7 ms·

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 dona

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. EDIT: after reading his Twitter, it seems something is going on with him. https://twitter.com/marak https://twitter.com/marak

ganafagol 6y ago
Please stop painting open source as a donation-based development model. That's completely distorting what it is about.
- gkoberger 6y ago
  Okay? This particular project is soliciting donations: “Support us with a monthly donation and help us continue our activities.” I’m not really sure what your point is, because you never actually made one. You just said I was wrong.
  - Robin_Message 6y ago
    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.)
    - stormbeard 6y ago
      Then you're just indirectly donating money, no? What you described is just proxying the donation through an engineer.
    - hobofan 6y ago
      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.
      - Robin_Message 6y ago
        No problem per-se, but to give a simple example: 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.
        treis 6y ago
        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.
  - hobofan 6y ago
    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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- MildlySerious 6y ago
  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.
- stormbeard 6y ago
  Care to elaborate on what _you_ believe it's about?
  - ganafagol 6y ago
    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.
- dang 6y ago
  "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (Your comment would be better for conversation if it explained more instead of just denouncing what you think is wrong.)
neltnerb 6y ago
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.
ricardobeat 6y ago
BountySource did this. It failed.
- theluketowers 6y ago
  That's because their product sucked, they charged excessive fees, and they were actively hostile to their users.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    They also got acquired and the acquiring company tried to take the existing bounty money for themselves.
- gkoberger 6y ago
  There’s a ton who have tried variations of adding money to open source! None have managed to stick for some reason.
imtringued 6y ago
Issuehunt and bountysource already exist.
slooonz 6y ago
> 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. I don’t understand how it hasn’t happened yet.
- quells 6y ago
  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.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    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.
andrey_utkin 6y ago
> 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. I hope I am onto something with the idea of crowdfunding specific commitments, as I have sketched there: https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/3735cd91750a1214443a283546391b72 https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/3735cd917... 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. It's strange that there's so little crowdfunding happening to deliver free and open source software. One of the very few prominent examples is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-migrations-for-django https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-mig... 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.
- jlbnjmn 6y ago
  > I am keen to help others to adopt this approach, so everybody is most welcome to reach out to me with any questions. I'll take you up on this. How far have you gotten? What surprises have you uncovered? Are you blogging or tweeting the project?
  - andrey_utkin 6y ago
    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 sketch some of my thoughts here, but the notes are somewhat outdated: https://github.com/userbase-funded/wiki/wiki https://github.com/userbase-funded/wiki/wiki 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 https://github.com/pimutils/vdirsyncer/issues/790
hinkley 6y ago
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.
- josteink 6y ago
  > been working my way down Youtube videos. ... If you don't pay for this video, then either there is no video, or advertisers pay Youtube Premium which helps pay for videos is right here: https://www.youtube.com/premium https://www.youtube.com/premium
toast42 6y ago
Looks like they lost all their possessions in an apartment fire: https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272 https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272
- NathanKP 6y ago
  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/6425363/ https://abc7ny.com/suspicious-package-queens-astoria-fire/64...) So yeah "seems something is going on with him"
  - finnthehuman 6y 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.
    - NathanKP 6y ago
      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.
  - dopamean 6y ago
    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.

ganafagol 6y ago

Please stop painting open source as a donation-based development model. That's completely distorting what it is about.

gkoberger 6y ago
Okay? This particular project is soliciting donations: “Support us with a monthly donation and help us continue our activities.” I’m not really sure what your point is, because you never actually made one. You just said I was wrong.
- Robin_Message 6y ago
  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.)
  - stormbeard 6y ago
    Then you're just indirectly donating money, no? What you described is just proxying the donation through an engineer.
  - hobofan 6y ago
    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.
    - Robin_Message 6y ago
      No problem per-se, but to give a simple example: 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.
      - treis 6y ago
        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.
- hobofan 6y ago
  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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
MildlySerious 6y ago
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.
stormbeard 6y ago
Care to elaborate on what _you_ believe it's about?
- ganafagol 6y ago
  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.
dang 6y ago
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (Your comment would be better for conversation if it explained more instead of just denouncing what you think is wrong.)

neltnerb 6y ago

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.

ricardobeat 6y ago

BountySource did this. It failed.

theluketowers 6y ago
That's because their product sucked, they charged excessive fees, and they were actively hostile to their users.
- imtringued 6y ago
  They also got acquired and the acquiring company tried to take the existing bounty money for themselves.
gkoberger 6y ago
There’s a ton who have tried variations of adding money to open source! None have managed to stick for some reason.

imtringued 6y ago

Issuehunt and bountysource already exist.

slooonz 6y ago

> 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. I don’t understand how it hasn’t happened yet.

quells 6y ago
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.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  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.

andrey_utkin 6y ago

> 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. I hope I am onto something with the idea of crowdfunding specific commitments, as I have sketched there: https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/3735cd91750a1214443a283546391b72 https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/3735cd917... 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. It's strange that there's so little crowdfunding happening to deliver free and open source software. One of the very few prominent examples is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-migrations-for-django https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-mig... 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.

jlbnjmn 6y ago
> I am keen to help others to adopt this approach, so everybody is most welcome to reach out to me with any questions. I'll take you up on this. How far have you gotten? What surprises have you uncovered? Are you blogging or tweeting the project?
- andrey_utkin 6y ago
  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 sketch some of my thoughts here, but the notes are somewhat outdated: https://github.com/userbase-funded/wiki/wiki https://github.com/userbase-funded/wiki/wiki 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 https://github.com/pimutils/vdirsyncer/issues/790

hinkley 6y ago

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.

josteink 6y ago
> been working my way down Youtube videos. ... If you don't pay for this video, then either there is no video, or advertisers pay Youtube Premium which helps pay for videos is right here: https://www.youtube.com/premium https://www.youtube.com/premium

toast42 6y ago

Looks like they lost all their possessions in an apartment fire: https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272 https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272

NathanKP 6y ago
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/6425363/ https://abc7ny.com/suspicious-package-queens-astoria-fire/64...) So yeah "seems something is going on with him"
- finnthehuman 6y 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.
  - NathanKP 6y ago
    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.
- dopamean 6y ago
  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.