12 ms·

No Free Features

74 points by alangibson 6y ago

OJFord 6y ago
There is at least one SaaS tool for this (that takes its own cut too, of course) - the name escapes me - but rather than require that the change requestor put up the full sum, it allows multiple people to chip in ('+1 I have this problem too', but with cash) so rather than sort by #people affected as some projects do (proxied by +1s on the original post in the issue usually) they could sort by #currencyunits that the community is willing to pay, which clearly isn't necessarily the same as the issue that is annoying most people. I think GitHub also marks that a commenter (or issue opener) is a 'Sponsor' if you use that system.
- ljlolel 6y ago
  +$1
- alangibson 6y ago
  Is like a service that allows the devs to basically make an offer of what they will implement it for. Bonus points if the dev can give an hour estimate so the requestor can make a case with their employee for paying up based on the good hourly rate they are getting.
- codetrotter 6y ago
  > There is at least one SaaS tool for this (that takes its own cut too, of course) BountySource? Yeah their name escaped me too for a moment and when I was able to figure the name out I came across a post from a while back about them. Apparently they turned evil. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23551098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23551098
0dmethz 6y ago
100% agree. "Sorry, but I don't work for free, consider sponsoring the project" should be a perfectly legitimate reason to reject a request on an open source project.
- alangibson 6y ago
  The reason that response is so rare is that people forgot the origin of open source. Once I solve my problem, it costs me nothing to give you the solution. If you just want me to solve your problem when I don't also have it, you need to compensate me for my time.
  - White_Wolf 6y ago
    I think (some)people forget that that particular piece of software saves them money and/or time and think they are entitled to it (somehow). They forget that nobody owes them anything and should be grateful for the fact it's FOSS in the first place.
  - falcolas 6y ago
    Respectfully, this is not the origin of open source. The origin of open source is the ideal that "users should be able to see - and modify - the code that is running on their machines." The "it costs me nothing" has also also proven to be false, because there's a pretty sizable overhead to open sourcing and maintaining an open source project, especially once it becomes popular. If there was no overhead, you wouldn't see articles like the "Pay Me or Fork This" post from earlier this morning.
    - alangibson 6y ago
      I always understood that as a later Richard Stallman-esque take on it. Transparency would have just been assumed by the first people to do OSS because they'd be the ones loading the programs.
      - falcolas 6y ago
        It's worth reading into the history of OSS. There was a bit of sharing going on in the early 70's, but it was all being locked down before Richard Stallman and his contemporaries created the modern OSS movement via the GNU project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-source_software#Initial_decline_of_free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...
hobofan 6y ago
> Requesting work in an economic context without offering compensation in some form is morally indefensible. Not even close to all open source work is in an economic context though.
- Edd314159 6y ago
  _Requesting_ it is fine. _Expecting_ it is not
- alangibson 6y ago
  That's why I made it clear that I'm talking about this in an economic contest. If you are making a SaaS for organizing church group outings, I wouldn't expect that 'pay for your change requests' would be a great model.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  Nearly all human activity occurs in a "economic context". Doing something outside of an economic context is like that old comedy sketch about a leaking oil tanker being towed "outside the environment". Most human interactions are at some level transactional and driven by individual incentives. This is true even for personal side projects and charity work. In all Western societies and economies that I know of, it is both legal and acceptable to offer people compensation in exchange for them doing stuff for you, whatever that stuff is and whatever that compensation is. I'm sure there are human societies in which this is totally untrue, but I would be surprised if the rules of those societies were applicable to open source software development outside of very specific situations.
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
How often do the faang companies actually make change requests to these projects? My understanding, not working in the space, is that they will many times upstream improvements they develop. But I wasn't aware that they were hitting oss authors with a deluge of unpaid change requests. Now I know that reviewing an upstreamed change is also work. That's a big part of my job at work so I could hardly fail to recognize it. It would be completely reasonable to apply this policy even to code reviews. Of course in that event forking the project might be exactly what the companies would do, and I'm not sure if that would be a preferable outcome from the perspective of oss authors either.
- mfer 6y ago
  There are people at the large tech companies who will not only push for a project to make a change they want (including doing all the coding work) but will sometimes get into the space of bullying to try and force someone to do the change for them. I've seen this numerous times.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    Would you be so kind as to point to some examples? Presumably this will be visible in a Github issue or something like that, since we're talking about OSS and presumably open issue trackers. FWIW I just went back and did some searching over the faker.js issues and I didn't see any requests that seemed obviously corporate. (I picked faker.js because that article seems to be the most recent inspiration for this discussion on this site.) Most of the non-feature request issues were malformed or from people who obviously don't know what they are doing, but the rest were bugs that could hit big corporate users or hobbyists alike. I didn't see any request that looked like it came from someone working at a FAANG, although I guess it might be hard to tell. The overall number of feature requests filed during the repo's history was only 15.
    - wbond 6y ago
      No bullying, but Facebook wanted a change in one of my repos. The engineer said it was important for “security”, but had no motivation to contribute: https://github.com/wbond/asn1crypto/issues/59 https://github.com/wbond/asn1crypto/issues/59. Eventually I ended up having to do the work because other organizations didn’t like that I didn’t bundle 3MB of test fixtures with the releases on PyPi.
qwerty456127 6y ago
> So let’s get one thing straight: open source developers are not volunteering to fix your problem. That's not universally correct. As an open source (and non-open source too) developer I appreciate every idea of how to improve my app, by fixing a bug or by adding a feature (or even by rewriting my app entirely in a particular language - this is unlikely but may happen to be a good idea occasionally). Surely nobody should rely on the idea I will actually do what they want and when they want but nobody should ever hesitate to tell what they want.
- alangibson 6y ago
  Fair enough. I was trying to address people that have an expectation that the maintainers are going to do work for them. I didn't have the "wouldn't it be cool if..." requests in mind.
dahart 6y ago
I’m fully in agreement with the goal here, that for-profit companies should pay for changes they request. And some companies do pay OSS projects for support. SQLite is one high profile example (https://www.sqlite.org/consortium.html https://www.sqlite.org/consortium.html), and there are others with varying degrees of success. The problem I see here is that there is no clear or easy path to making this goal a reality everywhere. What really happens most of the time is engineers at various companies are downloading and integrating open source code because it’s free to use as-is. These engineers aren’t managers and do not typically have the ability to spend company money on software without approvals from management, and while they should ask, the reality is that they don’t ask. If I’m an engineer inside a for-profit company, with no explicit software budget, what steps should I take to prepare the company for offering bounties? Should something be happening before we download and integrate a new OSS project that sets a management/company expectation of paying for future changes, and what should that look like?
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Honestly I think many companies would be willing to pay for open source if internally engineers could say, "look, we depend on this project for our success and we have a vested interest in seeing it maintained well and getting our features/bug-fixes actioned, and it's a lot cheaper for us to spend $1k/year (or whatever) than for us to pay our own developers to work on it (and not our own features)". I think a lot of business people would respond well to that, and if enough companies do that it could drive a lot of additional innovation and development in open source.
  - dahart 6y ago
    Totally, I think you’re right, a lot of companies are open to paying for it if it’s saving money and providing value. I mean, all companies already do have a software expenditure budget for commercial software. But I guess it is not simple to just put OSS projects in the same budget bucket as proprietary software. Companies have a special aversion to unexpected expenses. I’ve done business with companies that would rather pay a known monthly fee for all their licenses than only pay for the licenses that get used every month, simply because they can’t account for what it will cost in advance. Practically speaking, always paying bounties for changes would turn OSS into pure commercial software from the buyer’s point of view. There are a ton of OSS projects that are supported by the author’s day job at a for-profit company. I guess I’m not convinced that if software is offered for free in the first place that it always makes sense to expect money to be offered without asking for it. If an OSS project needs funding, maybe it’s best to just offer it commercially in the first place? I just don’t necessarily agree with the hyperbole that unpaid labor is “wrong”, because that undermines the initial OSS transaction. The software was offered for free-as-in-beer in the first place, and that is unpaid labor. It’s perfectly fine to request pay for changes, so isn’t that better and more straightfoward than not asking for money but complaining when none comes?
llimos 6y ago
What about documentation? The maintainer doesn't need to document the package in order to solve their own problem (at least, not to the same level.) Should that be chargeable too? In which case the project will likely never get off the ground, and there'll be no money coming in for other change requests either. Don't get me wrong, I agree in principle. There are just too many grey areas to make a blanket rule. But what this is leading me to, is that if we go down this path, it just becomes another business model - where you build some things, and give them away, because you need to do so to have a product. And then charge for others. Nothing wrong with that at all, but it isn't as simple as the article makes out.
- alangibson 6y ago
  > There are just too many grey areas to make a blanket rule. Indeed. I'm not trying to write a law. More like correct a social norm.
jefftk 6y ago
> I look forward to a day when asking anyone to do unpaid labor is considered unethical by our industry. That goes for feature requests on open source projects ... While I'm sure there are some open source developers who see feature requests as a burden, lots of us just want to make useful software. If someone lets me know about a way that icdiff or anything else I maintain could be better, I'm happy to hear it. I'm not always up for implementing changes, in which case I'll typically say whether a PR implementing the feature would be welcome, but it is extremely far from unethical to file a feature request.
- alangibson 6y ago
  > extremely far from unethical to file a feature request. I'm suggesting that it is in fact an ethical problem to try to get something for nothing if you break it down. It's no different than walking into an artists shop and asking if you can just have a painting. It doesn't make you a terrible person, but I think it's a problematic norm. Now there's no requirement that the developer actually take the compensation (whatever it is). If you don't want it, add that to your README and never think of it again.
  - monetus 6y ago
    Hmm, more like walking into a public installation and asking the artist if they considered adding X, since they are mostly losing time while adding to the commons.
    - alangibson 6y ago
      If go with that example if there was a direct benefit to me in the addition. Feature requests are typically made based on what the requestor needs, not what they think everyone else might need.
      - monetus 6y ago
        Yeah, emphasis on the feature requests being variable. Hopefully for the burden the more inconsiderate ones create, there is at least a commensurate level of unspoken gratitude. Thanks.
durnygbur 6y ago
The uninformed audience is unbelivably spoiled by free software, no other professional will even talk about any domain specific problem without charging at least one hour rate. The software professionals have hopelessly low self esteem or think they're the smartest, many are ruthlessly competitive. Applying for jobs in our industry is such a miserable experience.
maximumOS 6y ago
That's exactly why we've started xs:code. Join us! https://xscode.com https://xscode.com
atoz2020 6y ago
You should join xscode
- alangibson 6y ago
  What's Xscode's value add beyond going to the developer directly and paying them by PayPal?
  - atoz2020 6y ago
    Everything the developer needs. Legal framework, a trusted 3rd party (from the user side), revenue share with other contributors, ability to manage dual-licensing for repos, and much more. the thing is, xs:code also makes it easier to BUY from the developer. and that what makes it work, for both sides.
  - atoz2020 6y ago
    https://xscode.com/open-source-developer-features/ https://xscode.com/open-source-developer-features/
maerF0x0 6y ago
If I give you a large number of scratch tickets (such that expected value is > $0), could it be considered compensation? Starting and contributing to a side project often has EROI > 0 and for many _that_ is their compensation. Now, as for Marak who is facing homelessness etc, that's just dumb (for society to treat such a beneficial member in such a manner) .
- alangibson 6y ago
  If all the dev wants is street cred, then great. I'm not telling anyone what is good for them. I'm arguing against a norm that I see as being frequently one-sided and occasionally actively destructive, and for something like the Norm of Reciprocity in this narrow case of feature requests on open source projects.
  - maerF0x0 6y ago
    Yeah, hopefully thats where new engineers hoping to cut their teeth on FOSS contributions would step in and say "I want to contribute too!" It doesnt have to be a full binary, can be a spectrum of outcomes where some people get paid for full time work, some take "experience"/"portfolio" payment and others are happy to just code ...
junon 6y ago
Worth mentioning, there are quite a few people on another thread pointing out this person is not very pleasant, having done some seriously not-ok things and has an attitude that suggests these claims are disingenuous.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Nitpick but important detail: > The gist is that Marak, who’s on the brink of homelessness after his apartment building caught fire It caught on fire likely because he was trying to make bombs: https://abc7ny.com/suspicious-package-queens-astoria-fire/6425363/ https://abc7ny.com/suspicious-package-queens-astoria-fire/64...
- Fnoord 6y ago
  > They say 12 units and 60 firefighters responded to the scene. Someone is paying the wage of all these people, and it isn't Marak. The irony.

74 points by alangibson 6y ago

There is at least one SaaS tool for this (that takes its own cut too, of course) - the name escapes me - but rather than require that the change requestor put up the full sum, it allows multiple people to chip in ('+1 I have this problem too', but with cash) so rather than sort by #people affected as some projects do (proxied by +1s on the original post in the issue usually) they could sort by #currencyunits that the community is willing to pay, which clearly isn't necessarily the same as the issue that is annoying most people. I think GitHub also marks that a commenter (or issue opener) is a 'Sponsor' if you use that system.

ljlolel 6y ago
+$1
alangibson 6y ago
Is like a service that allows the devs to basically make an offer of what they will implement it for. Bonus points if the dev can give an hour estimate so the requestor can make a case with their employee for paying up based on the good hourly rate they are getting.
codetrotter 6y ago
> There is at least one SaaS tool for this (that takes its own cut too, of course) BountySource? Yeah their name escaped me too for a moment and when I was able to figure the name out I came across a post from a while back about them. Apparently they turned evil. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23551098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23551098

0dmethz 6y ago

100% agree. "Sorry, but I don't work for free, consider sponsoring the project" should be a perfectly legitimate reason to reject a request on an open source project.

alangibson 6y ago
The reason that response is so rare is that people forgot the origin of open source. Once I solve my problem, it costs me nothing to give you the solution. If you just want me to solve your problem when I don't also have it, you need to compensate me for my time.
- White_Wolf 6y ago
  I think (some)people forget that that particular piece of software saves them money and/or time and think they are entitled to it (somehow). They forget that nobody owes them anything and should be grateful for the fact it's FOSS in the first place.
- falcolas 6y ago
  Respectfully, this is not the origin of open source. The origin of open source is the ideal that "users should be able to see - and modify - the code that is running on their machines." The "it costs me nothing" has also also proven to be false, because there's a pretty sizable overhead to open sourcing and maintaining an open source project, especially once it becomes popular. If there was no overhead, you wouldn't see articles like the "Pay Me or Fork This" post from earlier this morning.
  - alangibson 6y ago
    I always understood that as a later Richard Stallman-esque take on it. Transparency would have just been assumed by the first people to do OSS because they'd be the ones loading the programs.
    - falcolas 6y ago
      It's worth reading into the history of OSS. There was a bit of sharing going on in the early 70's, but it was all being locked down before Richard Stallman and his contemporaries created the modern OSS movement via the GNU project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-source_software#Initial_decline_of_free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...

hobofan 6y ago

> Requesting work in an economic context without offering compensation in some form is morally indefensible. Not even close to all open source work is in an economic context though.

Edd314159 6y ago
_Requesting_ it is fine. _Expecting_ it is not
alangibson 6y ago
That's why I made it clear that I'm talking about this in an economic contest. If you are making a SaaS for organizing church group outings, I wouldn't expect that 'pay for your change requests' would be a great model.
nerdponx 6y ago
Nearly all human activity occurs in a "economic context". Doing something outside of an economic context is like that old comedy sketch about a leaking oil tanker being towed "outside the environment". Most human interactions are at some level transactional and driven by individual incentives. This is true even for personal side projects and charity work. In all Western societies and economies that I know of, it is both legal and acceptable to offer people compensation in exchange for them doing stuff for you, whatever that stuff is and whatever that compensation is. I'm sure there are human societies in which this is totally untrue, but I would be surprised if the rules of those societies were applicable to open source software development outside of very specific situations.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

How often do the faang companies actually make change requests to these projects? My understanding, not working in the space, is that they will many times upstream improvements they develop. But I wasn't aware that they were hitting oss authors with a deluge of unpaid change requests. Now I know that reviewing an upstreamed change is also work. That's a big part of my job at work so I could hardly fail to recognize it. It would be completely reasonable to apply this policy even to code reviews. Of course in that event forking the project might be exactly what the companies would do, and I'm not sure if that would be a preferable outcome from the perspective of oss authors either.

mfer 6y ago
There are people at the large tech companies who will not only push for a project to make a change they want (including doing all the coding work) but will sometimes get into the space of bullying to try and force someone to do the change for them. I've seen this numerous times.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Would you be so kind as to point to some examples? Presumably this will be visible in a Github issue or something like that, since we're talking about OSS and presumably open issue trackers. FWIW I just went back and did some searching over the faker.js issues and I didn't see any requests that seemed obviously corporate. (I picked faker.js because that article seems to be the most recent inspiration for this discussion on this site.) Most of the non-feature request issues were malformed or from people who obviously don't know what they are doing, but the rest were bugs that could hit big corporate users or hobbyists alike. I didn't see any request that looked like it came from someone working at a FAANG, although I guess it might be hard to tell. The overall number of feature requests filed during the repo's history was only 15.
  - wbond 6y ago
    No bullying, but Facebook wanted a change in one of my repos. The engineer said it was important for “security”, but had no motivation to contribute: https://github.com/wbond/asn1crypto/issues/59 https://github.com/wbond/asn1crypto/issues/59. Eventually I ended up having to do the work because other organizations didn’t like that I didn’t bundle 3MB of test fixtures with the releases on PyPi.

qwerty456127 6y ago

> So let’s get one thing straight: open source developers are not volunteering to fix your problem. That's not universally correct. As an open source (and non-open source too) developer I appreciate every idea of how to improve my app, by fixing a bug or by adding a feature (or even by rewriting my app entirely in a particular language - this is unlikely but may happen to be a good idea occasionally). Surely nobody should rely on the idea I will actually do what they want and when they want but nobody should ever hesitate to tell what they want.

alangibson 6y ago
Fair enough. I was trying to address people that have an expectation that the maintainers are going to do work for them. I didn't have the "wouldn't it be cool if..." requests in mind.

dahart 6y ago

I’m fully in agreement with the goal here, that for-profit companies should pay for changes they request. And some companies do pay OSS projects for support. SQLite is one high profile example (https://www.sqlite.org/consortium.html https://www.sqlite.org/consortium.html), and there are others with varying degrees of success. The problem I see here is that there is no clear or easy path to making this goal a reality everywhere. What really happens most of the time is engineers at various companies are downloading and integrating open source code because it’s free to use as-is. These engineers aren’t managers and do not typically have the ability to spend company money on software without approvals from management, and while they should ask, the reality is that they don’t ask. If I’m an engineer inside a for-profit company, with no explicit software budget, what steps should I take to prepare the company for offering bounties? Should something be happening before we download and integrate a new OSS project that sets a management/company expectation of paying for future changes, and what should that look like?

throwaway894345 6y ago
Honestly I think many companies would be willing to pay for open source if internally engineers could say, "look, we depend on this project for our success and we have a vested interest in seeing it maintained well and getting our features/bug-fixes actioned, and it's a lot cheaper for us to spend $1k/year (or whatever) than for us to pay our own developers to work on it (and not our own features)". I think a lot of business people would respond well to that, and if enough companies do that it could drive a lot of additional innovation and development in open source.
- dahart 6y ago
  Totally, I think you’re right, a lot of companies are open to paying for it if it’s saving money and providing value. I mean, all companies already do have a software expenditure budget for commercial software. But I guess it is not simple to just put OSS projects in the same budget bucket as proprietary software. Companies have a special aversion to unexpected expenses. I’ve done business with companies that would rather pay a known monthly fee for all their licenses than only pay for the licenses that get used every month, simply because they can’t account for what it will cost in advance. Practically speaking, always paying bounties for changes would turn OSS into pure commercial software from the buyer’s point of view. There are a ton of OSS projects that are supported by the author’s day job at a for-profit company. I guess I’m not convinced that if software is offered for free in the first place that it always makes sense to expect money to be offered without asking for it. If an OSS project needs funding, maybe it’s best to just offer it commercially in the first place? I just don’t necessarily agree with the hyperbole that unpaid labor is “wrong”, because that undermines the initial OSS transaction. The software was offered for free-as-in-beer in the first place, and that is unpaid labor. It’s perfectly fine to request pay for changes, so isn’t that better and more straightfoward than not asking for money but complaining when none comes?

llimos 6y ago

What about documentation? The maintainer doesn't need to document the package in order to solve their own problem (at least, not to the same level.) Should that be chargeable too? In which case the project will likely never get off the ground, and there'll be no money coming in for other change requests either. Don't get me wrong, I agree in principle. There are just too many grey areas to make a blanket rule. But what this is leading me to, is that if we go down this path, it just becomes another business model - where you build some things, and give them away, because you need to do so to have a product. And then charge for others. Nothing wrong with that at all, but it isn't as simple as the article makes out.

alangibson 6y ago
> There are just too many grey areas to make a blanket rule. Indeed. I'm not trying to write a law. More like correct a social norm.

jefftk 6y ago

> I look forward to a day when asking anyone to do unpaid labor is considered unethical by our industry. That goes for feature requests on open source projects ... While I'm sure there are some open source developers who see feature requests as a burden, lots of us just want to make useful software. If someone lets me know about a way that icdiff or anything else I maintain could be better, I'm happy to hear it. I'm not always up for implementing changes, in which case I'll typically say whether a PR implementing the feature would be welcome, but it is extremely far from unethical to file a feature request.

alangibson 6y ago
> extremely far from unethical to file a feature request. I'm suggesting that it is in fact an ethical problem to try to get something for nothing if you break it down. It's no different than walking into an artists shop and asking if you can just have a painting. It doesn't make you a terrible person, but I think it's a problematic norm. Now there's no requirement that the developer actually take the compensation (whatever it is). If you don't want it, add that to your README and never think of it again.
- monetus 6y ago
  Hmm, more like walking into a public installation and asking the artist if they considered adding X, since they are mostly losing time while adding to the commons.
  - alangibson 6y ago
    If go with that example if there was a direct benefit to me in the addition. Feature requests are typically made based on what the requestor needs, not what they think everyone else might need.
    - monetus 6y ago
      Yeah, emphasis on the feature requests being variable. Hopefully for the burden the more inconsiderate ones create, there is at least a commensurate level of unspoken gratitude. Thanks.

durnygbur 6y ago

The uninformed audience is unbelivably spoiled by free software, no other professional will even talk about any domain specific problem without charging at least one hour rate. The software professionals have hopelessly low self esteem or think they're the smartest, many are ruthlessly competitive. Applying for jobs in our industry is such a miserable experience.

maximumOS 6y ago

That's exactly why we've started xs:code. Join us! https://xscode.com https://xscode.com

atoz2020 6y ago

You should join xscode

alangibson 6y ago
What's Xscode's value add beyond going to the developer directly and paying them by PayPal?
- atoz2020 6y ago
  Everything the developer needs. Legal framework, a trusted 3rd party (from the user side), revenue share with other contributors, ability to manage dual-licensing for repos, and much more. the thing is, xs:code also makes it easier to BUY from the developer. and that what makes it work, for both sides.
- atoz2020 6y ago
  https://xscode.com/open-source-developer-features/ https://xscode.com/open-source-developer-features/

maerF0x0 6y ago

If I give you a large number of scratch tickets (such that expected value is > $0), could it be considered compensation? Starting and contributing to a side project often has EROI > 0 and for many _that_ is their compensation. Now, as for Marak who is facing homelessness etc, that's just dumb (for society to treat such a beneficial member in such a manner) .

alangibson 6y ago
If all the dev wants is street cred, then great. I'm not telling anyone what is good for them. I'm arguing against a norm that I see as being frequently one-sided and occasionally actively destructive, and for something like the Norm of Reciprocity in this narrow case of feature requests on open source projects.
- maerF0x0 6y ago
  Yeah, hopefully thats where new engineers hoping to cut their teeth on FOSS contributions would step in and say "I want to contribute too!" It doesnt have to be a full binary, can be a spectrum of outcomes where some people get paid for full time work, some take "experience"/"portfolio" payment and others are happy to just code ...

junon 6y ago

Worth mentioning, there are quite a few people on another thread pointing out this person is not very pleasant, having done some seriously not-ok things and has an attitude that suggests these claims are disingenuous.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

Nitpick but important detail: > The gist is that Marak, who’s on the brink of homelessness after his apartment building caught fire It caught on fire likely because he was trying to make bombs: https://abc7ny.com/suspicious-package-queens-astoria-fire/6425363/ https://abc7ny.com/suspicious-package-queens-astoria-fire/64...

Fnoord 6y ago
> They say 12 units and 60 firefighters responded to the scene. Someone is paying the wage of all these people, and it isn't Marak. The irony.