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I haven't tried this yet, but poking around the site, I'm wondering what mitigations you have for potential abuse? I'm concerned specifically about transparency
by undoware 7y ago
I haven't tried this yet, but poking around the site, I'm wondering what mitigations you have for potential abuse? I'm concerned specifically about transparency to the end user about the costs of the packages that they've installed.
Thinking aloud:
* My user chooses to install my package with scarf, either because I force them to (by not making it easily available elsewhere) or because they want to support me (yay!)
* I make money from their install, and/or their use of the package (is this correct?)
In that case, as Mallory, as a bad actor, I:
* Want to make a package that looks affordable but pulls in dependencies
* I want to make those dependencies cheap at first, but then I'm going to make them expensive later, when you are, well, dependent (ahem)
* I want those deps to be, as much as possible, me and my friends
I'm not even going to get into the abuse potential I can imagine would obtain by preying on naive good actors; e.g. convincing some well-intentioned dev to use my dep and then effectively taking rents from all of their downstream users.
I haven't had a chance to play with Scarf yet but I'd love to hear about how you handle scenarios like this on its website. Because I'm pretty sure these scenarios are why something like scarf hasn't shown up before.
(Personal belief/stance informing this worry: FOSS got big by providing easily-reasoned-about costing structure in an industry that had hitherto been beholden to things like on-site auditors, per-seat licensing, hidden costs, submarine patents, etc; our value prop was "you always know your cost is gonna be $0, plus installer and maintainer salaries", which is much better than "We decided this now costs double". We didn't so much cost less as cost predictably.)
- misterdoubt 7y agoI can't imagine using a package on this system as a dependency at all. Not even bringing Mallory in. Just the ordinary use case of "Hi, my app is free or pay... and dep #1 is free or pay and dep #2 is free or pay and dep #3 is free or pay so now you have some choices."
- aviaviavi 7y agoFrom the user's perspective, the price of the dependencies will need to be baked into the price of the package, the user should not need to deal with that. The developers shouldn't deal with it much either, really. Scarf can handle making sure dependencies are paid appropriately based on prices agreed to by developers.
- aviaviavi 7y ago> I make money from their install, and/or their use of the package (is this correct?) It could be install, usage, usage without sending analytics, and eventually other tiers too! The idea of the system being abused is a great point to bring up. There are a few ideas floating but it isn't fully nailed down yet because the project is still in very early stages :). We'll certainly get there. Cost predicability is something I had not thought of, I agree that's a compelling use case for FOSS. I'll think about that moving forward and how Scarf can help bring revenue to developers while keeping costs predictable for users.