Lets make a new license: If you wont hire me, use my library and make over $100m in revenue a year, you must pay a commercial license to use my software equivalent to the total cost (equity grants included) of an average principal engineer or director who manages 50+ people at your company in your highest COL metro, whichever is higher. For OSS work that isn't mostly one author, make it go to the foundation for the OSS project instead and apply the rule to principal maintainers. You could even scale it in multiples of revenue in principle engineer units of $1b per principle engineer of global revenue.
IMO I think foundational projects that every single bigtech uses like ffmpeg should get on this licence yesterday. They would start getting millions because it still would be way cheaper than making it themselves in their bloated cost structures.
I agree with the spirit of this comment, but I worry about the implementation.
See the comment of Manly read in this section. Once the threat of payment approaches, you can just switch to a free fork. A single person can't really win a trial against a big, well-funded company.
I don't really see how this is an issue, depending on the license text it's trivial to make the license apply in the same manner. As for winning, I think that's more of a US-centric view, if you sue elsewhere in the world there's plenty of courts that are happy to slap big tech.
I think Jacobsen vs Katzer [0] is the most relevant one to the discussion here, but there a number of successful cases on this front. If memory serves, BusyBox has also managed to enforce GPL in court on a number of occasions.
Suing a major corporation still seems like quite a bit of work, and what's the end goal? Is it to humble a major company, or to get paid? Because if it's the latter, it feels like there are easier ways to do so.
This is obviously a subjective opinion, but at least in my mind, the point is to defend your rights. No one else is going to come along and defend you against the corporate steamroller.
They can fork it, but can they find the maintainers? If it's just their own internal employees, then they definitely have less expertise in that codebase.
It's crazy. I used think his ideas were completely unrealistic and him being a general loon. He has certainly had the last laugh (or first tear, really). I still think he's definitely not correct on all fronts, but I pay more attention to his opinions on tech.
It’s a nice idea but couldn’t a big company simply move its engineering team to a subsidiary that doesn’t get sales revenue?
(I’m not an accountant!)
Would be hilarious to bury a clause like “Modified MIT license — head of HR must publicly announce any employment application rejections of the maintainers while wearing a chicken suit).”
The idea is to make it cheaper to pay you than it is to do silly stuff. 1 principal engineer is a fart for these huge companies, but can be $500k-$3m/yr, which is huge for OSS projects. Small companies that are not big tech in the USA don't pay that much so they will get a cheaper price, etc.
Companies usually have no problem paying for stuff that saves them money, but need to be forced to do so if there is a cheaper alternative. There is a very specific reason why I put the cost matching their own staffing costs, it's so the company will choose the easier and cheaper option vs. doing the more expensive option of hiring staff to make it themselves.
They can also get it even cheaper by hiring the maintainer at a sr or staff eng cost. You create the financial ammo so staff inside can do the right thing.
And these shenanigans are usually sidestepped with subsidary type of language that places like the EU uses for enforcing laws.
That would just open the door to commercial competitors to undercut the price by reverse engineering it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design). You'd be playing on the proprietary software industry's home turf and they will straight up curb stomp you.
No, because it's still significantly cheaper than any commercial option will be. You think the commercial place will charge less than 100 principle engineers to Google, lol no.
Because
- They can decide more easily what he works on
- They know he loves this work and is very capable of doing it
- They can own his output, a competitive advantage
- He will likely cost them ~nothing anyway
This is an incredibly short-term thinking. The reason is simple: the author is not obliged to continue while this sort of thing can be demoralizing.
I don't know about the author's approach to this matter, but if I would find out that a company is making a killing using my software and then that company would refuse to even give me an interview I'd probably stop loving doing what I do. Sure, the software is under MIT license and it was the author's choice to do so, but what's the point of doing it under such a license when you can't even count of it mattering in a resume? What's the point of providing free labor to a company with revenue in billions? If you look at the author's blogpost, the only benefit the author mentions is making the number of downloads go up and that's just pathetic.
I am reminded of an another, similar case with a library called "FluentAssertions". This library used to be free to use by anyone until the author changed the license and started charging money for commercial use. The author did that because he spend several year maintaining the library on his own time and dime and megacorpos like Microsoft wouldn't even bother to donate despite using it extensively. What happened afterwards was that the author got shat on by everyone on the internet for daring to ask for money. In the company I work for his library has been replaced with an another free fork at a incredibly fast pace. All that free labor and the author got dropped as soon as they fell out of line.
The worst thing is that it wouldn't probably take much to make the author of the library happy. Even if they weren't interested in hiring him they could still acknowledge him, talk to him a bit to maintain good relations, throw him a nice donation as a thank you and now it would be a nice, good PR story instead of an another reminder that corporations are just looking to squeeze out value out of all of us.
Sorry but have to call b.s. here. Many of us did in fact, in this very forum, kept pointing out that dumping on GPL (and the man and his ideas behind it) was a mistake and that non-gpl oss was for chumps. And we were greyed to oblivion. Same exact story as with surveillance tech.
Hackernews is hugely responsible for many of the ailments of this field in 21st century. Own it.
> Many of us did in fact, in this very forum, kept pointing out that dumping on GPL (and the man and his ideas behind it) was a mistake and that non-gpl oss was for chumps. And we were greyed to oblivion.
I'm not entirely sure that was intentional. On Reddit, it would be called 'brigading', and basically getting your corpo-techbros to -4 and flagkill posts.
If done fast enough, you only need 5 500+ karma accounts to sink a post.
Sometimes, I'll say something unpopular, but defensible. Its interesting to see the dramatic swings those contentious posts take.
The fact that the management of this forum, who are VCs, permitted such a mechanism is part of the "own it, HN" assertion. HN has baked in something like 'peter principle' into the forum. Karma Grifters who post articles that get them over the 500 points are then ala Peter Principle granted the right to 'grey out' actual thoughtful comments.
Are you telling the management of this outfit never looked into this phenomena?
How about ageism? Mr. Paul Graham and personality cult asserting that anyone over 20 something is no longer viable for leading edge tech work?
We used to call these VCs "vulture capitalists" in the 90s. We geeks were so right about so many things in the 90s: We were right about GPL. We were right about VCs. We were right about surveillance tech. We were right about outsourcing ...
But alas, "corpo-techbros" empowered by thoughtless forum software courtesy of Paul Graham and company got into this mess.
> Are you telling the management of this outfit never looked into this phenomena?
To counter, I think that HN is being used as a testcase to shove techbro and VC ideology across all of tech. And secondly, its some of the most potent tech market research. Its a textsearch goldmine.
I believe YC knew what they were doing, and intentionally chose this course of action.
> Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's usernames show up in orange, which — although not an explicit benefit — does allow fellow YC founders to immediately identify one another in discussions.
Even with the significant bias here, I still read it. I also read lobsters as well, which is here minus techbro insanity.
> Karma Grifters who post articles that get them over the 500 points are then ala Peter Principle granted the right to 'grey out' actual thoughtful comments.
You've stretched that analogy past the breaking point. Downvotes barely change your role and there's nowhere else to go up from there regardless of your posting quality. Peter Principle does not apply.
Right now it is just a hobby and there are still a number of bugs remaining. Since I don't have an income from it, I can't dedicate more time to it. Hiring me would allow me to work on fixing them full time and make the progress much faster
Hey, props to your attitude, and I wish you the best of luck.
Obviously, you've provided value to a company in a really in-demand area. It doesn't feel right to treat the contributors like this. Sadly, it seems that the companies have the power and the intent to just abuse and exploit
I don't have a solution. I am just expressing my frustration from the perceived injustice.
Correct, you cannot remove a version or the whole crate unless very specific criteria are fulfilled. You can "yank" versions. That prevents people from adding the version as a new dependency, but if you relied on it before it got yanked, your build will succeed.
I wouldn't delete old versions even if I could though. My goal is to publish a rock solid library that everyone can depend on and build awesome projects with
I can't say for Anthropic, but I've seen Google hire people working on open source projects that were aligned with the skills they were looking for. Desktop search and collaborative editing comes to mind, although I might be mis-remembering?
Why wouldn't a company want to hire the fore-most expert in a tool that is critical to the company? They are hiring for someone with that exact expertise.
A competitor could hire the OP instead, get them to work on improving the software for a few years. Giving the competitor a major head start.
Worst-case scenario, the tool they are building doesn't work out and Anthropic has a pretty good developer to put on other projects.
But he's not doing the work for free. He's doing something else for free which they use. He has domain knowledge with the library that noone else has, their can either pay someone to learn it or they can hire someone with it.
And that's exactly what these companies can abuse.
If this wasn't available for free, they would gladly pay for a programmer to create it. But if it's already free, they can use it as a starting point. Maybe they'd need to internalize/extend it. But the option of paying for the work already done is gone.
Do this for each npm dependency and you're looking at huge savings.
This is still illogical. You can hire the original maintainer and pay an incremental cost, or you can hire a random developer and pay the initial learning cost + higher incremental cost.
If every company using a library chose the former, then every hour of development would be paid for (from the perspective of the maintainer) and the cost would be spread out across all its users.
You can use what is as is. Then you can ignore all of the other issues if they don't impact your bottom line.
Don't get me wrong, I like your corporate OSS financing model. But there seems to be not enough incentive for companies to use it. Why take ownership for a small cost, when you can use an imperfect thing with no cost?
Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.