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For all those people in this thread praising his work, now's the time to put your money where the mouth is. If you have used his work, push your companies to sp

For all those people in this thread praising his work, now's the time to put your money where the mouth is. If you have used his work, push your companies to sponsor/donate. Asking irrelevant questions like whether he has a job does not help the situation. The community's response to events like this is what determines the future of open source. People like to complain about copyleft vs libre licenses. But if you have benefitted much from open source software and are hesitant about contributing back financially, you are part of the problem. This is not just about Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Fortune 500s. If you are a tech startup with revenue or funding and uses his software in your products, consider a 5 to 6 figures contract, or at the very least a significant one time donation.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I feel for him being in his tough spot, but let's be clear on what faker.js is. I suspect many companies (like mine) use it to create "decent"-looking data for tests. But we could trivially do without it, and basically just used it because it was there. I contrast this with some other open source projects we use that we specifically contribute to (using GitHub donations) because they are central libraries to our code base.
- offbyone 6y ago
  That's going to be true to some extent of every library your company uses, but for every library someone writes and offers as FOSS, you don't have to spend the cycles designing, developing, and maintaining your own, nor training new hires on using it. You're fundamentally misunderstanding the value of having good quality tools developed by someone else. And I'm not even going to _start_ on what I think of your attitude towards test tooling vs "central libraries" other than to note that if you don't consider test tools central to your development process, I think you have bigger problems.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    You're completely mischaracterizing my post. My point is that if faker were anything slightly above free, we really wouldn't have used it, and our code quality wouldn't suffer from not having it. It was more of a "ooh, that's kinda nice" thing when we used it. > And I'm not even going to _start_ on what I think of your attitude towards test tooling vs "central libraries" other than to note that if you don't consider test tools central to your development process, I think you have bigger problems. That's not my attitude at all and is a bullshit strawman. I actually do donate to libraries that are fundamental to our test framework. Faker is just definitely not one of them.
    - tomnipotent 6y ago
      > and our code quality wouldn't suffer from not having it Your code quality is irrelevant. What matters is did it save you time, and what is that time worth to you and your business.
      - NoodleIncident 6y ago
        Their whole point is that it didn't actually save any time; if it didn't exist for free, they wouldn't have done it themselves.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  How often have you implemented a trivial feature and, after adding tests, debugging, doing code review, etc, you find it’s taken a nontrivial amount of time. And it’ll likely take maintenance too as you learn what you need (easier when you’ve seen it done already). Most of these trivial things probably take nontrivial time, and if you add all of them together for all the trivial projects you use, it’s probably saved a really serious chunk of time. The ocean is made of “trivial” drops of water, yada yada.
  - jlcummings 6y ago
    Likewise, the trivial or novel that you borrow for free isn’t really free when you need to use it suddenly in ways that the license doesn’t permit or it is just technically inconvenient. It is sort of like leasing vs buying, but not really a good analogy.
  - Macha 6y ago
    Let's be clear, this is the difference between your test user being called Tom Smith with email tom@smith.com and Joseph Baker with email jbaker@bigcorp.com versus being called Foo Bar and Foo Bar2 with emails foo@example.com and foo2@example.com
    - an_opabinia 6y ago
      "Let's be clear, action developer actually took versus action developer didn't take but in my opinion isn't that different, as someone who didn't take any actions at all" is a bad hill to die on.
  - awb 6y ago
    I think the point is that generating pretty fake data as opposed to bland fake data is a "nice to have" rather than a "must have" for 98% of companies. And by the time you get up to AirBnb and FB, etc., they have their own internal testing data and standards based on years of real-world false negatives and false positives. It's really a content library, which is useful, but it's not in the mission-critical category where developers can get a rubber stamp budget approval from their boss. It's a great project to get your name out there as an open source developer, rather than a viable business model IMO.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  That just goes to show you how rough the real world really is. Like, it’s free and a pretty good solution, but still replaceable lol. Tough crowd. Always charge, or get value somehow, because I can promise you people will feel entitled to whatever baseline you give them (in this case ‘free’). Everyone and everything is replaceable, oh cruel world, why you do us dirty like that?
  - mattdeboard 6y ago
    That's not how tough the world is, it's how tough people choose to make it.
vmception 6y ago
Yeah but it is also hilarious when the contributors of free open source software rage quit when they realize others can use their work for free while the contributors forget to make money. Software developers, man! For a bi-weekly hilarious rage quit, check out Andre Conje on twitter!
- chris_wot 6y ago
  That’s horrible. If you produce something for free, and someone uses it to reduce effort and expenses, at least throw some money their way! Doesn’t even have to be much.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    I wonder if npm packages should operate in a similar way YouTube does. Why can’t people sell a license via npm? That would be a nice way to browse packages, pay a buck or two for Faker.js for commercial projects. Plenty of us have budgets that $50 dollars could get you some solid pro versions of a lot of software. We devalue ourselves really.
- cmiles74 6y ago
  I'm not sure that's the case here. It sounds like their apartment caught fire and now they are homeless. In my opinion, this sounds more like a desperation move than anger; this developer really needs money ASAP in order to keep a roof over their head.
  - vmception 6y ago
    Yeah. And this other time I saw a hardware company be “in the spirit of open source” and then saw another company use their code in cheaper hardware sold for less and then the first company went on a rage tirade and tried to edit their commit history to change the license, tarnishing themselves in their whole community and customer’s eyes at the time. FOSS rage quits are hilarious.
jonrimmer 6y ago
I use his work, but for me the situation is more complicated my prior experiences with the author. He's been making similar complaints about his lack of renumeration for quite a while. In an older GitHub where he requested contributions, I pointed out that he had barely worked on the project for many months (at that time), and not published a new version to npm in years[1], despite making a $600 withdrawal from his Open Collective fund in June 2018 with the explicit purpose of releasing v5[2]. In the thread, I suggested that I and others might be willing to contribute, but I wanted more certainty on what exactly my contribution would be paying for. As I saw it, at that point he had a number of regular donors who were essentially paying him to do nothing. He responded very angrily, saying nobody had any right to question his actions or to expect anything from him, even if they were paying him. He then deleted my comment entirely and banned me from commenting further. This interaction didn't exactly leave me with a strong desire to contribute. I think he's a rather volatile individual and the community would indeed be better off forking this project than indulging his sense of grievance. [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker.js https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker.js [2] https://opencollective.com/fakerjs/expenses/3972 https://opencollective.com/fakerjs/expenses/3972
- jka 6y ago
  It looks like the package may have duplicate entries on NPM; the more-regularly-released package is posted here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker
- derefr 6y ago
  You might see that as “volatile”, but I think I can see what he’s getting at. A charitable reading of his whole stance: • We can enter into a formal contract where I actually do owe you work-on-this-project in exchange for pay; • but without such a contract, donations to me are just that — donations — and don’t influence my work; • but this is an open-source project, so you’re free to put whatever work you like into it, and keep/use/share the results (in your own space, that I don’t have to referee.) • I’ll just be over here, doing what I want, unless/until someone makes a contract with me to do what they want. (Which, of course, they’re not obligated to do; they could just as well hire someone else to fork and maintain the project, rather than hiring me. That’s their choice.) • So, in short, you’re not the boss of me; unless you’re literally my boss. (A patron is not a boss.)
simlevesque 6y ago
I mean, I'm not using faker.js but I'm not exactly sure I'd finance a potential terrorist.
beervirus 6y ago
Yes, it is a good look to donate money so this guy can make more bombs.
bluedino 6y ago
Debian (for example) has 51,000 free software packages. How do we decide which ones to fund and how much they get? Do you earn money for being the maintainer. LOC you commit? Bugs you report or fix? What about people that write documentation or packaging?
mamunamu 6y ago
Honestly, he should have used the GPL and allowed other licensing options for commercial entities. Frankly I wouldn't use MIT license for personal open-source projects.
cwyers 6y ago
> If you have used his work, push your companies to sponsor/donate. That's not how any of this works. Most people work for companies that do not just donate to random software developers. If you want companies to send you money, you need to have something on an invoice. You don't actually have to make the commercial edition different than your community edition, especially if you're charging a low amount, finance isn't going to grill you about why you aren't using the free version. But you need to align how you expect to get paid with how companies are set up to pay people. Charge for stuff!
- bartvk 6y ago
  What I do, is ask for a receipt before I donate. Then it becomes a business cost to me.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

I feel for him being in his tough spot, but let's be clear on what faker.js is. I suspect many companies (like mine) use it to create "decent"-looking data for tests. But we could trivially do without it, and basically just used it because it was there. I contrast this with some other open source projects we use that we specifically contribute to (using GitHub donations) because they are central libraries to our code base.

offbyone 6y ago
That's going to be true to some extent of every library your company uses, but for every library someone writes and offers as FOSS, you don't have to spend the cycles designing, developing, and maintaining your own, nor training new hires on using it. You're fundamentally misunderstanding the value of having good quality tools developed by someone else. And I'm not even going to _start_ on what I think of your attitude towards test tooling vs "central libraries" other than to note that if you don't consider test tools central to your development process, I think you have bigger problems.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  You're completely mischaracterizing my post. My point is that if faker were anything slightly above free, we really wouldn't have used it, and our code quality wouldn't suffer from not having it. It was more of a "ooh, that's kinda nice" thing when we used it. > And I'm not even going to _start_ on what I think of your attitude towards test tooling vs "central libraries" other than to note that if you don't consider test tools central to your development process, I think you have bigger problems. That's not my attitude at all and is a bullshit strawman. I actually do donate to libraries that are fundamental to our test framework. Faker is just definitely not one of them.
  - tomnipotent 6y ago
    > and our code quality wouldn't suffer from not having it Your code quality is irrelevant. What matters is did it save you time, and what is that time worth to you and your business.
    - NoodleIncident 6y ago
      Their whole point is that it didn't actually save any time; if it didn't exist for free, they wouldn't have done it themselves.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
How often have you implemented a trivial feature and, after adding tests, debugging, doing code review, etc, you find it’s taken a nontrivial amount of time. And it’ll likely take maintenance too as you learn what you need (easier when you’ve seen it done already). Most of these trivial things probably take nontrivial time, and if you add all of them together for all the trivial projects you use, it’s probably saved a really serious chunk of time. The ocean is made of “trivial” drops of water, yada yada.
- jlcummings 6y ago
  Likewise, the trivial or novel that you borrow for free isn’t really free when you need to use it suddenly in ways that the license doesn’t permit or it is just technically inconvenient. It is sort of like leasing vs buying, but not really a good analogy.
- Macha 6y ago
  Let's be clear, this is the difference between your test user being called Tom Smith with email tom@smith.com and Joseph Baker with email jbaker@bigcorp.com versus being called Foo Bar and Foo Bar2 with emails foo@example.com and foo2@example.com
  - an_opabinia 6y ago
    "Let's be clear, action developer actually took versus action developer didn't take but in my opinion isn't that different, as someone who didn't take any actions at all" is a bad hill to die on.
- awb 6y ago
  I think the point is that generating pretty fake data as opposed to bland fake data is a "nice to have" rather than a "must have" for 98% of companies. And by the time you get up to AirBnb and FB, etc., they have their own internal testing data and standards based on years of real-world false negatives and false positives. It's really a content library, which is useful, but it's not in the mission-critical category where developers can get a rubber stamp budget approval from their boss. It's a great project to get your name out there as an open source developer, rather than a viable business model IMO.
runawaybottle 6y ago
That just goes to show you how rough the real world really is. Like, it’s free and a pretty good solution, but still replaceable lol. Tough crowd. Always charge, or get value somehow, because I can promise you people will feel entitled to whatever baseline you give them (in this case ‘free’). Everyone and everything is replaceable, oh cruel world, why you do us dirty like that?
- mattdeboard 6y ago
  That's not how tough the world is, it's how tough people choose to make it.

vmception 6y ago

Yeah but it is also hilarious when the contributors of free open source software rage quit when they realize others can use their work for free while the contributors forget to make money. Software developers, man! For a bi-weekly hilarious rage quit, check out Andre Conje on twitter!

chris_wot 6y ago
That’s horrible. If you produce something for free, and someone uses it to reduce effort and expenses, at least throw some money their way! Doesn’t even have to be much.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  I wonder if npm packages should operate in a similar way YouTube does. Why can’t people sell a license via npm? That would be a nice way to browse packages, pay a buck or two for Faker.js for commercial projects. Plenty of us have budgets that $50 dollars could get you some solid pro versions of a lot of software. We devalue ourselves really.
cmiles74 6y ago
I'm not sure that's the case here. It sounds like their apartment caught fire and now they are homeless. In my opinion, this sounds more like a desperation move than anger; this developer really needs money ASAP in order to keep a roof over their head.
- vmception 6y ago
  Yeah. And this other time I saw a hardware company be “in the spirit of open source” and then saw another company use their code in cheaper hardware sold for less and then the first company went on a rage tirade and tried to edit their commit history to change the license, tarnishing themselves in their whole community and customer’s eyes at the time. FOSS rage quits are hilarious.

jonrimmer 6y ago

I use his work, but for me the situation is more complicated my prior experiences with the author. He's been making similar complaints about his lack of renumeration for quite a while. In an older GitHub where he requested contributions, I pointed out that he had barely worked on the project for many months (at that time), and not published a new version to npm in years[1], despite making a $600 withdrawal from his Open Collective fund in June 2018 with the explicit purpose of releasing v5[2]. In the thread, I suggested that I and others might be willing to contribute, but I wanted more certainty on what exactly my contribution would be paying for. As I saw it, at that point he had a number of regular donors who were essentially paying him to do nothing. He responded very angrily, saying nobody had any right to question his actions or to expect anything from him, even if they were paying him. He then deleted my comment entirely and banned me from commenting further. This interaction didn't exactly leave me with a strong desire to contribute. I think he's a rather volatile individual and the community would indeed be better off forking this project than indulging his sense of grievance. [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker.js https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker.js [2] https://opencollective.com/fakerjs/expenses/3972 https://opencollective.com/fakerjs/expenses/3972

jka 6y ago
It looks like the package may have duplicate entries on NPM; the more-regularly-released package is posted here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker
derefr 6y ago
You might see that as “volatile”, but I think I can see what he’s getting at. A charitable reading of his whole stance: • We can enter into a formal contract where I actually do owe you work-on-this-project in exchange for pay; • but without such a contract, donations to me are just that — donations — and don’t influence my work; • but this is an open-source project, so you’re free to put whatever work you like into it, and keep/use/share the results (in your own space, that I don’t have to referee.) • I’ll just be over here, doing what I want, unless/until someone makes a contract with me to do what they want. (Which, of course, they’re not obligated to do; they could just as well hire someone else to fork and maintain the project, rather than hiring me. That’s their choice.) • So, in short, you’re not the boss of me; unless you’re literally my boss. (A patron is not a boss.)

simlevesque 6y ago

I mean, I'm not using faker.js but I'm not exactly sure I'd finance a potential terrorist.

beervirus 6y ago

Yes, it is a good look to donate money so this guy can make more bombs.

bluedino 6y ago

Debian (for example) has 51,000 free software packages. How do we decide which ones to fund and how much they get? Do you earn money for being the maintainer. LOC you commit? Bugs you report or fix? What about people that write documentation or packaging?

mamunamu 6y ago

Honestly, he should have used the GPL and allowed other licensing options for commercial entities. Frankly I wouldn't use MIT license for personal open-source projects.

cwyers 6y ago

> If you have used his work, push your companies to sponsor/donate. That's not how any of this works. Most people work for companies that do not just donate to random software developers. If you want companies to send you money, you need to have something on an invoice. You don't actually have to make the commercial edition different than your community edition, especially if you're charging a low amount, finance isn't going to grill you about why you aren't using the free version. But you need to align how you expect to get paid with how companies are set up to pay people. Charge for stuff!

bartvk 6y ago
What I do, is ask for a receipt before I donate. Then it becomes a business cost to me.