And the openssl project? And OpenBSD for openssh? And any of the other hundreds of bits of code that they rely on on a daily basis to get their work done.
At the end of the day if you want to get paid for your work, don't give it away under a free license. This is the second major story -- that I've seen anyway -- in the last couple of weeks about people wanting to be paid for the software that they freely give away. It reminds me of the time I went to Rome and a man came up to me and slipped a string bracelet around my wrist. When I told him I didn't want it, he said "no, no, it's free. just a friendly gift." and when I said thanks and turned to walk away he got mad that I didn't give him any money. Apparently it's a typical scam. "Give a gift" but then demand a return donation of money.
> They start accepting contributions from the public, including substantial features and bug fixes.
I spent a considerable amount of weekends helping out with a FS2020 mod. The maintainer now accepts donations and makes a considerable sum. I got none of that. Personally, it left a bad taste in my mouth. I maintain a private fork now, because I don't like the idea of someone profiting off my rare nights and weekend work. It would be one thing if he recognized the work and/or gave back to the contributors in some way, but they don't... so I stopped contributing publically.
Let the maintainer monetize release versions. If new releases have major contributions from others, charge for the new release and dole out funds to the contributors.
Certainly some thought needs to be put into how to monetize this, but we haven’t ever even tried. I’d say something like NPM is sort of like how Uber/Lyft built and validated the ride sharing infrastructure - it works, it’s normalized. Now how do you manage the money between the drivers and riders.
It’s not like software devs and companies are broke and are unwilling to pay modest amounts, and we will always support free for non-commercial.
> it’s extra hard when you get no additional value.
I believe this, the identification and the articulation of additional value, is the problem with FOSS sustainability, and it's urgent that we resolve that.
The mental model behind this is quite simple, and I hope that once adopted, it will avoid a lot of unproductive behaviours and expectations on both sides, of the producers and the consumers.
Basically I believe in offerings which promise specific qualities (timeliness of responses and bugfixes, roadmap features schedule etc) and cover the costs of development (including market rate salary for the developers according to their skills which they use to develop and manage the project).
I am currently developing this with the aim to roll out my first experimental offerings.
I am keen to help others to adopt this approach, so everybody is most welcome to reach out to me with any questions.
Thanks for your interest. Do you maintain something yourself? Do you have some projects on your mind which could adopt such approach?
I am currently just beginning my research of the current state of things in Linux distributions with regard to the distribution (pun not intended) of bugticket time to resolution. I am doing this to get a fine grasp of actual state, and be able to articulate the additional value of such userbase-funded commitments.
I aspire to tracking my commitments up to full deployment in SDLC terms, but it seems this information is too hard to consistently get with the existing bugticket handling practices of Linux distros, so now I am going to start with measuring how much time it takes to mark the ticket "closed" or "resolved", whatever that means (seems to mean mostly "integration completed" in SDLC terms).
I have also contacted the current maintainer of one valuable but neglected project, but got no response so far. That project is vdirsyncer, it has been not actively maintained for a year and a bit until recently, but has many consumers, and I think such projects are a good fit for my idea. https://github.com/pimutils/vdirsyncer/issues/790
There are several projects in the low cost, user maintainable, appropriate technology space that I'm currently estimating the feasibility of starting.
I'm biased towards fascination with processes and markets, however, and value mapping and incentives are more strengths of mine than programming.
From my vantage point, there's a massive shortcoming in the mechanisms by which programmers, user programmers, and users are connecting.
Simply, I know several programmers looking for interesting physical world side projects and several craftspeople looking for automation. There's simply not a clear way to meaningfully connect them.
My ideas revolve around defined test, unit based recognition/compensation.
Person A has a specific use case, proposes it, persons B-G have similar use cases and agree on a test specification and deadline and place deposits. When the deadline is reached, the best performing commit is selected and merged, and the developer receives recognition and compensation.
There is a difference between one-off bounties and continuous sponsorhips.
- Stable income vs. unplannable amount of bounties
- Bounties generally don't cover general maintenance work for a project (e.g. updating dependencies)
- Bounties (as they are implemented today) generally only pay the contributor, and not the maintainers, which can also have significant cost in reviewing a feature
- Bounties traditionally have been so disproportionally small compared to the work required that they don't come close to provide a reasonable hourly rate for contributors
(I think you'll find enough articles that go into more details on the difference between the two.)
Bounty platforms have been around for ages, and I don't know a single project that is able to finance itself from that. Even for the OBS example you mentioned, it the bounty was a good way to get the ball rolling on a specific issue, but the overall maintenance is still financed by monthly sponsoships.
One-off donations might be a nice supplement, but they don't form a solid foundation.
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.)
What's the problem with a cost-plus pricing model? Having a solid ecosystem of cost-plus priced open source software would already be a great step up from the status quo.
Suppose a developer, let's call him Salvatore, lives in a modest apartment in, say Italy, and would live very comfortably indeed on three hundred thousand euros a year.
And let's say three cloud providers, call them, Jungle, Blue, and Lots, agree to give Salvatore a hundred thousand a year each to keep developing a, I don't know, a high-performance in-memory database. Lucky Salvatore, plenty of money for doing what he loves anyway.
Let's say that this database is quite good, and Jungle, Blue, and Lots each make a cool hundred million a year in pure profit renting out instances that run Salvatore's code.
So, whilst Salvatore has done perhaps better with the cost-plus model than he was before, he is capturing just 0.1% of the economic surplus that is being generated by his code.
And that is the problem in this scenario: if all elements of the value chain are cost-plus except one, that one element captures all of the surplus even though it may not be deserved.
The problem with this is that Redis isn't used because it is particularly good. It's used because everyone else uses it. And everyone else uses it because it's free.
If you tried to charge for Redis then "everyone else" would stop using it and pretty much all of the value disappears. It becomes a niche product that you shouldn't build on. You're vulnerable to high license fees and experienced developers become harder to find since few get experience with it.
Ok, and why do you think most people use Redis? Is it (1) they did a careful evaluation of the options and selected Redis because it was best or (2) everyone knows you use Redis if you need an in memory cache?
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.
Making the source code available for everybody to see and use for derivative works under certain conditions like retaining authorship notices or keeping the same license (copyleft).
There are many varieties of this, some are more permissive than others. But this does not directly imply a certain business model.
Some people do donation-based development. And that's fine. And some people do things entirely for free, that's also fine. (But don't be angry that somebody then takes your code and does what the license you put it under permits them to do, e.g. not pay you.)
And others are corporations that have full-time employees write code and publish it as open source. See all the Red Hat work. Or Intels and others contributions to the Linux kernel.
Open source is more than the lone dev in their basement doing selfless acts and sometimes begging for donations.
I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately. Years ago software was fully build on the backs of a multitude of giants within their niche domain.
But for a while now large companies have been adopting a model of taking from open source contributions and raking in billions. The original social bargain of "pay it on" has been broken by the Bezos of the world raking in billions. And yes, as others have pointed out, nobody owes you anything, this has down the line knock on effects of ingraining having to build widgets inhouse for the thousandth time because all the talent went and put it into their day-job instead of the community. Maybe a partial factor because the industry has expanded and matured so much in the past three decades that name recognition is harder to filter out among the noise by merely doing good work.
Whatever the case, developers are starting to believe that voluntary free open source contribution is for smucks. Which will hamper innovation and morph the industry to how, well, every other industry operated before tech came along. Siloed and slow.
> I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately.
Open source is a niche. The vast majority of developers don’t participate in open source. If they do, it’s simple bug fixes that they need for their paid jobs. The number of people creating and releasing significant open source projects is vanishingly small relative to the entire pool of developers.
I think it was a mistake to tell entry-level devs everywhere that open source was some sort of secret cheat code to boost one’s career. On the hiring and recruiting side of things, seeing open source contributions is helpful, but it’s almost never the deciding factor in hiring someone. Meanwhile, Internet forums for juniors are full of anxiety about creating side projects and GitHub profiles because young developers think it will get them to the head of the hiring line. It’s a recipe for a lot of disappointment in open source.
I have seen hiring manager on this site say they wouldn't hire anyone without opensource experience. Sometimes they say something wishy-washy about how contributing to open source is such a specialized skill that they don't have the bandwidth to train someone new. At other times they are more willing to blatantly admit that they just want someone who's capable of spending all their free time writing code.
I tend to wonder about the legality of it all. Since when did judging candidates on what they do off-the-clock become acceptable? To make it easier, if I don't have time to do open source because I am heavily involved in my religion, does that start to toe the line of acceptable work qualifications.
Significant part of open source development is paid for by companies. I don't know why the myth of its being done mostly for free persists, but maybe we should stop pretending it.
Depends on how you define "part". Maybe the visible part like MySQL or the Linux kernel or Android. But I'd say open source has a long tail mostly unpaid. From where I'm staying there is also a myth that companies pay for all the open source I use.
I don't know what open source you use. But yes, the big ones are mostly done by people who are paid for it. They are not after work occasional effort.
The smaller ones are also often done a part of university research or on clock. Not necessary because companies are altruistic, but because they need something and because open source developers need to eat.
Out of the hundred or so resumes I have worked with at this point the handful that have had their github up that I had time to look at were net-zero or net-negative as an addendum of their resume. There's a difference between an engineer with a history of open source and one that 'did something and pushed to github', and most entry-level engineers haven't had such a strong history of open source that what you see of them would be meaningful anyway. I do try to preach this to what developers I come across but there's only so much that can be done.
If you work with web standard technologies your code is probably inherently open. Even still most developers in that space cannot write any original code to save their lives. They are utterly reliant on mountains of shit that does everything and they string a few build tasks together. As an experiment take NPM, Angular, React, or SpringMVC away and observe the forth coming violence like a zombie apocalypse in a third world nation. The entitlement runs deep.
I have hired a guy that was applying for his first job at the highest salary we could afford because of his phenomenal open-source contributions. We knew right away that it was a particularly strong candidate. We were right.
Most Github repositories I've seen since then are net negative and it would be better if they hadn't been included at all.
The only reason this ‘bargain’ existed at all in the first place was because of the GPL and other more restrictive licenses which encoded this ‘bargain’ into their verbage.
The current version of the ‘bargain’ - use MIT or BSD and expect more participation as a result - has never been the norm. The norm is corporate programmers taking whatever code they can and using it.
The norm is a cleanroom implementation of open source software written because companies would rather pay for that implementation rather than muck around in open source licensed code (I watched Oracle do this with several MySQL feature/bug fix patches).
And so here we are. Yet Another MIT License Regret.
> But for a while now large companies have been adopting a model of taking from open source contributions and raking in billions.
I've been working at a large corporation for about five years now. I've been on more than a few projects where we wanted to use an open source product/tool to help build an application and it was roundly rejected by the security team. After two back-to-back requests were rejected, we were told corporate policy was 100% against using any open source tools or products in anything we did.
The ironic part is this monolithic, hulking corporation is losing chunks of market to smaller, more nimble companies who can get their product to market in three months. Whereas, it takes us 18 teams and 100 people and two years to get the same product to market. Their solution? Just buy the technology instead. We've had dozens of acquisitions over the past year or so.
Which now creates another new set of problems I'm sure you can already see. . .
>Whatever the case, developers are starting to believe that voluntary free open source contribution is for smucks.
In today's environment, it kind of is for shmucks. How many times have I seen the same tired FreeBSD copypasta about how FreeBSD powers netflix and playstation, and won't I please donate because netflix and sony are parasites who won't pony up the dough to keep FreeBSD solvent.
Why on earth would anyone directly subsidize these CEOs when they could get paid to do it instead?
It's because we could never get users to care about open-source software. Users continue to lap up closed-source software and that's what leads to billions for these companies.
I'd go as far as saying that the term "free software" is a complete an utter fail. In my mind "free speech" is speech that is entirely unrestricted. Almost all FOSS licenses come with "restrictions", such as you must leave the copyright notice in place, you must add the "PROVIDED AS IS" spiel somewhere the end user can read it, you must release your derivative work's source code under the same license etc., so it is by definition no longer "free".
0. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
1. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
3. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Even in 1998 it didn't take a genius to see what a Faustian bargain that Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond were leading us to sign.
Now we have SaaS, PaaS, and AWS. L-O-L. Bigly L-O-L. MySQL and PHP alone probably contributed to half of Zuckerface and Bezos billions.
Imagine writing an npm package that the FAANGs install as a dependency of their giant website and not being able to pass the leetcode gatecheck to even get a job there. Dystopias aren't much fun when you live in one.
That's 50k more than most open source projects make, also: No one forced the owners of qdos to give Microsoft that license for 50k. Sellers remorse is a thing, but I'm not sure why we should feel sorry for them.
As a really fun thought experiment, imagine that they took the $50,000 and put it into 30-year US Treasury bonds in 1981 and sold them in 1986 to buy Microsoft at the IPO.
It would be worth about $212 million today. And that ignores dividends.
I empathize with the sentiment, but if you want to get paid for your open source work, surely it would work better to set up a Patreon and point people to it, rather than write "send me a six figure contract or fork this!" in a GitHub issue.
It's also weird to use a license that explicitly lets Fortune 500 companies use the code for free, and then write that you don't want them to do so in the issue. Just change the license if you don't want to license it freely to big companies!
> Just change the license if you don't want to license it freely to big companies!
Marak doesn't want to prevent big companies from using his (?) code, he's saying that he won't support them for free anymore. Read the Github issue again, carefully.
I find that those companies that add issues and support requests _ought_ to have the decency to also donate to him.
But, I guess, companies don't have any decency to donate unrequested, so maybe he should put up some sort of notice to request payment for any work they request from him. Oh, wait...
There's also probably distance between the arm of the company that donates to open source and the developers who are opening issues when they spot a bug. And that distance probably gets longer for companies with the most money to donate too.
This is not exactly so. Those developers who are opening issues belong to a team, that team has access to a budget. If the company has a lot of money, as you say, they themselves have some say over where this budget gets spent.
About your first point, I've had people open issues on one of my Github projects, asking for new features. I then politely replied "I currently don't do free support for this project. If you have a budget, then I can make time. Let me know."
For me, this is the best way. It's clear and states that the ball is in their court.
He's not complaining about use, he's complaining about support.
This is not a licensing issue.
He is frustrated that companies that use his software for their business raise support and feature requests and expect him to work on them for free again and again.
I'm 100% sure they know that open source doesn't guarantee that and that he's well within his rights to ignore their support requests if he feels like doing something else.
It's not about organizations _demanding_ that you do work for them for free, it's the constant _expectation_ of it. I experience it myself quite often where users of my software ask about timelines for bug fixes or new features, but very rarely offer to chip in and certainly never to sponsor the work.
Of course these organizations have no way to force me to do anything, but it is emotionally draining to constantly have people expect you to.
I wonder where this expectation comes from? Is it because of high quality free as adware/spyware commercial software? Or the way development centered around repository name and we do not use forks?
I treat open source as a gift. It allows modifications, it allows forks, what's wrong with people?
I would be happy if somebody asked for timelines for feature requests, because it would mean that I have the option to extract money by prioritizing those features. Just make the companies bid against eachother, writing a bidding system (maybe second price auction for a work point where you set the number of work points needed for a feature) is really easy.
I already offer both sponsorship as well as tailored consulting, but I haven't found any success in trying to sell that in response to issues. The moment I mention that I can provide commercial support, they tend to become silent. Maybe it's viable if you have a truly massively successful product like Redis or something, but it hasn't been for me at least.
I'm really sorry about that. Still, probably every successful open source project should offer the commercial support by default, I feel like that's the best way to change the culture.
If you read the thread there is a link to a tweet. He had an apartment fire and lost just about everything. That is one of the things that is motivating this.
It makes complete sense to make a case in a project where there are a lot of requests for work and many companies using it.
I think a better approach is make some of the corporate users making requests admins on repo and take a break from the project. Companies would rather not maintain a private fork, but there are ways other than saying "pay up" to get them involved.
I know a couple of comments have mentioned this already, but this apparently grows out of him being in a pickle financially at the moment and resenting the time he has put into doing free work: https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272
I'm sympathetic. I don't have any funds to spare to help him out. I'm chronically broke myself.
I've done lots of nice things for people over the years for free. A lot of the things I'm good at are inherently hard to monetize (most moderating positions are unpaid, for example).
I was homeless for years. I still write about homelessness and try to provide other forms of support for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness.
Some of the things that would help:
1. Universal health care coverage in the US. ("free"/provided by the government)
2. Fix our housing policy issues such that more small housing in walkable neighborhoods becomes available.
If those two things were done, a single adult could potentially support themselves on part-time minimum wage work while renting a single room until they get back on their feet. That's currently not feasible.
I am not against open source. (I just submitted my first pull request to open source a few hours ago.) But I do recognize that there are systemic issues and we need to make it easier for people to make their lives work so they don't wind up all pissed off over what they have done for free when something goes sideways.
I don't really care. I'm not even going to read your link.
The reason I don't care is because I remain dirt poor and I've spent years trying to figure out how to earn an adequate income legitimately while being called a "whiner" and told to shut up about my financial problems and all this crap and it has a long history of making me feel suicidal.
So if you have someone "doing good works" -- like contributing for free to open source -- who cannot figure out how to make ends meet and the entire world is happy to use their stuff for free while not giving a rat's ass about their lack of an income, that alone can drive you crazy.
So I just don't care. At all. Who set the fire is of zero importance to me and has no bearing whatsoever on the fact that "We have systemic issues that we need to address."
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 said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat(E) of the day.’
13 “But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend.(F) Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? 14 Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. 15 Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’(G)
Matthew 20:9
(Marek has the right to renegotiate. The fortune 500s had the right to use the work he offered for free, as that was the terms set)
One of the fallacies in reasoning is that people tend to judge outcomes solely on the results, not taking into consideration the initial conditions.
When the authors started, did they really know that the library was going to take off and be used by many companies in the world with boat loads of money? Hell no.
Open source licenses by are optimized for high usage and freedom. You also have to consider that because it was so permissive, people at huge tech companies used it for their projects, which led to those engineers telling other engineers about the project and fast tracked to amazing growth there.
Anyways, the authors have the right to renegotiate but I don't think companies have done significant evil.
Basically, Marak is just saying he won't go back to the vineyard to work for free, but he will if he gets paid a fair salary. Else, the landowner will have to search for new workers.
It's a parable wherein the landowner is the Christian god, the work of the vineyard is the work of his will, and the denarius is salvation. It doesn't have anything to do with people getting paid fairly, it has to do with the Christian god's generosity disrupting notions of fairness.
I think that, independently of the original meaning of the parable (which is not at all what we are discussing here), it indeed is a nice example of having to accept the terms you negotiated without looking at what terms others get. I used the same example to explain why I think this situation is a bit different. But it is just an analogy, nobody is claiming this is the right interpretation of the biblical text.
the parable serves to introduce the idea of fundamental dignity in contrast to conventional notions of reason and merit. and ought not be taken as youve suggested
Yeah, it's not a very good story. There are a few possible outcomes.
1. All workers start showing up later, thus the employer is motivated incentivize those who show up earlier.
2. Instead of raising wages, the employer limit the number of available position, thus incentivizing workers to show up earlier in order to be paid the denarius whereas those that show up later risked not getting the work and therefor lowered the statistical amount of money they can earn over time.
3. The workers organize together and mutually decide to bargain with the employer as a group for work hours and wages.
4. Scabs decide to work for the employer at an increased rate of 1.5 denarii.
5. Half of the crops rot on the vines, the employer raises the price of the wine to double it's original amount to recoup the losses.
6. The employer spends some additional money on lobbyists to convince Roman governors that their business is too important to fail, and receives a bailout.
7. The original workers and their families starve to death or turn to crime.
8. The bureaucrats and landowners profit and the scabs are forced to take 0.75 denarii as their wages because they have no bargaining power and they fear starvation as their contemporaries were made an example of.
Personally I'm an atheist, but I still find this piece of religious text interesting. It tells us that this is as old problem as human civilization is. How do people share the work and the fruits of the labour?
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 indirect about it this time, he makes it clear from the beginning:
> For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard..."
The workers object because (surprise) this actually is unfair in a landscape of mortal human struggles. It's jarringly so. It defies common sense and notions of fairness. In that confusion, Jesus is trying to make a point about just how incomprehensible the generosity of the godhead is. He's saying it breaks your prior notions and that salvation doesn't map to time and money.
There's literally no other point being made by the parable, and it's a total error to try to divine another message.
You can also mine out some awful stuff by plucking certain passages without the right context, and we have certainly seen hatred and violence justified that way through history.
This story is also missing the larger context that explains what it's really about -- and the answer isn't labor and wages.
Almost as good, one might imagine. No truth written in the Bible gets less true. No lie gets less false. About the only benefit is that you know the Bible as a whole is fairly Lindy and full of powerful and competitive memes.
Which may mean that the text is useful as a means to express your opinions.
> Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money?
No. Money is a collective construct and strictly subject to collective norms (e.g., taxes). Paying selected people money for not really working is the cornerstone of corruption.
I just bought a TV from a shop selling the same as in another store, but cheaper. Should I return it and go and pay more? I've paid my taxes, the rest is mine.
One issue with "getting paid for open source" is how much marginal value the project is generating. For example, take left-pad. At the time of its infamous removal, it was relied upon by thousands of packages, including Node and Babel.
But does that mean that it was worth millions of dollars? Of course not. Because if it wasn't available, anybody could have replicated it in a few hours of work.
I don't know if that's the case for this project, but just wanted to note that "being used by <multi billion dollar company>" does not necessarily mean that you're providing that much value.
But if I am not providing much value, why am I wasting time on the project?
Like even if I am willing to work for free, I select a project thats more valuable and meaningfull. So if open source is all free, its hard to tell what is meaningfull.
Also maybe fundamentally important packages should be more carefull with their dependencies.
Right move IMO. The consulting firm a friend works for uses faker.js for almost all their projects. The consultants get paid $1500 a day and they haven’t even thought of donating as it “free and open source”.
I also hope the license is more restricted for commercial use.
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 necessary and just a minor side effect. And just as you don't have an obligation to help does nobody have an obligation to help you either.
That's why I like the term "open source" better than the original "free software". If you get the root motivation that RMS had for the "freedom" aspect of it, then that's the same thing, but too many people read it as "for free". Like apparently the author of this article. And that's just wrong.
I feel that the author started open source out of passion but is at the stage where he is sick of incredibly valuable companies using his work for profit without contributing back.
> That's why I like the term "open source" better than the original "free software". If you get the root motivation that RMS had for the "freedom" aspect of it, then that's the same thing,
That's revisionism : Open Source split from Free Software because they wanted to give freedom to companies to profit from it. With predictable consequences…
> but too many people read it as "for free". Like apparently the author of this article. And that's just wrong.
Have github issues been elevated to the level of articles?
There comes a time with all open source where the person developing goes away for some reason and someone else has to take charge. That is open source. Expecting him to feel bad about this choice is bad form.
I hope the developer gets financial support if the project is truly that popular. The reality of getting support is likely to be thin.
While not as mission critical, stories like these remind me of openssl.
I am not really happy that a string of words which have an understandable meaning ('open' and 'source' leading to 'open source') has been hijacked by some foundation. I mean how would you phrase it if your customer wants to source to be open, but without the freedom of redistribution (because he doesnt want to pay for it).
it's actually quite close to paying taxes, most people understand the benefits of a tax system (even libertarians with some caveats) but it is hard to be enthusiastic about paying taxes if you can see widespread evasion, corruption, and waste.
I am okay with paying 32% in taxes, but only if everyone else is doing it too
On Twitter, he claims that he was recently made homeless due to an apartment fire, and asks the community to send funds to help him avoid homelessness, which seems reasonable enough. He later goes on to describe "fake news written by the NY Post." I searched for this, and found an article that might be the article he describes (timing fits) [0]
Pretty crazy story, all in all!
He seems to be in some pretty dire straits, and is reacting to the perceived grievance of others profiting off of his work. All in all, I don't think this is the best way to handle the situation, although building some kind of SaaS API is probably not really possible for something that can be trivially implemented and operated locally. However, many other SaaS APIs have seemed equally trivial in the past and have been extremely successful, so it still might be a useful avenue to explore if he can sort out his legal troubles...
If the police would ransack my family home after a fire you could probably write the same article. Charred RPi's and lots of computer parts, enough wiring for a new house, lots of chemicals (cleaners, fertilizers, other chemical agents with regular gardening use cases), ultimate survival guide and related parts ("This guy was prepping for something!"). The naming of suspects is just adding insult to injury. If he's in good faith... Anyone could lose it after a house fire plus being named a 'unabomber' by your neighbours.
Emotional distress seems pretty normal after your house burns down and there's plenty of people in our community with hobbies that would be considered odd. Naming suspects in these cases seems so weird from a non-US perspective, there's not even been a court case.
This is terrible. All the news are based on speculation, but they plastered his very-Googlable-name everywhere, only making it harder for him to get a job now.
I honestly can't see anything positive about those articles existing before there's a proper court case.
I never understood the need to name suspects - address and all - in this country.
In my home country suspects that are (or are about to be) charged and convicted with a crime have their last name abbreviated (e.g. Paul S.), which seems completely reasonable to me. You're innocent until proven guilty, for one. But even if you're guilty and convicted, your punishment should be limited to whatever the judge rules it should be.
I don't see the need for public shaming beyond whatever punishment they get in court should they be convicted. When someone is released after a prison sentence they have a right to resume their life. They did their time, after all.
Sorry if I sound like I'm rambling a bit, English is not my native language.
It's about retribution and the idea that lawyers can influence the justice system and let "bad guys" go free. A lot of the states with lax laws around naming people accused of crimes are the same ones still dishing out the death penalty.
>Naming suspects in these cases seems so weird from a non-US perspective, there's not even been a court case.
As I understand it, the original reason for this is to prevent the police from simply making people disappear. It's a public check on what the police and government do to people.
That police should not make people disappear from their families without proper noticing, it would be a starter. I'm not from the USA but I think I can already guess who usually suddenly go missing because the police got them.
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.
> 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 building using the materials you have in your house. If you have any metal piping sitting around, and a nail or screw, that could be turned into a primitive gun. If you have metal piping and anything that burns very quickly like gunpowder, that's a pipe bomb (or pressure cooker). If you have a propane grill and a gun (or anything that could be used as a detonator), that propane tank could cause some serious damage.
I'll grant you, ammonium nitrate isn't a terribly common substance to have around an apartment. I still don't think it's very compelling evidence that he was building a bomb, and weaker evidence that if he was building a bomb, it was to hurt people. Maybe he was just trying to make his own fireworks. He shouldn't be doing that in an apartment, cuz risk of accidental explosions, but it seems hasty to start painting him as a domestic terrorist.
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 mainframe hacking nutjob anarchist.
(And more importantly, there are police out there right now who would jump to the same conclusions. See a simple hobbyist electronics bench and take it as something nefarious.)
That's why you don't go around presuming people are guilty of things.
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.
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:
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.
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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.
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.
> 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?
If you don't make those comments to me, and a news story is making the call that your comments were about shooting up a school, I'll presume you're innocent.
That's literally what this is about. You're not an investigator, you're not sitting on the case files for every story you see. No one is expecting you to have the same standards as a court for what guilty is, but you should still internalize some concept of innocent until proven guilty
Because the news can, and will, and does paint people as criminals when they did nothing wrong. Now a days literally all it takes is saying "so and so person was arrested for allegedly committing so and so crime".
That's it.
People don't need any more proof than that, and the fact that this entire conversation is happening when the investigation into the materials was almost 2 months ago by an NYPD Counterterrorism unit and the FBI, yet this guy is still walking around is pretty damn strong evidence that nothing more came of it, should be proof.
Tour standard of guilty should be much more than a simple news story.
A news story mentioning saltpeter and prepper books is nothing. The kind of people who experiment with saltpeter are exactly the kinds of people to read those books out of interest, not some sort of malicious plan to commit crimes.
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Also this is an aside but...
> So don't tell me that no one thought it was an actual bomb. That doesn't matter.
That's literally the crux of the matter. That's literally all that matters. That no one thought it was an actual bomb, and he didn't act like it was an actual bomb.
If both teachers immediately realized it wasn't a bomb, how are you claiming it looked like a bomb?
It didn't look like a bomb. It looked like an electronic thing splayed out, they asked what it was, he said alarm clock.
The second teacher knew it didn't look like a bomb, what happened is they presumed that he was trying to make it appear like a bomb. No one thought it was a bomb because it didn't look like one.
>His English teacher thought the device resembled a bomb, confiscated it, and reported him to the school's principal. The local police were called, and they questioned him for an hour and a half.
I misremembered the case and forgot it was the police who realized it wasn't a bomb but were trying to prove intent by interrogating him due to Texas's hoax bomb laws...
but exactly like I said above that's an aside, and the entire story just shows how little people understand of the appearance of these things if anything.
If all it takes to convince laypeople to call police on a child is a splayed out alarm clock, how many electronics hobbyists have more than enough contraptions for someone to go on record as saying "I saw a bunch of really suspicious stuff on his desk" after a fire?
I agree, it's pretty bad. But I don't think it's on the laypeople. The English teacher did the right thing. Could they live with themself knowing they could've stopped a real bombing that killed people? The problem isn't that people will call the police based on some suspicions they have in order to protect others in their community or cooperating with law enforcement and telling them what they know and have observed. What else to do?
If the teacher thought it was a real bomb do you think they would have waited until after class and walked it down to the principal's office? The school would have been evacuated before the police got to interrogating him.
The teachers said it looked like a bomb, but even they did not think it was a bomb, again the trouble came down to the hoax law, not someone thinking he had an actual bomb
> I'll grant you, ammonium nitrate isn't a terribly common substance to have around an apartment. I still don't think it's very compelling evidence that he was building a bomb, and weaker evidence that if he was building a bomb, it was to hurt people. Maybe he was just trying to make his own fireworks. He shouldn't be doing that in an apartment, cuz risk of accidental explosions, but it seems hasty to start painting him as a domestic terrorist.
For what it's worth, I fully agree with this. All I'm saying is, we shouldn't outright dismiss the possibility that he was building a bomb, simply because he's an open source developer.
You realize the concept of innocent until proven guilty is not a unique concept to HN readers right?
That presumption of innocence is not "act like maybe he was making bombs until proven guilty"?
It sounds like you've let the media erode your understanding of a very basic human right, but do not try and cast it on others as some sort of tribalism.
He is innocent until proven guilty.
Not "reasonable chance" according to your random opinion, but a judge and jury and various council go through a legal case and legally find him guilty.
> He is innocent until proven guilty ... Not "reasonable chance" according to your random opinion, but a judge and jury and various council go through a legal case and legally find him guilty.
If someone is running towards you with a knife shouting religious scripture, are you going to stand still and think to yourself "I'm going to assume this person is innocent until they are convicted of my murder in a court of law"? No, you're going to consider the possibility that they actually might intend to murder you, and you'll take appropriate precautions.
Innocent until proven guilty is a concept for the court of law, not for the court of public opinion. People are allowed to hold opinions and thoughts regarding how dangerous other people are.
Is the court of public opinion what makes you run away from someone coming at you with a knife?! Is a compelling article using stinging quotes what makes you think a knife coming at you is going to be a bad thing?
They're completely non-comparable concepts. It's such an embarrassingly lazy strawman I can't believe you bothered to waste words on it, and it's silly I should have to respond to it.
Innocent until proven guilty is not a concept born for the sake of legal rigor... it's born of the fact that "court of public opinion" is easily swayed by nonsense. It's largely seen as detracting from the proper functioning of an actual impartial justice system which is why we go to such great lengths to isolate jurors in major cases and why some countries don't even publish people's information this easily.
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So many comments are replying trying to say "there's nothing that legally requires me to assume people are innocent!!!"
That's not a clever argument, there's no legal requirement to be a free-thinking person.
But as I pointed out before, the same way a literal alarm clock splayed out in a box became a national scandal, the burden of proof for the media to sensationalize anything is embarrassing low.
Someone could have a picture taken of a simple hobbyist electronics bench and most people would see it as some sort of mad scientist's electronics lab.
Use your brain cells of a second and think of the context. Someone running at you with a knife? Where the hell does public opinion come into it?
Someone asking for money for thousands of hours of free work that they've done after their apartment burns down and they're left homeless?
And you want to protest that because the Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism of the entire NYPD found some unmixed materials and some reading materials and felt:
> the totality of the circumstances that raised our concern to a level where we're going to need more investigation
Really?
If a deputy commissioner of counterterrorism is saying "we're just worried enough to look into it" almost 2 months ago and the guy is still out here on the street, you really think you have a leg to stand on protesting the guy getting some money to not be homeless?
This honestly feels like inverse-concern baiting. The man is asking for money and about to go homeless after spending a good chunk of his life doing free work used by multi billion dollar corporations.
Trying to go "oooOOooOo he might be a terrorist!!!" over this weak of an indictment is the height of something so insulting, the words to describe it escape me.
> 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, then clearly you would assume that the man charging at you with a knife has no intention of committing a crime, right? Since you assume that they are entirely innocent, then there is no risk of being murdered, so you would not try to run away, right? Can you see how that doesn't make sense? Clearly you would try to run away from someone running at you with a knife, and that's because you have no obligation (legal or otherwise) to assume that everyone is innocent. It's okay to assign probabilities to different events, including crimes that people may or may not commit.
If you didn't take the extreme position to begin with, we wouldn't have to go over extreme examples to demonstrate why your extreme position was wrong. Anyway, I'm going to assume that we both now agree that there is no obligation to assume people are innocent until proven guilty. If you still disagree, please explain how this obligation should work out in the context of the knifeman attack.
> ...the same way a literal alarm clock splayed out in a box became a national scandal...
...but this was not an alarm clock. This was ammonium nitrate (among other stuff). Ammonium nitrate is used for fertilizer and explosives. Was he a farmer? No. So either he was intending to use it for explosives, or he was running some chemistry experiments or something. Can you see how this is different from the possession of an alarm clock?
For what it's worth, I think the most likely explanation for the stuff found is that he was geeking out some harmless experiments. I think the second most likely explanation is that he was going to build bombs and blow stuff up in the forest for fun. I don't think it's likely that he intended to hurt people in bombs, because it's extremely rare for people outside warzones to hurt other people with bombs. But it's definitely within the realm of possibility, and it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
> Someone asking for money for thousands of hours of free work that they've done after their apartment burns down and they're left homeless?
I'm not calling for any fundraisers to be shut down, and I'm not admonishing people for donating money. Even if he intended to hurt people with bombs (which he probably didn't), I think the world is going to be a better place if people donate money and help him get on his feet. Let's hope that the investigation can clear him innocent of any suspicions, and that this doesn't loom over his job search in the future.
> 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 experimentation.
When someone is running at you with a knife is the thought "this person is going to harm me" a tertiary thought?
You realize it's not illegal to own any of the materials he had or to experiment with them? The reckless endangerment charge is not just for having them but for having a box catch fire after storing it near a stove?
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 mean
> This was ammonium nitrate (among other stuff). Ammonium nitrate is used for fertilizer and explosives.
Where the HELL did you see him have Ammonium Nitrate? Don't tell me you read POTASSIUM Nitrate... literally saltpeter you can order of Amazon right now with next day shipping... and thought it was AN. It'd just drive home how precious little you know of the topic and hand and how your serious of comments literally is just concern-baiting that we're jumping way too quickly to treat an innocent person as innocent...
> 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.
Obligatory Reddit-type response: "Sir, this is a Wendy's drive-thru. Not a court of law."
HN response: Of course, everyone is free to say what they wish. First amendment. Freedom of speech. Freedom of thought. Freedom is the basic human right.
Wikipedia says, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 11, states: "Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defense."
Notice that this covers the rights of someone "who has been charged with an offence" in "a public trial".
There's not actually a "human right" preventing people from having or expressing opinions.
Precious little about your comment makes sense from that first sentence to the rest of it.
> Of course, everyone is free to say what they wish. First amendment. Freedom of speech. Freedom of thought. Freedom is the basic human right.
I'm not even going to bother falling into the tangential tarpit of acting like someone is a bomb maker without them having gone to trial is a "1st amendment right". After all, if your best defense of a statement is "I'm legally allowed to say it", it's probably not worth much consideration.
> Notice that this covers the rights of someone "who has been charged with an offence" in "a public trial".
No it doesn't. It covers the rights of a person. Period. That's literally the point of a universal declaration of human rights
You're trying to play word sashimi to make a point that isn't made. The definition of guilt is specific to a public trial exactly because a "trial" of public opinions is so easy to manipulate.
Sure it can't force the general public to be decent people and understand that people should be presumed innocent until proven guilty... but it's also not endorsing the public not do so. It's not limiting presumption of innocence to trials.
I think it's reasonable for police & even FBI to investigate after a fire in a home with lots of chemicals, including 40lbs of potassium nitrate, after also finding bomb-making information. However it does seem like they made a rush to judgment in arresting him rather than simply letting the hospital hold him until medically cleared, after which the police could hold him for 48 hours without charging, all while they investigate things more thoroughly like any writing/internet posts etc that could indicate any actual intent to use the stuff, rather than simply a (very dangerous) lack of care in how he conducts his hobbies.
Yikes, what you describe could easily be a decent portion of HN people’s homes. Don’t forget the anti-social, unpopular with the neighbors bit either. And of course the NYPost appears to thrive on drumming up scandal.
I second that. The ammount of microcontrollers, arduino/RPI boards, gsm modules, 400 Mhz radio transcievers and such would most likely "make me available" for "interviews".
Just a few years back when moved to a diff city for the job we had a visit to check if "we're ok" because our electricity bill was way above the average for the area. The silver lining: My wife was ok with me upgrading everything in the rack with new, low(er) power equipment.
Also, never forget how these intitial police investigations are wrong all the time. How do they know this is potassium nitrate? Was it labeled? Does it look like it? Smell like it? Taste like it?
Do you have any ammonium nitrate though? I mean, chances are he was just some pyro and not actually interested in bombing/killing people. But it's dumb to do that in a flat.
>Cops said FDNY fire marshals are combing through Squire’s charred, first-floor apartment to determine the cause of the blaze, an FDNY spokesperson said.
The fact that his apartment is 'charred' suggests he was doing stuff in it.
Could be he took the materials with him as he was trying to escape out the back window, or that's just where he was storing them so they wouldn't be found if a search was conducted.
I think it's useful that this was reported on, because it could make people more wary of shelling out money to a guy who was recklessly endangering others even if there were no nefarious motives.
> The fact that his apartment is 'charred' suggests he was doing stuff in it.
Or, it suggests that there was a fire, which is not really up for debate.
> Could be he took the materials with him as he was trying to escape out the back window
You are making up a hypothesis to make someone sound guilty with no evidence.
> I think it's useful that this was reported on, because it could make people more wary of shelling out money to a guy who was recklessly endangering others even if there were no nefarious motives.
This is a poor opinion. First, he has not been found guilty of "reckless endangement", and you are just assuming he's guilty. Do you also expect to see reporting every time someone recklessly endangers others by driving at high speeds through a school zone, or accidently runs through a stop sign?
Publishing accusations of someone (especially a very easily google-able person) being a terrorist is not something that should be done lightly without proof.
Hell, right now I'm pretty sure I have both bleach and ammonia in my apartment as regular cleaning supplies. When combined, these ingredients are dangerous, but that sure as shit doesn't mean I'm endangering others just by possessing them.
I have a garden of about 400 m2. So yes, there are different 20kg bags of fertilizer in the shed. Ammonium nitrate being NPK 34-0-0 (wiki), I think I can get pretty close to that with boosting fertilizer (like 25-5-5 or something). The point is that one could write a hit piece with only "true" information about me. I even have both "rightwing" and "leftwing" extremist propaganda in my house! (Say, Nozick and Solzjenitsyn. Or Nietzsche and Orwell.)
There is no reason to implicitly trust what a police officer tells a reporter or says at a press conference during the initial investigation of a crime.
Fair enough, but would you take all of the most suspicious-looking items in your house that could possibly implicate you in a crime and put them all into one crate, including printed material and books that explain how to perform said crime?
For all those people in this thread praising his work, now's the time to put your money where the mouth is. If you have used his work, push your companies to sponsor/donate. Asking irrelevant questions like whether he has a job does not help the situation. The community's response to events like this is what determines the future of open source. People like to complain about copyleft vs libre licenses. But if you have benefitted much from open source software and are hesitant about contributing back financially, you are part of the problem. This is not just about Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Fortune 500s. If you are a tech startup with revenue or funding and uses his software in your products, consider a 5 to 6 figures contract, or at the very least a significant one time donation.
I use his work, but for me the situation is more complicated my prior experiences with the author.
He's been making similar complaints about his lack of renumeration for quite a while. In an older GitHub where he requested contributions, I pointed out that he had barely worked on the project for many months (at that time), and not published a new version to npm in years[1], despite making a $600 withdrawal from his Open Collective fund in June 2018 with the explicit purpose of releasing v5[2].
In the thread, I suggested that I and others might be willing to contribute, but I wanted more certainty on what exactly my contribution would be paying for. As I saw it, at that point he had a number of regular donors who were essentially paying him to do nothing.
He responded very angrily, saying nobody had any right to question his actions or to expect anything from him, even if they were paying him. He then deleted my comment entirely and banned me from commenting further. This interaction didn't exactly leave me with a strong desire to contribute. I think he's a rather volatile individual and the community would indeed be better off forking this project than indulging his sense of grievance.
You might see that as “volatile”, but I think I can see what he’s getting at. A charitable reading of his whole stance:
• We can enter into a formal contract where I actually do owe you work-on-this-project in exchange for pay;
• but without such a contract, donations to me are just that — donations — and don’t influence my work;
• but this is an open-source project, so you’re free to put whatever work you like into it, and keep/use/share the results (in your own space, that I don’t have to referee.)
• I’ll just be over here, doing what I want, unless/until someone makes a contract with me to do what they want. (Which, of course, they’re not obligated to do; they could just as well hire someone else to fork and maintain the project, rather than hiring me. That’s their choice.)
• So, in short, you’re not the boss of me; unless you’re literally my boss. (A patron is not a boss.)
Yeah, bringing money into free software equation complicates things.
It comes down to donors expecting something back for their donation, while authors expect something back for all the effort they put so far into the project that is obviously useful to other people.
For my open source project I made a hard decision not take any money. This curbs expectations and puts users at disadvantage, but lets me take as much time off as I want and I sleep better.
I've participated in a project using Bountysource some years ago; in total I received something on the order of 1500-2000 $. Which is nice. I assume a lot of people did a lot more work than I did back then and never saw any money for it. So I probably have no right to complain or lament about these transactions in any way. But, in a way, it is very hard to not think about dollar per time, especially with Bountysource being attached to solving specific issues. I believe this contributed to my mentality souring over time, because in the back of my head I never got rid of the idea that I'm sort-of at work here, but at about 2 $/hr average wage. I stopped contributing to that project completely after about just two years or so.
For most people, the funding mechanisms on the Internet pretty much all carry an expectation that they're to support ongoing work that will be used to either explicitly deliver a product, as with Kickstarter, or is to fund an artist's/coder's/etc. ongoing work. Not many people are making donations based on past effort.
I sold a (non-open source) shareware product way back when. Money definitely provided the incentive to put more work into it than I otherwise would have. On the other hand, it made me treat it as a business, albeit a part-time one.
This feels like a semantic non-sequitur. Maybe that's actually a great example of core of the problem at hand!
You're trying to argue a conclusion based on the specific word "donor", but many of these "donors" (or in this thread's case potential "donor") don't see themselves that way; they are not interested in "donating" with no strings, it seems like they are more interested in "patronage" or some sort of "sponsoring", where their money is not no-strings, but instead conditional on some specific threshold of level/quality of support/service.
Perhaps we just need a bit richer vocabulary for these discussions; if the project author is only interested in unconditional donations, that's their prerogative, and you're free to fork or fund accordingly. But also recognize that at the margin, "donate with no strings" is a much tougher sell for enterprises than "patronage will buy you X quality of service".
So if you're actually making an effort to turn an open-source project into revenue, I think you'll probably need to listen to your potential customers/patrons a bit more and give them the assurances they are looking for. Again, any open source author is free to do as they please! But as the GP notes, bringing money into the situation complicates things, and I don't think it's reasonable or rational to expect companies to start throwing donations your way without listening to what they want to get in return.
By my understanding, in the US, if you solicit donations and say you will do something specific with them (e.g., use them to pay yourself to work on a project), then those aren't really donations. They're payment for a service. You may not think that you entered into a contract with the "donors" by accepting the "donations," but you did. You made an offer to perform an action in exchange for money and someone accepted that offer by paying you. That's a contract and anyone who donated could take you to court to get the money back.
I do not think he 'deserves' to get paid. It is nice if he gets paid, but I dont even see a moral obligation (not speaking of legal). I mean the idea of gpl2 (at least from linus and my perspective) is nicely laid out here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU
Paraphrasing:'I give you my sourcecode and if you change it and give the software away, please give me the changes'.
For MIT license (which Marak choose) (this is not in the video link), it is more like: 'please use this for whichever cause you like, I dont even expect software changes back'.
Everyone deserves to get paid (in the sense of moral desert; i.e. people "deserve" human rights.) You don't have a personal obligation to pay them, though.
Solving that discrepancy isn't going to be done in an HN comment; it's the Great Work of capitalist statecraft.
I agree he deserves to get paid like everybody else, but not because of this work he did. Unfortunately not all societies do that, so uually the common route to get paid is to get (a) work (contract), somebody is willing to pay for.
I believe prison laborers deserve to be paid minimum wage, despite their convictions and despite their inability to negotiate. Additionally minimum wage should be raised to a living wage.
You’re taking an overly reductionist view, incompatible with things like “equal pay for equal work.” He definitely deserves to get paid for his work, and it’s obviously a matter of by whom, and he’s fed up with giant corporations using his stuff despite being able to pay him, and he’s totally in the right even if he’s insert-some-undesirable-here.
I agree with the other commenter that "deserves" is a strong word.
If you want to sell something for money, you put a price on it. And people decide to buy it or not.
If you give it away for free, going back after the fact and asking for a donation is fine. But I don't think it's required. And it doesn't make people who choose not to donate bad in any way.
He should probably figure out his next business and get to working on that. Start a business, sell a thing, profit.
Having been on both sides of that pay discrepancy, I have come to the conclusion that most of our economic theory about the nature of business and competition is bullshit. I now see corporations as social organizations which exist to keep educated people fed and controlled, everything else is secondary. The sums are big because the money has to get divvied up amongst everyone, even if the work involved is just changing a hex value by the lowest paid and probably most technically skilled person in the network.
Yep, that money has to pay for not only the developer "doing the work", but all the overhead: the product managers, QA, release/deployment... then redo of work because someone used the wrong shade of blue.
He was co founder of Nodejitsu, the company who raised kickstarter funding for NPM, the same time NPM raised money from investors . There was a legal conflict about who owns NPM, they didnt refund or make a statement the money they raised for a project they don't own. That Kickstarter campaign was a scam and they got away with it.
I feel for him being in his tough spot, but let's be clear on what faker.js is. I suspect many companies (like mine) use it to create "decent"-looking data for tests. But we could trivially do without it, and basically just used it because it was there. I contrast this with some other open source projects we use that we specifically contribute to (using GitHub donations) because they are central libraries to our code base.
How often have you implemented a trivial feature and, after adding tests, debugging, doing code review, etc, you find it’s taken a nontrivial amount of time. And it’ll likely take maintenance too as you learn what you need (easier when you’ve seen it done already).
Most of these trivial things probably take nontrivial time, and if you add all of them together for all the trivial projects you use, it’s probably saved a really serious chunk of time.
The ocean is made of “trivial” drops of water, yada yada.
I think the point is that generating pretty fake data as opposed to bland fake data is a "nice to have" rather than a "must have" for 98% of companies. And by the time you get up to AirBnb and FB, etc., they have their own internal testing data and standards based on years of real-world false negatives and false positives.
It's really a content library, which is useful, but it's not in the mission-critical category where developers can get a rubber stamp budget approval from their boss. It's a great project to get your name out there as an open source developer, rather than a viable business model IMO.
Let's be clear, this is the difference between your test user being called Tom Smith with email tom@smith.com and Joseph Baker with email jbaker@bigcorp.com versus being called Foo Bar and Foo Bar2 with emails foo@example.com and foo2@example.com
"Let's be clear, action developer actually took versus action developer didn't take but in my opinion isn't that different, as someone who didn't take any actions at all" is a bad hill to die on.
Likewise, the trivial or novel that you borrow for free isn’t really free when you need to use it suddenly in ways that the license doesn’t permit or it is just technically inconvenient. It is sort of like leasing vs buying, but not really a good analogy.
That's going to be true to some extent of every library your company uses, but for every library someone writes and offers as FOSS, you don't have to spend the cycles designing, developing, and maintaining your own, nor training new hires on using it. You're fundamentally misunderstanding the value of having good quality tools developed by someone else.
And I'm not even going to _start_ on what I think of your attitude towards test tooling vs "central libraries" other than to note that if you don't consider test tools central to your development process, I think you have bigger problems.
You're completely mischaracterizing my post. My point is that if faker were anything slightly above free, we really wouldn't have used it, and our code quality wouldn't suffer from not having it. It was more of a "ooh, that's kinda nice" thing when we used it.
> And I'm not even going to _start_ on what I think of your attitude towards test tooling vs "central libraries" other than to note that if you don't consider test tools central to your development process, I think you have bigger problems.
That's not my attitude at all and is a bullshit strawman. I actually do donate to libraries that are fundamental to our test framework. Faker is just definitely not one of them.
Yeah but it is also hilarious when the contributors of free open source software rage quit when they realize others can use their work for free while the contributors forget to make money.
Software developers, man!
For a bi-weekly hilarious rage quit, check out Andre Conje on twitter!
I'm not sure that's the case here. It sounds like their apartment caught fire and now they are homeless. In my opinion, this sounds more like a desperation move than anger; this developer really needs money ASAP in order to keep a roof over their head.
And this other time I saw a hardware company be “in the spirit of open source” and then saw another company use their code in cheaper hardware sold for less and then the first company went on a rage tirade and tried to edit their commit history to change the license, tarnishing themselves in their whole community and customer’s eyes at the time.
That’s horrible. If you produce something for free, and someone uses it to reduce effort and expenses, at least throw some money their way! Doesn’t even have to be much.
I wonder if npm packages should operate in a similar way YouTube does. Why can’t people sell a license via npm? That would be a nice way to browse packages, pay a buck or two for Faker.js for commercial projects. Plenty of us have budgets that $50 dollars could get you some solid pro versions of a lot of software.
> If you have used his work, push your companies to sponsor/donate.
That's not how any of this works. Most people work for companies that do not just donate to random software developers. If you want companies to send you money, you need to have something on an invoice. You don't actually have to make the commercial edition different than your community edition, especially if you're charging a low amount, finance isn't going to grill you about why you aren't using the free version. But you need to align how you expect to get paid with how companies are set up to pay people. Charge for stuff!
Honestly, he should have used the GPL and allowed other licensing options for commercial entities. Frankly I wouldn't use MIT license for personal open-source projects.
Debian (for example) has 51,000 free software packages. How do we decide which ones to fund and how much they get? Do you earn money for being the maintainer. LOC you commit? Bugs you report or fix? What about people that write documentation or packaging?
This looks like a pretty popular project, so I assume he's decently talented. How does he not have a day job? Passion projects are great and all, but they're not known for paying the bills. Especially for solo maintainers, it's almost like playing a gig at a coffee shop for tips. Want to make a career out of it? You need talent, marketability, and be ready to compromise on your vision.
This is wrong. If someone works a day job, they won't have time to work on their OS projects. Corporation should pay contribution to the OS projects they use to make billions/year. We should have license that requires only high income companies to pay for usage.
> As everybody knows, every OSS maintainer doesn't have a day job.
We could still have many more if it was viable to do it without being forced to have a day job. Especially when your software is used by many succesfull companies.
> "OS project"
It stands for open source project. I don't get your quotes here.
> Impossible to accomplish, because "OS project" is not a legal entity to whom one could pay.
You talk about law, I talk about ethics.
> We have such licenses, but they don't have anything to do with Free Software or Open Source Software. Such licenses are called "commerical licenses".
Using "commerical licenses" hurts every use cases that is not profit based. Having mixed licenses adds a lot of complication for the mantainers on top of the already difficult volontary development.
I suggest you do some research. It is perfectly fine to have “mixed” licenses. Redis operates like this and has no problem making money, as do many others.
“adds a lot of difficulty” is a terribly weak argument - you want to make it your job and get paid for it, of course it will take some effort. Nobody owes you anything.
As a developer, I want my job to be about producing software. Handling the nitty gritty of commercial licensing is something I will happily leave to people who studied to do it.
I also reject the notion that everything should be commercialized, OSS is the antithesis of it.
I thought you were proposing a form of hybrid paid-OSS as many seem to want now. If you want to make a living, make it a business (yes, someone will have to deal with the business stuff).
And that's true, but then we circle back to the OP (original problem), if you can't make a living out of OSS you're generally very limited in how much you can achieve, which then stiffles innovation in all other sectors that depend on OSS.
So the question stands, how do we allow OSS maintainers to contribute without forcing them to find ways to monetize their project, which would be against the very nature of OSS?
And I'm loving this discussion, because then why can't you apply it to other fields, like arts? In fact similar discussions are already happening in most creative fields. I know where this is going, and it's great.
>how do we allow OSS maintainers to contribute without forcing them to find ways to monetize their project
The most common way--which is pretty widespread--is to work for a company that is monetizing the project or otherwise depends on it as they're often interested in hiring someone with particular familiarity with the code base.
> Using "commerical licenses" hurts every use cases that is not profit based.
At the end of the day, people still have to eat.
The direct consequence of releasing you work under a copyleft license is that you have to figure out an alternate source of income in order to sustain yourself.
You could do that by providing paid consultancy, or by selling a product. It's perfectly valid to have a full time day job as an employee to sustain yourself, and do related or totally unrelated open source on the side. It's valid to start your own business providing consultancy based on your own open source project. Or maybe own a business on something entirely unrelated. To put it even to the extreme: you could be homesteading in the outback, living on cans of beans and rice while writing open source code on a dingy laptop powered by a generator and a satellite uplink each night.
My point is that covering your primary needs by making an income should come before any considerations to provide free labour.
In fact, this principle extends beyond open source code and to any creative endeavour. For instance, many famous writers didn't write full time. Kurt Vonnegut managed a Saab car dealership and J.D. Salinger was an entertainment director aboard a cruise ship at one point.
Copyleft isn't a business model. And one should interpret "business model" in the broadest sense of the word here: figuring out your personal finances and how you make an income is privy to the notion.
Copyleft protects the creator exactly because it isn't a business model in itself. Copyleft doesn't guarantee any support or continued maintainership towards users. It is not an SLA. There's zero obligation on your part, as a creator, to maintain anything you release on account of what users might want. You're entirely free to walk away.
As far as users are concerned, if they decide to rely on open source, they also accept the risks that comes with using third party code which doesn't get maintained or even gets abandoned. That's not a problem of the creator, that's entirely the problem of those who rely on open source code. Copyleft protects users to the extent that they are entirely free to fork your code and do whatever they want with it as long as they use the same copyleft terms if they decide to publish their modifications.
The perceived robustness of Linux by users actually translates into a due sense of trust in an emerging collective behaviour: that there will always be a wide community of maintainers working on the codebase either being paid or voluntary. But that trust isn't a formal, legal SLA at any given point.
Those are the consequences that come with deciding to maintain or use open source software.
Yes, it's true that there are several companies who have leveraged open source to unrivalled financial and business success. And it's also true that there are plenty of maintainers who barely see a tuppence for their long hours at night herding issue queues and reviewing pull requests.
Pitting them against each other isn't the way forward. If Amazon or Facebook are using open source software in order to sell their services to the tune of billions of dollars, then that's not solely because of Torvalds' decision to put Linux out there under the GPL license. It's equally because they understood and managed other aspects such as legal compliance, financial / asset management, human resources management, sales, marketing, acquiring and mergers,...
The problem there isn't the apparent 'abuse' of copyleft tools in it's own right. It's a far more complex set of economic, political, financial, cultural, ideological,... variables that created a unique context that allowed those companies to emerge.
The biggest fallacy open source maintainers face is that they are somehow obliged to boundlessly cater to the wishes, desires and needs of communities that emerge around their projects for next to nothing. Even when those communities attract developer teams from Fortune 500 companies.
They are not, that's the whole premise of both copyleft AND copyright.
If you want to give your work away unrestricted and free while pouring in endless amounts of hours, days and weeks, that's totally fine. Just don't be surprised that doing that full time without further consideration won't make you rent at the end of the month. At the end of the day, there simply isn't such thing as a free lunch.
After 20 years, I can tell you that neither closed or open source are better in absolute terms. They both have their drawbacks and their advantages. I've ran into specific business cases where closed source solution clearly was the better option; and vice versa as well.
Maybe because he’s banned from a bunch of open source communities for threatening comments and being an asshole. Oh and also was arrested in September for having bomb making materials.
> Making the world a better place by allowing big corporations to generate solid fake test data for their QA flows.
--- Random Guy in a random Silicon Valley episode
Not compromising your vision? Not to belittle Marak's work here, it's certainly valuable, but it doesn't sound like something that one does to make the world better, but like something that is useful (nearly) only in a corporate context and should be done for a decent salary.
I think regardless of the repository, participation in the FOSS ecosystem strengthens it and encourages more people to join. The very act of doing so makes the world a better place, indirectly.
It's not the same as boots-on-ground charity work, no. But it's something.
Yes, I don't want to say I disagree with their work, not at all!
And while I thought this is classic corporate-centric coding, some people [1] seem to have a strong relationship with this:
> Faker is love. Faker is life. I applaud this move. Someone sponsor this man!
I can't edit the GP anymore, but it really seems to be a beloved tool. I guess we love the tools we use, even if they ultimately benefit someone else. :)
Then it’s pretty easy to stop playing for tips or perhaps stop hanging out a sign that says “feel free to sample without paying me or even referencing me.”
If I’m playing for tips, have thousands of listeners, and making an amount of money that doesn’t make me happy then that’s a good sign to stop doing that because people don’t value my music as much as I do.
It’s really hard to understand what makes an album #1 as there’s so many factors. I think that’s why it’s so important to set up licenses beforehand. I don’t think it’s reasonable that I’m entitled to any percentage of a #1 album just because they sampled my CC-commercial licensed music.
Be interested to know which part of it is fake news eh.
The culmination of the recent tweets and actions presents this as having more of a personal tone than a grand indictment of big companies relationship with open source.
> building some kind of SaaS API is probably not really possible for something that can be trivially implemented and operated locally
A SaaS that allows you to deploy APIs and handles Auth/Billing/Customer Support/Usage Metrics etc would be a viable service. There are plenty of 1 man APIs that could be built by an engineer if the heavy business aspects were taken care of.
I dunno, there's websites like placeholder kittens and the like which are "mock data as a service"; faker.js could be offered as a service as well in that regard. I can't see much opportunities for making money, but it's something at least.
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.
I remember Marak from the very early days of Node.js on IRC. He was extremely active answering tons of people's questions. I don't know him personally, although he helped me a lot on IRC back in the day. I was excited watching Nodejitsu startup and sad to see it kind of disappear. In a lot of ways people like Marak and TJ Holowaychuk have done so much for the community that it wouldn't look the same without them.
We often talk about the responsibilities of companies to pay open source engineers. I think this would be great but in my experience companies are very often looking for ways to cut costs to meet goals. Giving money to open source is likely one of the first things that would get cut in these situations. I'm not saying that is a good thing but a reality. That being said if the donations are so small that they aren't going to move the needle for a goal either way then it is unlikely to be cut. I don't know what the sweet spot is but it would be cool if it became standard for software companies to expect to give some portion of their budget to open source.
This also leaves the question open for what the responsibility for individuals are. I'm not proud to say it but I haven't given very much money to open source developers. However, I have a list of about 10 that have had a very positive influence on my career. I would bet I'm not alone. I do feel conviction over this and posts like this are helping me re-evaluate this.
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.
I tried (not very hard) and failed to life out of open source.
The real problem that I see, is that, the more I mature as engineer, the more my work improve, the more it is valuable, the less time I got to do it.
Often the choice is between time with my family and coding, and for how much I love coding, it won't beat time with the family.
It is a shame because there is a lot of open source work that we could do in a lot of area, even fundamental area like storage that is suppose to be stable and mature.
Certainly his right; his project (though it has a very permissive license), his time. It sounds like he's tired of working on it, and he requires sponsorship to make it worthwhile. Let's say he doesn't, and the project is forked. This begs an interesting question: does he own the npm name? "faker" has mindshare, not just in JS; if he's unwilling to work on it, would it make sense for the NPM organization to reassign the name to whatever the active fork is?
Kind of sets a horrible precedent by NPM no? Keep, maintaining your open source project or we use it for a different project. How many builds does that break the very next update? What about downstream codebase security?
Which corporation sponsoring the fork gets to be declared the active fork?
It seems simplest to keep his original version and whatever updates he feels like doing as his own thing, and if a corporation feels like forking the project to add some feature they can add their name to it. If others prefer that version they can switch to it.
It's reasonable given the people doing it are well versed in this stuff. He keeps doing what he's doing without being as annoyed, the project stays on trajectory, and individual users can switch if they feel like it to an alternative option.
He ought to keep the name, however there should be some way to keep track of the public forks via something that is github oriented. Maybe something in DHT like IPFS. It maybe something npm/yarn can work out.
the whole point is the original author may not want to publish the forks on his domain. There ought to be independent 3rd party to keep track of the fork or a npm name that is not the author and not github (aka Microsoft).
I've seen a few abandoned projects where the first issue is by someone announcing their fork and their willing to continue maintenance, merge PRs, etc. Not an ideal situation, but sometimes it proves helpful.
Problem: You want to make money for all the work you do your open-source project. But no one pays for it.
Reason: Developers choose your project, and developers are at the bottom of the food chain. They have no authority to spend money, usually, or they get pushback and delays if they do.
Solution: Band together with the authors of related projects and create a new closed-source product, taking bits of your various codebases. For instance, what if Faker.js and other similar libraries banded together into a corporation, and sold a multi-language mocking/stubbing/faking toolset? It would be easier to go to your boss, show them the product, and convince them to pay for it, since it now encompasses multiple things your dev team needs.
>For instance, what if Faker.js and other similar libraries banded together into a corporation, and sold a multi-language mocking/stubbing/faking toolset?
Nobody would use them. Ultimately they would lose out to someone like Thoughtbot that puts out open source tools as a loss leader to drive consulting business.
That only works if Thoughbot's open source tools are good enough. People seem very happy to pay for JetBrain's suite of tools. Postman's collaborative offering makes good money. Sublime is still doing well.
There are people still selling standalone pieces of software to developers and doing okay. It's hard to compete with huge companies with a build-over-buy culture but that's just their nature. It's way cheaper to just built it themselves and have control of the project than to pay the licensing fees.
Tools are an easier sell. You can always switch to a different one without too much fuss. That's a lot different than writing five years worth of test cases and then having to go for a license renewal.
I don't think you should write FOSS software if you want to get paid for copies of it or the use of copies of it. That kind of defeats the whole point[1].
Either: 1) Be comfortable being extremely poor. This was the route I initially took: I was homeless during the time I learned UNIX and Python, etc. and had plenty of free time to work on writing code.
2) Be wealthy already. The easiest is to be born to wealth, but if that didn't work out for you you'll have to acquire wealth yourself. There is a wealth (pun intended) of information on this already, and it's beyond the scope of this comment, but I'll recommend "The Art of Money Getting or, Golden Rules for Making Money" by P. T. Barnum (Yes, that P. T. Barnum!) esp. the last chapter: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm and "The Richest Man in Babylon" which "remains in print almost a century after the parables were originally published, and is regarded as a classic of personal financial advice." ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon_%28...
3) Get paid for the writing itself (which is hopefully solving someone's immediate problem, eh?) (This is what RMS himself does, FWIW.) (Can be combined with option #2 to bootstrap wealth.)
[1] The "whole point" being something like, "Let's accelerate the techno-singularity and go live in Star Trek with cool aliens who like us." yeah?
"I lost all my stuff in an apartment fire and am barely staying unhomeless. Lost access to most of my accounts. All precious metal is missing. If anyone could bless paypal@marak.com with a little cash it would help me from freezing on the street. lol."
a programmer's work is never done. I imagine this is doubly true for anything js related. this project has 179 open issues and 85 open PRs, impressively almost as many issues as lines of code!
Or a change of work environment. Too much paid work or no more JavaScript, who knows.
I've been offered to take over the development and maintenance of a small Ruby gem many years ago. I think I contributed a patch or something. I needed that gem in my current Rails project, probably not in the next one. Furthermore I don't work only with Ruby. So I refused.
Something like faker is useful in nearly every project and I contributed to the Elixir faker (my customer agreed to that, we needed it.) I learned a couple of things of the Elixir environment in the process. By the way, nice team and great tooling. Would I take over that package if offered? Again no, because I don't use Elixir full time and I'd rather drop another contribution whenever I need it. No time to work on fixes and look at issues not related to my work.
Has anyone ever heard of a service that allows users to attach bounties to issues? So if the open source developer fixes an issue, the developer gets the money offered by the issue reporter.
Looking at the Bountysource docs, it looks like users can offer bounties. Do you know if it has a Github integration that allows developers to post some sort of price schedule, or to request a bounty on a given issue?
Edit: It looks like there are red flags around Bountysource too:
"If no Solution is accepted within two years after a Bounty is posted, then the Bounty will be withdrawn and the amount posted for the Bounty will be retained by Bountysource."
"In December, 2017, Bountysource was acquired by a cryptocurrency company called CanYa who redesigned the Bountysource site and service with a new cryptocoin focus."
This one looks interesting. The top project has gotten $7,858.50. Not too shabby.
The docs are pretty thin though, so it's not clear if it's possible for devs to attach a price to feature requests themselves. I've been looking for service with a flow like
1. User opens feature request
2. Dev responds with "Not useful to me, so I'll do it for $200. Click this button to pay."
Edit: Issuehunt.io seems to be a side project of the people that make Boost Note. That may explain why BoostIO/Boostnote is the most funded project, and why there doesn't seem to be much ongoing effort to promote the service. I get that "we made it for us, but you can use it too" vibe from their site.
Yes, a company will pay you to work on open source projects that are considered valuable for that company.
I am surprised that Marak hasn't been offered a satisfactory job that pays six figures already. Perhaps he makes some mistakes while applying, or luck hasn't been on his side.
Makes me wonder if GitHub could add a “paid support ticket” as an add-on to their donation buttons. A repo owner could offer paid support tickets by setting an option. A bit of a combination of bounty program and consulting, but simpler and streamlined using GitHubs clout.
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 managed, but you're forever a renter.
They've destroyed our open web, replaced RSS with DRM, left us with streaming and music options worse than cable and personal audio libraries.
The web is bloated with ads and tracking, AMP is given preference, Facebook and Twitter are testing the limits of democracy and radicalizing everyone to cancel one another.
Remember when the Internet was actually pleasant? When it was nice to build stuff for others to use?
Stop giving your work away for free when the companies only take.
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 work free.
The right reaction is not to stop producing open source software. The right reaction is to adjust the license.
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't love this hyper-centralization of wealth and it would be better for the world if we defanged the power that billionaires have.
> I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD.
That is an arbitrary criteria, and you'll end up with software being written by Apple Development LLC, the loss-making shell company that Apple uses to do all it's development.
If you want something other than the GPL you can use it but don't be surprised when people commercialise your software at scale, don't pay for it and don't release changes back to the community.
I mean, this is a fairly trivial loophole to close if you have a lawyer who knows what they're doing.
In fact, you don't even need to close the loophole. You just need to make FAANG employees pause long enough to worry that they might not comply, deterring them from using said library.
How does it help you if they don't use your lib? Why do you publish your work in the first place? To get donations? That's not what open source was invented for.
If you don't want people to use your work, don't publish it. Publishing has the totally selfish goal of getting others to help you by trying things out, report bugs and improvements and some of them to contribute those things to you. Don't publish if you don't care and just want mobey out of it. Then open source is not for you.
You think Linus Torvalds wanted donations when he published Linux? Or that he was in a particularly philantropic mood? No way. He did it to get other people to work for him. And it turned out great for the project! That he is now making a living with it is just a side effect.
> Why do you publish your work in the first place? To get donations? That's not what open source was invented for.
I don't know about everyone else, but if I publish something as open-source it's because it's something I made and needed in the first place.
Open-sourcing it is just a way to enable other people who have an itch to scratch to be able to do so. More often than not, such scratches comes back benefiting me as the original author.
I don't get this fixation on everything having to be profitable, but then again I don't work on any FOSS projects full time. I only do it to scratch an itch, to make the software work for me.
And when it works... I go do the actual work I'm paid to work on, using the software I've helped make better.
I feel the same way. In the early nineties a corporation got in touch with me, they said they were working on a Java IDE and could they ship some of my source as "example projects". I thought about it for about six seconds and said "Yes please!" I think they even mailed me a CD-ROM at some later point.
At the time I was thinking "Yay! I'm famous! My code is good!".
Over the years I've seen some of my code, not much of course, end up in other big projects and I'm a little proud, and a little pleased. The fact that the company got the money and not me? Doesn't bother me in the slightest.
I write code for me, and if I get bug reports that prove other people used it then I'll try to improve things. Money just isn't a consideration, although I have linked an Amazon wishlist in a few places over the years, and received unexpected books/films which make me smile.
> You think Linus Torvalds wanted donations when he published Linux?
If you look at the mailing list with the announcement, it was "look ma, no hands" kind of moment. Just letting people know of his experimental project, with entirely no expectations if it growing as much as it did decades later.
That's not to say Linux is a good example to go by, for an average free software project.
Governments don't try very hard. It's in their best interest that this fraud-adjacent activity keeps going on, or at least that's the only reasonable explanation for why they keep cooperating so well with it.
Extending restrictions to affiliates/related bodies corporate is absolute bread and butter commercial legal work. Most lawyers are writing these kind of clauses week in, week out.
What you are presumably referring to is transfer pricing, which is a completely different beast.
Of course, licence clauses won't physically stop someone who is fine with wilful infringement. But they're not intended to. They're intended to restrict the behaviour of people who, by and large, respect the law.
It's practically unthinkable that a company like Apple/Amazon/etc is going to create an expensive, complicated international legal structure to conceal wilful infringement of some open source licence.
It's perfectly achievable to write a licence that forbids use or incorporation in products, servers or services from particular companies.
It’s achievable. You could even just name the companies with a periodic process to update the list.
There are all kinds of ways you can write a license that won’t be used popularly but would achieve this specific goal. Do you want to close “your” software off to companies who might seek to be acquired later?
While I have never practised as a lawyer, I do have a law degree, and I've written several papers on IP and IP licensing when I was in law school. And I will also add that I did not do my degree in the US. Still, I am quite convinced that it is very hard to codify the intention of what the OP wants to do in a generic software license (i.e. one that you do not draft specifically for each client).
I do not have the motivation to lay out my full argument as that would take another entire paper, but even if it turns out to be not as hard as I think it is, it certainly isn't as easy as is posited here.
I don’t know why you think it’s not possible (or that it’s anything more than trivial). Revenue, affiliated companies, third party service providers, etc are all basic legal concepts.
The risk is far more likely to be inadvertently making the licence overly narrow and preventing usage by companies that you would actually intend to allow (or at least contemplate should be allowed).
Regardless, the text doesn’t really matter. Most companies will run for the hills as soon as they see anything remotely like the contemplated licence. It’s just not worth the risk for them.
shrug The Unreal engine mentioned elsewhere in this threat also seems very simple (an order of magnitude more straightforward as what we're talking about here I'd argue), yet if you go on the Id forums you'll find many questions from people in various edge cases that fall under one category in spirit and another in the letter of the license. But hey, I'm just some guy on the internet, what do I know, we'll just have to agree to disagree until someone really tries to find out.
Exactly. If you feel this is unjust, put a non-commercial clause in you license.
And watch everybody avoid your lib. You think you are special? A competing lib will soon show up without that restriction. And that lib will get attention from corporations and they will have thousands of eyes use the lib and test it and beat the hell out of it and fix issues and send them upstream (since maintaining a fork is too much work) and eventually this commercial-permissive alternative will thrive and be 100x as stable and streamlined and your alternative will cease to exist.
But you are free to do this. Nobody prevents you from it. But please don't cry later when seeing effects that you don't like.
A permissible MIT license might even be the best way to exploit this.
Assuming there are network effects for being the 'official' place to contribute to your project, than you can start with an MIT license, and once it gets popular, you take it private with slightly ever less permissible licenses.
Fat chance. An average programmer will replace the library if the current one has issues, not fix the issues in the library. It is rational to do so (assuming a different lib exists, which it does for most libs).
Nope. Because the loss-making shell company has a stakeholder worth more than a billion USD.
The core issue here is all these lawyerly lawyers try to parse words and contracts and it's all bullshit. The core point about OSS isn't to hyper-centralize wealth. The core point about OSS is to enable people to create a common good. A common wealth for the people. I'm not against the core function of capitalism—the feedback loop that allocates resources to those that produce things that others want—I'm against some of its outcomes. Namely, a class of hyper-wealthy people that make out like bandits and incorporate in places like Cyprus to pay as little back as possible to the very communities that enriched them in the first place.
It isn't just. And quite frankly, I consider it to be a disease that hurts the billionaire class as much as it hurts the rest of us. This never ending dick measuring contest while the world burns. Ferraris driving past over-packed women's shelters. People ashamed that they "only" drive an Audi. Like, in bayesian free energy terms it's the equivalent to holding onto ninety tons of fat and still trying to eat more. Of course Bezos went ballistic when his phone got hacked. Security concerns sky-rocket when you're holding onto this much energy and power.
For a moment I disagreed with this, so I'll add a link to the OSD [0] for anyone else who wants to quibble.
Also a choice quote about Stallman [1]:
"Richard Stallman argues the obvious meaning of term "open source" is that the source code is public/accessible for inspection, without necessarily any other rights granted"
Thanks, that led me to this intriguing origin story from Christine Peterson, involving some advanced people skills: (my italics)
"Between meetings that week, I was still focused on the need for a better name and came up with the term "open source software." While not ideal, it struck me as good enough. I ran it by at least four others: Eric Drexler, Mark Miller, and Todd Anderson liked it, while a friend in marketing and public relations felt the term "open" had been overused and abused and believed we could do better. He was right in theory; however, I didn't have a better idea... Later that week, on February 5, 1998, a group was assembled at VA Research to brainstorm on strategy. Attending – in addition to Eric Raymond, Todd, and me – were Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman, and attending by phone, Jon "maddog" Hall... Todd was on the ball. Instead of making an assertion that the community should use this specific new term, he did something less directive – a smart thing to do with this community of strong-willed individuals. He simply used the term in a sentence on another topic – just dropped it into the conversation to see what happened.... A few minutes later, one of the others used the term, evidently without noticing, still discussing a topic other than terminology. Todd and I looked at each other out of the corners of our eyes to check: yes, we had both noticed what happened... "
"Shared source" was an umbrella term by Microsoft for its licenses that allows access to the source code. Among these licenses were ones that were also open-source licenses, but also ones that were not.
- Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) [open source]
- Microsoft Limited Public License (Ms-LPL) [not open source]
- Microsoft Limited Reciprocal License (Ms-LRL) [not open source]
- Microsoft Reference Source License (Ms-RSL) [not open source]
So, "shared source" was clearly not a particular license by MS.
Also, at that time, Microsoft tried to establish this term (by its Shared Source Initiative) for the general concept of "source code is available, but the license is not necessarily open source".
In the linked Wikipedia article, one can read on this:
"However, former OSI president Michael Tiemann considers the phrase 'Shared Source' itself to be a marketing term created by Microsoft. He argues that it is 'an insurgent term that distracts and dilutes the Open Source message by using similar-sounding terms and offering similar-sounding promises'."
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, 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.
I don't understand what you're asking, can you elaborate?
Edit: I guess you're asking about 'ESR' and 'RMS.' ESR = Eric Raymond, an early proponent of open source as a communal development model ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html ). RMS is Richard Stallman, the originator of the GNU project on which the Linux kernel is based, as well as the GPL. RMS disagrees with ESR, in that he argues that the term "open source" is a distraction from the larger goal of free software ( https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....) .
There have been plenty of other authors with strong opinions on the subject but these are the two whose names most often come up in the context. Point being, it is unreasonable to say that "open source" is a term of art (as the GP did) whose meaning will be agreed upon by practitioners and advocates everywhere.
No, the question was supposed to illustrate that if you have that approach to language, then communication is impossible. There needs to be a shared notion of what certain words and concepts mean. You claimed that they mean whatever some person claims them to mean. So the question to you was what do your words mean, since with that entirely freewheeling approach to language, nobody here can know what you meant.
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.
No, not according to the Open Source Definition of the OSI, which is generally recognized to be the authority in terms of what we call "open source".
> No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
What is wrong with saying “all rights reserved. You are free to use this software for educational and nonprofit purposes but once you start to make money off it you must request permission in writing” - I’ve seen a few licences like this. I guess the down sides are it might send some people elsewhere and you might be on your own trying to enforce it in court.
I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up.
Besides, it would have to be a lot more formal; another commenter mentioned the Unreal Engine, which states something to the tune of "free to use until you earn over X, then you pay us Y% of your revenue".
Cynically, open source libraries need to use the err, hook-and-sinker approach? Be really good at bootstrapping a company or part thereof, then when they have buy-in, start charging. It's what Unreal and (I think?) Unity do, it's what Slack did (really successfully, in a lot of places where it was introduced it was snuck in the back door by employees, used for a couple of months until the restrictions became too much, then the company started to pay for it; I've never seen 'grassroots' software deployment like that before and I'm impressed).
But it'll be difficult to pull off fully without the software being as-a-service or DRM things.
I wonder if the package manager systems could play a role in that. Require you to register your application at e.g. NPM, then every time an `npm install` is done, keep track of it. If usage does not decrease, start charging for things.
One could also consider an alternative, compatible package manager; an open source publisher could opt to only push to and promote that one. The package manager charges for use, and pays package maintainers relative to usage.
> I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want usage, you can make it MIT and then suffer while they capitalize your code (as they are with in their rights to do), or if you want protection but low usage, make it AGPL or proprietary even. I don't really see a scenario where you have high usage, high protection and also high profit from you selling your product, unless you are good at marketing and selling your product.
> What's the point you're making? There's a lot of proprietary software that's
> - high usage - high protection - high profit
> What's the argument that OSS software (which you could use for free indefinitely until you gain profitability) is somehow not capable of the same?
Software that meets those criteria also has an organization that spends quite a lot on sales and marketing. Stimulation of usage and extraction of revenue doesn't happen on its own.
More explicitly, if an already-profitable organization can't use the software without paying on day zero, quite a lot of effort has to be expended to get them to make the leap, hence the long enterprise sales cycle. You can do it with just marketing if you keep the purchase price low (ie. below what a department manager is allowed to spend using a corporate credit card).
Open source can circumvent this to an extent, but to do so it has to allow businesses to use the software for free, and convert a percentage of those users to paying voluntarily.
Whether the mechanism of conversion is consulting and customization services, hosting services, support services, dual licensing, an 'enterprise' version with specific features, or something else is immaterial, they are never just paying for exactly what they were getting for free. The closest a business will come to that is employing developers to work on the open-source software, or at least allowing employees to work on the software during work hours.
The specific licensing-only approach you're outlining will only work in a very narrow case: A new unprofitable company starts using the software for free, and starts paying once they cross over to profitability (at which point they might decide to switch to using something else, instead). Note that there are some very large VC-fueled companies that have yet to be profitable. Convincing an already profitable business to pay at the outset just can't be done without the aforementioned marketing and sales.
I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up.
It is very much the Silicon Valley mentality that all value is added by that company and that no suppliers should make any profit.
Cynically, open source libraries need to use the err, hook-and-sinker approach?
The common terminology is “bait and switch”. Also very much Silicon Valley. Apple for example likes to become a critical customer for any supplier, then use their leverage to squeeze them.
I for one wouldn't use a library licensed like this. There are ideological reasons, but more practically, let's say I run a server that provides a public service. At some point, it gets a lot of traffic and I want to accept donations or use ads to fund the hosting. Under such a licence, I'd be completely at the mercy of the author, who could effectively shut down the server.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that it isn’t your choice.
Most people are likely assuming that the typical author intent behind the decision to open source is to increase usage and contributors over the default closed source/proprietary licensing.
Or you could pay the author for his/her work from your income.
I could be wrong but it seems obvious to me that semi-commercial licenses would explode the amount of open code available, because instead of devs working for corporations, corporations would end up working for them.
Commercial licensing - open code, free for non-profits, per-seat or per-user pricing for for profits with an official license, forks are considered a derivative work, clean room clones aren't. There would be details, but there are always details, and they don't stop two hundred page EULAs from existing and being (mostly) binding.
But we don't have this because Stallman is a zealot and he wanted to Make A Point about purity. So instead of creating a market where devs could actually get paid for original work and corporations would be the ones paying, corporations get millions of hours of development effort for free - because he thought he could somehow magically strong-arm them into playing to his rules.
I see antitrust as a critical purpose of freedom-respecting software - suppose you pay the author for the rights to use the semis proprietary software. You go on a decade or two, and become critically reliant on it.
But then they jack up the price a hundredfold.
You can't do anything (short of rewriting), even if you could flat-out hire a replacement dev team for the entire project for cheaper than what they're charging you.
OpenOffice and MariaDB are classic examples of Free Software solving this - the IP holder sandbagged, so the community forked and fucked off. Even despite that though, LibreOffice still suffers from losing its OpenOffice name, and plenty of users lose out because they're unknowingly using a barely-updated version due to abovementioned sandbagging.
Proprietary software hands a default victory to the IP holder. Free Software hands a default victory to the user. It's either one or the other.
> "I could be wrong but it seems obvious to me that semi-commercial licenses would explode the amount of open code available"
More likely it would implode the open code available, since usage would drop like a rock.
1) Once you're required to pay money, people start comparison shopping and proprietary software is optimized to win that game.
2) Nobody wants to spend the engineering, accountant, and lawyer hours to keep track of assorted semi-commercial licenses for a zillion dependencies and what they're owed. Half the point of FOSS is that you don't have to keep track of licenses and compliance, as the periodic sob stories on HN/Slashdot about "Oh no, I got audited and wasn't in compliance and had to pay. I'm going to switch everything to FOSS; that'll show them!" show.
Is the problem that you have to pay at all - or is the problem merely that in the absence of a listed price, there's no guarantee the price will be fair?
Would you also reject a library with this license if you knew the commercial use license was pocket change?
If the commercial license was literally pocket change, I’d be inclined to use it under that commercial license right out of the gate to increase my certainty going forward.
So if a nonprofit uses that software to sell services (they gotta fund their expenses after all), does that count? Seriously. With vague phrasing like this, you're gonna have a bad time. Contracts are that verbose for a reason.
That’s why it’s all rights reserved. If you want to use it to make money you have to ask me. In the scenario you describe is probably say that’s okay, but like I say it’s up to me and only me, at the end of the day.
This of course means it’s not open to the kind of free-form open collaboration that typifies Open Source but if anything this just goes to show how more restrictive licences such as GPL actually promote innovation.
As the person who wrote the software and owns the copyright, nothing prevents you from dual-licensing your software. You can release your software as GPL on GitHub, with a notice that you're willing to also license your code under a paid proprietary license; interested parties may send an email to sales@example.com at their leisure.
Do note that this effectively prevents other people from collaborating with you, since their contributions would be GPL-protected and you may not sell them. So it's not a good model for larger open-source projects. But if you're an independent open-source developer who works as a sole contributor and feels exploited, then it's probably a better model.
It's not what OP meant at all. He's asking for a license that lets regular devs use your project freely, but require fortune 500 like companies to pay.
If it's software for personal use, then the GPL is just fine. The GPL is explicitly designed to protect personal use.
If it's software for commercial use - I mean, that's exactly what the issue is here. Commercial users ought to need to pay for the software they use. Just because you offer a commercial license doesn't mean you need to charge a million bucks for it - if someone emails you and says that they work for a startup, you can always respond with a exclusive commercial license free of charge, if you like.
If you own the software you can charge whatever you like to different people.
Why is it evil for a large company making a large profit to exploit your free work, but not a small company making a small profit? They're both benefitting from work you're doing without paying you. Personally I don't see an qualitative difference, just one of degree.
Like I said, go ahead and offer free commercial licenses to small companies, who in your estimation are 99% of developers.
Because a small company, by definition, doesn't earn millions and usually has very small margins (if none, if they're still in the startup phase). A large company can definitely afford to contribute more.
> Like I said, go ahead and offer free commercial licenses to small companies, who in your estimation are 99% of developers.
Offering commercial licenses adds a lot of work on top of the already difficult development of OSS projects.
I don't understand why you think that the situation can be fixed using existing solutions, when the problem arised with these solutions already in place.
Perhaps we need something different??
Edit: I also completely reject the notion that everything should be commercialized. OSS is the antithesis of this. Down with commercial licenses, down with rich capitalists exploting people's voluntary work.
If your GPL project will be so tightly coupled with the company's project that their entire project will become GPL - then yes. Big libraries like Qt, for example.
On the other hand, if the coupling to the user's project is loose and doesn't make their entire project GPL, they have no reason to pay for a license. For example, compiling with gcc or hosting with nginx, or calling ffmpeg doesn't make your entire product GPL.
> Do note that this effectively prevents other people from collaborating with you, since their contributions would be GPL-protected and you may not sell them.
It is common to require a CLA/CAA in these dual-licensing cases such as Qt and other big commercial projects.
1. Release under a permissive license (MIT, BSD) and:
2. Release under a copyleft license (GPL) and: 3. Release it under a commercial license and: 4. Dual license it as GPL and commercial and: Pick your poison.