8 ms·

My heart breaks each time I discover a free tool of recognition is developed by some altruistic talent who lives at a near poverty level while their work genera

by fsloth 10y ago

My heart breaks each time I discover a free tool of recognition is developed by some altruistic talent who lives at a near poverty level while their work generates millions in added value. I suppose the simplest way would be to offer dual licensing. GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. The problem is, if the source code you are working on depends on third party GPL software it's very hard to do that. I think this is what should be fixed. There should be some way to have a chain of dual licensing, so that if someone uses a dual-licensed library, they can forward revenues simply to the original license owner from their proprietary license sales. Source remains open, and developers can eat (and pay for other amenities civilization has to offer). Blockchains?

pksadiq 10y ago
> GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. This is against the GNU GPL license terms. One can't conditionally license some code under GPL. Ie, a software released under GPL can't be restricted for some purpose (here, 'for non-profit'). The "no string should be attached" is for good. Say for example, a project says "For people to help learn writing code, I'm licensing my project under MIT License," it would be wrong to not release the source code (and only the binary) even if the code is in MIT license. Because that is the purpose why the developer choose MIT for his/her project. IANAL, but some corporate may be able to turn such carefully crafted words into money with their pricy lawyers. Most of the people are unaware of this. And for this reason, GPL can't be done the same way.
- dllthomas 10y ago
  > One can't conditionally license some code under GPL. You can release code under however many incompatible licenses as you'd like, as long as you own all of the code in question.
  - ufo 10y ago
    I think they were referring to the "GPL for non-profit" part of the comment. You either don' release it as GPL at all or you release it as GPL for everyone, which means that for-profit companies can use the software free of charge (as long as they obey the terms of the license).
    - dllthomas 10y ago
      Yeah, you are correct that you can't add a non-commercial clause to the GPL and have it remain the GPL (or compatible with the GPL in either direction). You could choose to only grant GPL licenses directly to non-profits. They would be free to pass along the same rights to commercial entities, if they chose. It's possible that in a practical sense this would present enough of a hurdle for larger companies to prefer to pay (but plenty possible that it would not). It is also possible to grant other licenses for situations where the GPL prevents some particular for-profit activity - that kind of approach is presently making some people some money, although the incentives can be weird.
    - henrikschroder 10y ago
      If you own the software, you can grant specific people and institutions a GPL license for your software, and grant other people and institutions a commercial license (and refuse to grant them a GPL license for your software). However, everyone who has received your software under the GPL can sublicense it to the people who you denied the GPL to. You can't forbid it, but they don't have to, and you can nicely ask them to never sublicense it.
- tavert 10y ago
  Two libraries used by Octave, FFTW and SuiteSparse, both do exactly this - GPL for open source usage, or commercial paid licenses for inclusion in proprietary software (like Matlab).
- simonh 10y ago
  You're kind of correct in a pedantic nitpicky way. If you release code under the GPL you can't prevent anyone, such as an Enterprise, from using it under that license. But what you can do is also offer it under a commercial license, that commercial customers might be more comfortable with, and let the user choose which license they want to use it under. This is very common and it certainly seemed clear to me that this is what the poster meant.
  - henrikschroder 10y ago
    Well, that enterprise has to receive the software under the GPL license first, and you can absolutely refuse to grant them that, in which case they have to find someone else who has received it under the GPL, and ask that party to sublicense it to the enterprise under the GPL.
- ufo 10y ago
  Selling software via a proprietary license to an enterprise can be bad for open source because it means that the enterprise doesn't need to obey the terms of the GPL. They are free to modify and adapt the code without contributing the changes back to the community, which kind of ruuing the point of the GPL in the first place. This method also only works if the copyright if fully owned by a single person or entity, with all code contributors signing a contributor licensing agreement to give away their copyrights to a single entity. This is problematic because now there is the possibility that this single entity gets bought out by an evil corporation (say, Oracle), which can choose to continue developing the project without releasing the modifications under an open source license.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    >They are free to modify and adapt the code without contributing the changes back to the community, which kind of ruuing the point of the GPL in the first place. As they are with the GPL so long as they don't distribute the modified code outside of the organization.
    - ufo 10y ago
      If they receive a copy of the software under a non-GPL license they might also be allowed to redistribute modified versions without releasing the source code. (This is usually the whole point of having the proprietary dual-licensing scheme).
  - henrikschroder 10y ago
    Selling commercial license also gives you cold hard cash, with which you can buy ramen so that you can continue developing said software. Contributing to the community is all good, but you know, eating is slightly higher on the priority list.
realPubkey 10y ago
I have watched how people use crypto-currencies to donate for a long time. I also tried it for a own privacy-project which has over 10.000 users / day. Since you can see the donation-amount in the blockchain, I'm free to say that "blockchains" are not the solution to this problem. People do not donate, no matter if via paypal or bitcoin.
- tommorris 10y ago
  There's so much magical tech bullshit thinking embedded in "if people aren't donating via PayPal, switching to Bitcoin is going to make them donate even though Bitcoin is a lot fucking harder to use than PayPal".
- fsloth 10y ago
  It's not a donation but a licence fee. For enterprises this is effectively compulsory, not opt in. I meant it would be convenient if there was some platform to maintain the licence contract chain so that a dual licenced project could use a third party dual licensed library, and the license fees would be forwarded to all license owning parties in a transparent manner. Just an idea, not sure if it would work non-parhologically in the end (i.e. some mega troll buying the licensing rights for a set of critical open source libraries, for example ).
- Y_Y 10y ago
  "10.000" What number is this? Is it ten? Ten thousand? I don't think decimal (thousand) separators are necessary when you can write the number without, use scientific notation or the number in words. But there is an English-speaking standard (comma) and an international standard (thin space). Considering that there are at least five better options I think this usage is perverse.
  - travisjungroth 10y ago
    Some countries use dots instead of commas for thousand separators.
    - 10y ago
pjmlp 10y ago
You kind of have this with the other licenses, like the MIT one. However the sad reality is that outside a few unicorns, working in open source means being sponsored by a large corporation or via support contracts, otherwise better give up. Both don't suit that well to desktop software for example.
sandGorgon 10y ago
in case of GPL, you merely sell support licenses. Gratitude-ware is not constrained by what you are selling.. only by 1) what can pass through corporate accounting 2) how convenient it is. Though it would be nice if the majority of people who intend to make money from opensource use Apache or MIT, however it is perfectly viable to make money from GPL. This is the crux of the problem - creators generally think "can I sell X with Y license?" and scared and give up. Just look at Pfsense - it is making money using a single click support license contract. Hell, people will pay for documentation. Make it corporate friendly and for please please generate invoices.
- ojilles 10y ago
  For me (working at a large(r) corporation) this hits then nail on the head! >> Gratitude-ware is not constrained by what you are selling.. only by 1) what can pass through corporate accounting 2) how convenient it is. I've bought support contracts and promptly shredded the support contact information effectively to just make a donation for software we use extensively but is free. Make it easy for us to pay you. Finance departments will not ask if the license or support contract covers all aspects etc so it's easy to buy those (PO number please!). But the last time I tried to do a straight up donation, I spend months before giving up.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    > I've bought support contracts and promptly shredded the support contact information effectively to just make a donation for software we use extensively but is free. I understand the intention, but you should have "used" support. You don't need to be picky and call it for every minor thing, but calling attention to the author about a problem or issue that can be improved is valuable
- TheCondor 10y ago
  Actually there is another avenue for Gpl software, although it's one fsf may not approve of. You sell copyright exceptions and effectively let a company buy a non-gpl cut of your code. There are details, especially with large projects that have many contributors, but it is done.
vbernat 10y ago
> GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. You are likely to have a hard time to get external contributions with that kind of licensing.
- chii 10y ago
  are there really that many external contributions for most projects? and if there are, i would imagine that it's a "simple matter of accounting" to distribute the wealth received accordingly.
  - gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
    I'm no accountant or lawyer but I would not attempt to distribute money like you are suggesting internationally. Just thinking about the employee/consultant/fee based nature of potential contributors and the tax statuses of every jurisdiction in the world makes me shudder. And money laundering regulations... And funding terror regulations...
  - matt4077 10y ago
    This isn't about the technical problems of assigning and distributing payouts. It's how it turns one of the most successful altruistic communities into just another domain of capitalism. There's this story from Freakonomics: A Kindergarten in Israel started to charge a fee for parents arriving late to pick up their children. Result: More parents would arrive late, because paying a fee was less of a burden than the bad conscience they had previous;y had when they made the employees stay late. This would work in reverse. That good feeling I get when I contribute a patch for some random project I improved at the margins would be devalued by whatever $0.29 I'd get wired at the end of the quarter.
    - fsloth 10y ago
      " It's how it turns one of the most successful altruistic communities into just another domain of capitalism." You hit the nail on the head what troubled me about my own suggestion of easy monetization but could not quite put into words. Perhaps the few poverty striken maintainers are necessary outliers in this equation. I still feel irritated there can't be some simple opt-in value capture program for recognized bdfl's.
cabalamat 10y ago
> My heart breaks each time I discover a free tool of recognition is developed by some altruistic talent who lives at a near poverty level while their work generates millions in added value. Maybe there could be a startup that helps people monetise their free software output?
- annnnd 10y ago
  THIS!!! In open-source there is a huge difference between value generated and value collected. The people behind open-source projects are often clueless (sorry, but it's true) how to extract value from their work while keeping community happy. How about a service which helps authors monetize open-source software for some percentage?
  - skaplun 10y ago
    I honestly don't think this will be very easy to achieve on a human level. There are plenty of platforms that allow devs to meet sales partners but most people would rather just go at it alone or don't trust others or don't play well with others etc etc. Even the author of this piece, who testifies to poverty, chooses to ask for global donations rather than seek out a business partner
    - dibstern 10y ago
      A sales partner is different to a company that helps monetise. And just because he is asking for donations doesn't mean he's against monetising.
      - skaplun 10y ago
        Depends how you pay the company as I wrote above. If you're just a poor single man op you share revenue and that company becomes your partner
    - inimino 10y ago
      I think it would be something like "sign up with us and we handle the sales, support, billing, and invoicing". Lots of open source projects don't need to bring on a business partner, but they might benefit from something like this. Just like not everyone on Kickstarter would go out and raise money by themselves.
fnord123 10y ago
Strong disagree. There should be funding bodies for projects like this who can fund projects and also provide a semblance of orchestration. The Linux Foundation (with the Core Infrastructure Initiative) and the Cloud Native Compute Foundation are already working in the right direction, imo. There are other organizations that work through contracting work to develop free and open source software. Red Hat and Canonical are obvious ones. But there's also smaller outfits like Continuum Analytics, Igalia, The SQlite Consortium. Further, there are loads of technology incubators and VCs who would do well to fund projects like Octave to make sure their Data Science startups can rely on these tools. > Blockchains? I'm scared to ask what you mean by this.
- chii 10y ago
  i feel that adding middleman organizations sap the margins, and also gives those middleman organizations that do the funding some measure of power that i feel is also undeserved. I think the dual licensing method would extract the most value and give the most of said value back to the developers.
  - toyg 10y ago
    The PyQt experience is that dual-licensing restricts adoption. On the other hand, it ensures the developer makes enough to keep working on it quite steadily.
    - gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
      The main fault I've heard with the PyQT licence is that the project has to pay a for a commercial licence from day 0 - companies would like to be able to prototype with the gpl version and start paying when they are close to release.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        From their FAQ: Can I develop my proprietary application using the GPL version of PyQt? Yes, so long as you have purchased the commercial version of PyQt before you distribute your proprietary application for the first time. (Note that this is different to the terms of the Qt commercial license.)
VMG 10y ago
> Blockchains? Only for Bitcoin.
matt4077 10y ago
You're throwing out technical solutions – one law-technical, one crypto-technical – for what's essentially a social problem. You don't need the draconian measure of dividing the OSS community, turning the idea of Free-as-Speech software into what's essentially shareware with source code access. Large corporations have (obviously) vast financial resources. And – more importantly – they are (usually) staffed by humans. Have you ever felt the wish to be generous to someone whose software you used extensively? That feeling doesn't go away when you step into an office that requires a name tag to pass security. Even mid-level managers or programmers usually can spend 4-figures easily without much oversight. And even if: I have witnessed a few cases where such requests went up the chain and came back with an added zero, despite HN third-favourite cliché being "companies have a duty only to shareholders and anything that deviates from 'greed is good' is a criminal offence'". Sometimes it helps to offer a some sort of service contract, sponsoring or a workshop. They're bought as tokens to cover all eventualities. So what's missing? Probably something like the FSF is doing here, handling paperwork and making it tax-deductible. I think it should be tied into some sort of coherent marketing strategy, kinda like the Apache foundation but more accessible to smaller projects, and possibly even a brand identity (/website) that doesn't trigger nostalgia for teletext. Mozilla is doing the best job in OSS marketing I can think of, but doesn't have a model for such projects. Maybe a Github foundation could also find success with a Wikimedia-style campaign. Although I'll hate myself for suggesting it if it ever happens. Plus, unfortunately, a tiny bit of effort by developers. If you're just coding away at home and loving it, I can understand that it seems unfair, useless, out-of-personal-scope etc. that you should be doing fundraising. But it's also a bit too easy to expect good things to happen just because there's good code. (I have no knowledge of the octave situation specifically, and they may have done an excellent job and I'm wrong – this is just my general impression of some of these lone-coder projects). Let's also not forget that OSS as a whole is probably doing better today than ever before. For every case such as this, there are dozens of cases where people are hired by large companies and largely left to work on their projects, or OSS created and released from within corporations, or successful startups with an OSS strategy etc. Yeah, and "blockchain" isn't actually a magic spell that solves random problems...
010a 10y ago
It is his responsibility to capture the value of his work. The world does not owe him this. The world doesn't owe him anything unless he demands it. You're asking to have your cake and eat it to: Give software away (altruism) but also feel guilty when he complains that he doesn't have any money. You can't have both.
kazinator 10y ago
This developer has been able to work at their hobby project for a quarter century, and finally has to contemplate the brutal reality of finding a job not related to it. Sorry, my heart just can't ache somehow!

by fsloth 10y ago

pksadiq 10y ago

> GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. This is against the GNU GPL license terms. One can't conditionally license some code under GPL. Ie, a software released under GPL can't be restricted for some purpose (here, 'for non-profit'). The "no string should be attached" is for good. Say for example, a project says "For people to help learn writing code, I'm licensing my project under MIT License," it would be wrong to not release the source code (and only the binary) even if the code is in MIT license. Because that is the purpose why the developer choose MIT for his/her project. IANAL, but some corporate may be able to turn such carefully crafted words into money with their pricy lawyers. Most of the people are unaware of this. And for this reason, GPL can't be done the same way.

dllthomas 10y ago
> One can't conditionally license some code under GPL. You can release code under however many incompatible licenses as you'd like, as long as you own all of the code in question.
- ufo 10y ago
  I think they were referring to the "GPL for non-profit" part of the comment. You either don' release it as GPL at all or you release it as GPL for everyone, which means that for-profit companies can use the software free of charge (as long as they obey the terms of the license).
  - dllthomas 10y ago
    Yeah, you are correct that you can't add a non-commercial clause to the GPL and have it remain the GPL (or compatible with the GPL in either direction). You could choose to only grant GPL licenses directly to non-profits. They would be free to pass along the same rights to commercial entities, if they chose. It's possible that in a practical sense this would present enough of a hurdle for larger companies to prefer to pay (but plenty possible that it would not). It is also possible to grant other licenses for situations where the GPL prevents some particular for-profit activity - that kind of approach is presently making some people some money, although the incentives can be weird.
  - henrikschroder 10y ago
    If you own the software, you can grant specific people and institutions a GPL license for your software, and grant other people and institutions a commercial license (and refuse to grant them a GPL license for your software). However, everyone who has received your software under the GPL can sublicense it to the people who you denied the GPL to. You can't forbid it, but they don't have to, and you can nicely ask them to never sublicense it.
tavert 10y ago
Two libraries used by Octave, FFTW and SuiteSparse, both do exactly this - GPL for open source usage, or commercial paid licenses for inclusion in proprietary software (like Matlab).
simonh 10y ago
You're kind of correct in a pedantic nitpicky way. If you release code under the GPL you can't prevent anyone, such as an Enterprise, from using it under that license. But what you can do is also offer it under a commercial license, that commercial customers might be more comfortable with, and let the user choose which license they want to use it under. This is very common and it certainly seemed clear to me that this is what the poster meant.
- henrikschroder 10y ago
  Well, that enterprise has to receive the software under the GPL license first, and you can absolutely refuse to grant them that, in which case they have to find someone else who has received it under the GPL, and ask that party to sublicense it to the enterprise under the GPL.
ufo 10y ago
Selling software via a proprietary license to an enterprise can be bad for open source because it means that the enterprise doesn't need to obey the terms of the GPL. They are free to modify and adapt the code without contributing the changes back to the community, which kind of ruuing the point of the GPL in the first place. This method also only works if the copyright if fully owned by a single person or entity, with all code contributors signing a contributor licensing agreement to give away their copyrights to a single entity. This is problematic because now there is the possibility that this single entity gets bought out by an evil corporation (say, Oracle), which can choose to continue developing the project without releasing the modifications under an open source license.
- ghaff 10y ago
  >They are free to modify and adapt the code without contributing the changes back to the community, which kind of ruuing the point of the GPL in the first place. As they are with the GPL so long as they don't distribute the modified code outside of the organization.
  - ufo 10y ago
    If they receive a copy of the software under a non-GPL license they might also be allowed to redistribute modified versions without releasing the source code. (This is usually the whole point of having the proprietary dual-licensing scheme).
- henrikschroder 10y ago
  Selling commercial license also gives you cold hard cash, with which you can buy ramen so that you can continue developing said software. Contributing to the community is all good, but you know, eating is slightly higher on the priority list.

realPubkey 10y ago

I have watched how people use crypto-currencies to donate for a long time. I also tried it for a own privacy-project which has over 10.000 users / day. Since you can see the donation-amount in the blockchain, I'm free to say that "blockchains" are not the solution to this problem. People do not donate, no matter if via paypal or bitcoin.

tommorris 10y ago
There's so much magical tech bullshit thinking embedded in "if people aren't donating via PayPal, switching to Bitcoin is going to make them donate even though Bitcoin is a lot fucking harder to use than PayPal".
fsloth 10y ago
It's not a donation but a licence fee. For enterprises this is effectively compulsory, not opt in. I meant it would be convenient if there was some platform to maintain the licence contract chain so that a dual licenced project could use a third party dual licensed library, and the license fees would be forwarded to all license owning parties in a transparent manner. Just an idea, not sure if it would work non-parhologically in the end (i.e. some mega troll buying the licensing rights for a set of critical open source libraries, for example ).
Y_Y 10y ago
"10.000" What number is this? Is it ten? Ten thousand? I don't think decimal (thousand) separators are necessary when you can write the number without, use scientific notation or the number in words. But there is an English-speaking standard (comma) and an international standard (thin space). Considering that there are at least five better options I think this usage is perverse.
- travisjungroth 10y ago
  Some countries use dots instead of commas for thousand separators.
  - 10y ago

pjmlp 10y ago

You kind of have this with the other licenses, like the MIT one. However the sad reality is that outside a few unicorns, working in open source means being sponsored by a large corporation or via support contracts, otherwise better give up. Both don't suit that well to desktop software for example.

sandGorgon 10y ago

in case of GPL, you merely sell support licenses. Gratitude-ware is not constrained by what you are selling.. only by 1) what can pass through corporate accounting 2) how convenient it is. Though it would be nice if the majority of people who intend to make money from opensource use Apache or MIT, however it is perfectly viable to make money from GPL. This is the crux of the problem - creators generally think "can I sell X with Y license?" and scared and give up. Just look at Pfsense - it is making money using a single click support license contract. Hell, people will pay for documentation. Make it corporate friendly and for please please generate invoices.

ojilles 10y ago
For me (working at a large(r) corporation) this hits then nail on the head! >> Gratitude-ware is not constrained by what you are selling.. only by 1) what can pass through corporate accounting 2) how convenient it is. I've bought support contracts and promptly shredded the support contact information effectively to just make a donation for software we use extensively but is free. Make it easy for us to pay you. Finance departments will not ask if the license or support contract covers all aspects etc so it's easy to buy those (PO number please!). But the last time I tried to do a straight up donation, I spend months before giving up.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  > I've bought support contracts and promptly shredded the support contact information effectively to just make a donation for software we use extensively but is free. I understand the intention, but you should have "used" support. You don't need to be picky and call it for every minor thing, but calling attention to the author about a problem or issue that can be improved is valuable
TheCondor 10y ago
Actually there is another avenue for Gpl software, although it's one fsf may not approve of. You sell copyright exceptions and effectively let a company buy a non-gpl cut of your code. There are details, especially with large projects that have many contributors, but it is done.

vbernat 10y ago

> GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. You are likely to have a hard time to get external contributions with that kind of licensing.

chii 10y ago
are there really that many external contributions for most projects? and if there are, i would imagine that it's a "simple matter of accounting" to distribute the wealth received accordingly.
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
  I'm no accountant or lawyer but I would not attempt to distribute money like you are suggesting internationally. Just thinking about the employee/consultant/fee based nature of potential contributors and the tax statuses of every jurisdiction in the world makes me shudder. And money laundering regulations... And funding terror regulations...
- matt4077 10y ago
  This isn't about the technical problems of assigning and distributing payouts. It's how it turns one of the most successful altruistic communities into just another domain of capitalism. There's this story from Freakonomics: A Kindergarten in Israel started to charge a fee for parents arriving late to pick up their children. Result: More parents would arrive late, because paying a fee was less of a burden than the bad conscience they had previous;y had when they made the employees stay late. This would work in reverse. That good feeling I get when I contribute a patch for some random project I improved at the margins would be devalued by whatever $0.29 I'd get wired at the end of the quarter.
  - fsloth 10y ago
    " It's how it turns one of the most successful altruistic communities into just another domain of capitalism." You hit the nail on the head what troubled me about my own suggestion of easy monetization but could not quite put into words. Perhaps the few poverty striken maintainers are necessary outliers in this equation. I still feel irritated there can't be some simple opt-in value capture program for recognized bdfl's.

cabalamat 10y ago

> My heart breaks each time I discover a free tool of recognition is developed by some altruistic talent who lives at a near poverty level while their work generates millions in added value. Maybe there could be a startup that helps people monetise their free software output?

annnnd 10y ago
THIS!!! In open-source there is a huge difference between value generated and value collected. The people behind open-source projects are often clueless (sorry, but it's true) how to extract value from their work while keeping community happy. How about a service which helps authors monetize open-source software for some percentage?
- skaplun 10y ago
  I honestly don't think this will be very easy to achieve on a human level. There are plenty of platforms that allow devs to meet sales partners but most people would rather just go at it alone or don't trust others or don't play well with others etc etc. Even the author of this piece, who testifies to poverty, chooses to ask for global donations rather than seek out a business partner
  - dibstern 10y ago
    A sales partner is different to a company that helps monetise. And just because he is asking for donations doesn't mean he's against monetising.
    - skaplun 10y ago
      Depends how you pay the company as I wrote above. If you're just a poor single man op you share revenue and that company becomes your partner
  - inimino 10y ago
    I think it would be something like "sign up with us and we handle the sales, support, billing, and invoicing". Lots of open source projects don't need to bring on a business partner, but they might benefit from something like this. Just like not everyone on Kickstarter would go out and raise money by themselves.

fnord123 10y ago

Strong disagree. There should be funding bodies for projects like this who can fund projects and also provide a semblance of orchestration. The Linux Foundation (with the Core Infrastructure Initiative) and the Cloud Native Compute Foundation are already working in the right direction, imo. There are other organizations that work through contracting work to develop free and open source software. Red Hat and Canonical are obvious ones. But there's also smaller outfits like Continuum Analytics, Igalia, The SQlite Consortium. Further, there are loads of technology incubators and VCs who would do well to fund projects like Octave to make sure their Data Science startups can rely on these tools. > Blockchains? I'm scared to ask what you mean by this.

chii 10y ago
i feel that adding middleman organizations sap the margins, and also gives those middleman organizations that do the funding some measure of power that i feel is also undeserved. I think the dual licensing method would extract the most value and give the most of said value back to the developers.
- toyg 10y ago
  The PyQt experience is that dual-licensing restricts adoption. On the other hand, it ensures the developer makes enough to keep working on it quite steadily.
  - gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
    The main fault I've heard with the PyQT licence is that the project has to pay a for a commercial licence from day 0 - companies would like to be able to prototype with the gpl version and start paying when they are close to release.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      From their FAQ: Can I develop my proprietary application using the GPL version of PyQt? Yes, so long as you have purchased the commercial version of PyQt before you distribute your proprietary application for the first time. (Note that this is different to the terms of the Qt commercial license.)

VMG 10y ago

> Blockchains? Only for Bitcoin.

matt4077 10y ago

You're throwing out technical solutions – one law-technical, one crypto-technical – for what's essentially a social problem. You don't need the draconian measure of dividing the OSS community, turning the idea of Free-as-Speech software into what's essentially shareware with source code access. Large corporations have (obviously) vast financial resources. And – more importantly – they are (usually) staffed by humans. Have you ever felt the wish to be generous to someone whose software you used extensively? That feeling doesn't go away when you step into an office that requires a name tag to pass security. Even mid-level managers or programmers usually can spend 4-figures easily without much oversight. And even if: I have witnessed a few cases where such requests went up the chain and came back with an added zero, despite HN third-favourite cliché being "companies have a duty only to shareholders and anything that deviates from 'greed is good' is a criminal offence'". Sometimes it helps to offer a some sort of service contract, sponsoring or a workshop. They're bought as tokens to cover all eventualities. So what's missing? Probably something like the FSF is doing here, handling paperwork and making it tax-deductible. I think it should be tied into some sort of coherent marketing strategy, kinda like the Apache foundation but more accessible to smaller projects, and possibly even a brand identity (/website) that doesn't trigger nostalgia for teletext. Mozilla is doing the best job in OSS marketing I can think of, but doesn't have a model for such projects. Maybe a Github foundation could also find success with a Wikimedia-style campaign. Although I'll hate myself for suggesting it if it ever happens. Plus, unfortunately, a tiny bit of effort by developers. If you're just coding away at home and loving it, I can understand that it seems unfair, useless, out-of-personal-scope etc. that you should be doing fundraising. But it's also a bit too easy to expect good things to happen just because there's good code. (I have no knowledge of the octave situation specifically, and they may have done an excellent job and I'm wrong – this is just my general impression of some of these lone-coder projects). Let's also not forget that OSS as a whole is probably doing better today than ever before. For every case such as this, there are dozens of cases where people are hired by large companies and largely left to work on their projects, or OSS created and released from within corporations, or successful startups with an OSS strategy etc. Yeah, and "blockchain" isn't actually a magic spell that solves random problems...

010a 10y ago

It is his responsibility to capture the value of his work. The world does not owe him this. The world doesn't owe him anything unless he demands it. You're asking to have your cake and eat it to: Give software away (altruism) but also feel guilty when he complains that he doesn't have any money. You can't have both.

kazinator 10y ago

This developer has been able to work at their hobby project for a quarter century, and finally has to contemplate the brutal reality of finding a job not related to it. Sorry, my heart just can't ache somehow!