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I'm happy for the guy. That's no mean feat. I'm just kinda curious about some comments on Twitter and here. Ok, the guy made an open source library, with no st

I'm happy for the guy. That's no mean feat. I'm just kinda curious about some comments on Twitter and here. Ok, the guy made an open source library, with no strings attached, a big company used it for god knows what and acknowledged him. Why would the company give him anything more than acknowledgement? As far as we know they didn't demand any updates or support from him, why are they expected to give him freebies, contribute to the code or anything else?

FartyMcFarter 6y ago
Some people don't understand what they're doing when they release open-source code with a permissive license. This results in expecting more than what the chosen license demands. It cuts both ways; some users expect more support than promised.
- BerSerKer 6y ago
  I see. I wasn't aware of this problem. I never fully read the differences about licenses, but again I never released anything. That was informative, thanks.
- Timberwolf 6y ago
  You get an interesting collision between two expectations on licensing in a modding community for an open source game. Modding communities have historically leaned on self-penned bespoke licences tending toward the, "only Tool fans can use this! Do not rip my sprites without permission, that means you XxSephiroth494 YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!" school of legal text. But as an open-source project, there is a convention to upload things to the content distribution network with a GPL or Creative Commons licence. This causes some rather dramatic fallouts when "I don't have to give you any source code, it's mine and I wrote it" or "he can't just take my mod and build his own version of it" meet the inevitable response of, "you released it under the GPL, that's how it works". It gets rather messier when said work includes upstream things which were originally released under the Tool Fan Restricted Licence or similar where the original creator forbade further sharing of source code.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
>why are they expected to give him freebies, contribute to the code or anything else? Because it would be cool, and some good press that very few people would read. After the tweet likely started to trend you see the start of the eternal GPL vs MIT/BSD debate, but the first couple just seemed pretty like they thought it would be neat if he got a Switch.
- nix23 6y ago
  >but the first couple just seemed pretty like they thought it would be neat if he got a Switch How much did he paid for the compiler?
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    Huh? He released his stuff as open source. That's exactly what other open source users using GPL-style licenses want. Nintendo are the ones not releasing their software as open source. They're the ones using open source without giving back, thus breaking the chain. (Which permissive BSD-style licenses do allow.) It seems like you're drawing some false equivalence between the open source developer and Nintendo.
    - VoxPelli 6y ago
      Do we know this?
    - nix23 6y ago
      >He released his stuff as open source I bet his compiler is opensource too.
      - boomboomsubban 6y ago
        It's node.js, I don't think there's much choice.
      - CydeWeys 6y ago
        So what point are you trying to make exactly? He's using open source software and then contributing back to the open source community; he's a model citizen of the community. Nintendo, meanwhile, is taking without giving.
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
The licence doesn't require giving anything back, but when you're a massive for-profit corporation, it would be easy to do something nice to the people whose work you're using for free.
- toast0 6y ago
  The hard part of giving things to people is not necessarily gathering the things; but determining which people, and finding their contact information, and complying with taxes and tarrifs.
javajosh 6y ago
The company is giving him something, which is a huge vote of approval to his library. "You ship it, you own it" means Nintendo just said, "This guys code is Nintendo-handheld quality code!" Big endorsement. And literally no-one in the world knows more about that code than him. Last but not least is just the feeling that your code is running in so many places! What a feeling of accomplishment. Over a career, you start to think more and more about what code you have running in the world. Where it used to run. Where you'd like it to run. That's a pretty satisfying feeling, and it also makes him one of the few bona fide people in the world at whom you can throw money to fix (or change) the library.
- ascar 6y ago
  I fully agree. A small piece of software I'm most proud of is a very small library I wrote for an ex-employer and was lucky enough to open-source. It isn't updated in years and should nonetheless still work. Since a few years ago it is used by the Gitlab main repo. I don't expect anything from them, they don't ask anything from me and just knowing that it is useful for such a big project is all endorsement I need.
  - sheetjs 6y ago
    SheetJS was created because of a Microsoft licensing issue with a library (https://github.com/stephen-hardy/xlsx.js/issues/8 https://github.com/stephen-hardy/xlsx.js/issues/8). The other project had a nonstandard license with a clause that only applied to browsers run on Microsoft Windows, which is really bizarre for a JS library that can run on any browser. Apparently the original developer was working for Microsoft at the time, and Microsoft mandated the license clause. In a funny twist of fate, Microsoft now uses SheetJS open source to power some Excel exports in Office 365! https://tasks.office.com/License.html https://tasks.office.com/License.html is the license disclosure, and you can actually see it in action in the exported files. We were blown away when we found out. It's the ultimate endorsement! Oftentimes we just wonder what would have happened if Microsoft just let the original project adopt a standard open source license.
    - 6y ago
downrightmike 6y ago
If Nintendo would donate to the developer of the software they used, they would be good community citizens.
ksec 6y ago
>I'm just kinda curious about some comments on Twitter and here. My opinion is that if we knew, fully understand and answered your questions we would have nearly ended all the past, current and future political debate. Some people just always wanted more, especially those who are making more profits.
fortran77 6y ago
Exactly. The people who are commenting on Twitter that they "owe" him something don't understand what FOSS is.
mobilemidget 6y ago
A meet and greet with Mario would be nice :-)
hutzlibu 6y ago
"why are they expected to give him freebies, contribute to the code or anything else? " Because they make big money with his work and he does not. So sure, legally they do not owe him anything, but morally a material compensation would be adequate. If the idea spreads of freely compensating OSS, then more OSS work could be done fulltime. Money still rules the world.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Since feross would materially gain from being gifted something from Nintendo, should feross give partial ownership of the Switch to the authors of the open source tools he used to build his library? Also, yes, the Switch makes a lot of money, but if I had to assign a percentage of revenue that is attributable to feross' library, I think I would assign it exactly 0.00000%
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    "but if I had to assign a percentage of revenue that is attributable to feross' library, I think I would assign it exactly 0.00000% " How do you know? Did you followed internal developement of the switch? "Since feross would materially gain from being gifted something from Nintendo, should feross give partial ownership of the Switch to the authors of the open source tools he used to build his library?" Why not? Whats wrong with inviting them over for a gaming round, or sending parts of the money? Depends on the amount.
    - oh_sigh 6y ago
      I know because the author's project, safe-buffer, is obviously open source, and you can look at it on his github. It is 65 lines long, and mostly boilerplate. And what isn't boilerplate isn't even particularly complicated code (which is a good thing) - it just adds a few common sense safety checks to the Buffer class. > Why not? Nothing's wrong with that. But if the author doesn't do it, I won't call him an ungrateful asshole and berate him on twitter.
franciscop 6y ago
> "Why would the company give him anything more than acknowledgement?" [...] why are they expected to give him freebies, contribute to the code or anything else? I disagree that it's "expected" that the company gives him anything, there's generally no expectation like that in OSS. BUT it'd be super-cool if they did give him a Switch!
gumby 6y ago
The company is following the license, as they should for any other. I'm glad to see this (and/but will note in my experience Nintendo is an above board company).
bredren 6y ago
Because they have more resources, and open source is largely volunteer driven. It would be great press too.
ljm 6y ago
If you look at the library (and many of his other 100+), then the code itself is so simple that it barely counts as a library. It's 60 lines where the only logic is to type-check for a string or a number. Mind, it's not to the same level as this guy: https://github.com/jonschlinkert https://github.com/jonschlinkert Chances are it's just found itself as a dependency of a dependency, rather than being used directly. Not to shit on either of them, but they both 'maintain' a large amount of trivial packages that any language with a sensible standard library wouldn't require.
- whoisthemachine 6y ago
  I don't think that takes away from it. He's also the author of remarkable, which is a ... remarkable library.
- feross 6y ago
  You're downplaying my `safe-buffer` library without understanding the reasons that it exists. The Buffer security issues that Mathias Buus and I uncovered led to the deprecation of `new Buffer()` in Node.js and the creation of the `Buffer.from()` and `Buffer.alloc()` APIs. There is an explanation here: https://github.com/feross/safe-buffer#why-is-buffer-unsafe https://github.com/feross/safe-buffer#why-is-buffer-unsafe I created `safe-buffer` as a demonstration of how the API could be fixed to be safe. Then, the ecosystem adopted `safe-buffer` as a polyfill to get that safety even before `Buffer.from()` and `Buffer.alloc()` were included in Node.js. And to this day it continues to be used to provide safety in older versions of Node.js which lack the newer APIs. tldr; We fixed Node.js and made it safe for you. But, by all means, feel free to continue mocking me and the volunteer work I've done for the community :/
oh_sigh 6y ago
To be fair, that wasn't the author's viewpoint - just random people on twitter. You can find a lot of insane ramblings in responses on twitter. For everyone that thinks he should get a switch for his work - I wonder if they also think that the author should, say, lend out his switch to open source authors for a week or two for using the open source software that he almost certainly used in order to build his library which was included in the Switch.
finnthehuman 6y ago
>Why would the company give him anything more than acknowledgement? Because there is a level above "doing the absolute minimum necessary" that is a nice-to-have, but not at all mandatory nor expected. It seems like everyone is purposefully going out of their way to not understand that throwing him a freebee that's cheap compared to the cost of engineering time (e.g. a nintendo switch) would be a pleasant thing to do and a way to buy goodwill.
moritonal 6y ago
The conversation exists because this guy in particular has talked and implemented various (in my opinion hostile) methods for commercialising open-source work. See his "experiment" (https://github.com/feross/funding https://github.com/feross/funding) and selling terminal ads during npm install (https://dev.to/adriansandu/npm-bans-terminal-ads-and-mozilla-ceo-will-step-down-at-the-end-of-the-year-front-end-news-16-46mm https://dev.to/adriansandu/npm-bans-terminal-ads-and-mozilla...)
slightwinder 6y ago
I guess it's mostly about acknowledging his free contribution to their own work. Being thankful and such. Though, it's questionable how much value his work really have for them and whether the company is actually aware of it. Likely the devs at nintendo decide such things on their own and non of the manager who decide on gifting stuff even know about this.

FartyMcFarter 6y ago

Some people don't understand what they're doing when they release open-source code with a permissive license. This results in expecting more than what the chosen license demands. It cuts both ways; some users expect more support than promised.

BerSerKer 6y ago
I see. I wasn't aware of this problem. I never fully read the differences about licenses, but again I never released anything. That was informative, thanks.
Timberwolf 6y ago
You get an interesting collision between two expectations on licensing in a modding community for an open source game. Modding communities have historically leaned on self-penned bespoke licences tending toward the, "only Tool fans can use this! Do not rip my sprites without permission, that means you XxSephiroth494 YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!" school of legal text. But as an open-source project, there is a convention to upload things to the content distribution network with a GPL or Creative Commons licence. This causes some rather dramatic fallouts when "I don't have to give you any source code, it's mine and I wrote it" or "he can't just take my mod and build his own version of it" meet the inevitable response of, "you released it under the GPL, that's how it works". It gets rather messier when said work includes upstream things which were originally released under the Tool Fan Restricted Licence or similar where the original creator forbade further sharing of source code.

boomboomsubban 6y ago

>why are they expected to give him freebies, contribute to the code or anything else? Because it would be cool, and some good press that very few people would read. After the tweet likely started to trend you see the start of the eternal GPL vs MIT/BSD debate, but the first couple just seemed pretty like they thought it would be neat if he got a Switch.

nix23 6y ago
>but the first couple just seemed pretty like they thought it would be neat if he got a Switch How much did he paid for the compiler?
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  Huh? He released his stuff as open source. That's exactly what other open source users using GPL-style licenses want. Nintendo are the ones not releasing their software as open source. They're the ones using open source without giving back, thus breaking the chain. (Which permissive BSD-style licenses do allow.) It seems like you're drawing some false equivalence between the open source developer and Nintendo.
  - VoxPelli 6y ago
    Do we know this?
  - nix23 6y ago
    >He released his stuff as open source I bet his compiler is opensource too.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      It's node.js, I don't think there's much choice.
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      So what point are you trying to make exactly? He's using open source software and then contributing back to the open source community; he's a model citizen of the community. Nintendo, meanwhile, is taking without giving.

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago

The licence doesn't require giving anything back, but when you're a massive for-profit corporation, it would be easy to do something nice to the people whose work you're using for free.

toast0 6y ago
The hard part of giving things to people is not necessarily gathering the things; but determining which people, and finding their contact information, and complying with taxes and tarrifs.

javajosh 6y ago

The company is giving him something, which is a huge vote of approval to his library. "You ship it, you own it" means Nintendo just said, "This guys code is Nintendo-handheld quality code!" Big endorsement. And literally no-one in the world knows more about that code than him. Last but not least is just the feeling that your code is running in so many places! What a feeling of accomplishment. Over a career, you start to think more and more about what code you have running in the world. Where it used to run. Where you'd like it to run. That's a pretty satisfying feeling, and it also makes him one of the few bona fide people in the world at whom you can throw money to fix (or change) the library.

ascar 6y ago
I fully agree. A small piece of software I'm most proud of is a very small library I wrote for an ex-employer and was lucky enough to open-source. It isn't updated in years and should nonetheless still work. Since a few years ago it is used by the Gitlab main repo. I don't expect anything from them, they don't ask anything from me and just knowing that it is useful for such a big project is all endorsement I need.
- sheetjs 6y ago
  SheetJS was created because of a Microsoft licensing issue with a library (https://github.com/stephen-hardy/xlsx.js/issues/8 https://github.com/stephen-hardy/xlsx.js/issues/8). The other project had a nonstandard license with a clause that only applied to browsers run on Microsoft Windows, which is really bizarre for a JS library that can run on any browser. Apparently the original developer was working for Microsoft at the time, and Microsoft mandated the license clause. In a funny twist of fate, Microsoft now uses SheetJS open source to power some Excel exports in Office 365! https://tasks.office.com/License.html https://tasks.office.com/License.html is the license disclosure, and you can actually see it in action in the exported files. We were blown away when we found out. It's the ultimate endorsement! Oftentimes we just wonder what would have happened if Microsoft just let the original project adopt a standard open source license.
  - 6y ago

downrightmike 6y ago

If Nintendo would donate to the developer of the software they used, they would be good community citizens.

ksec 6y ago

>I'm just kinda curious about some comments on Twitter and here. My opinion is that if we knew, fully understand and answered your questions we would have nearly ended all the past, current and future political debate. Some people just always wanted more, especially those who are making more profits.

fortran77 6y ago

Exactly. The people who are commenting on Twitter that they "owe" him something don't understand what FOSS is.

mobilemidget 6y ago

A meet and greet with Mario would be nice :-)

hutzlibu 6y ago

"why are they expected to give him freebies, contribute to the code or anything else? " Because they make big money with his work and he does not. So sure, legally they do not owe him anything, but morally a material compensation would be adequate. If the idea spreads of freely compensating OSS, then more OSS work could be done fulltime. Money still rules the world.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
oh_sigh 6y ago
Since feross would materially gain from being gifted something from Nintendo, should feross give partial ownership of the Switch to the authors of the open source tools he used to build his library? Also, yes, the Switch makes a lot of money, but if I had to assign a percentage of revenue that is attributable to feross' library, I think I would assign it exactly 0.00000%
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  "but if I had to assign a percentage of revenue that is attributable to feross' library, I think I would assign it exactly 0.00000% " How do you know? Did you followed internal developement of the switch? "Since feross would materially gain from being gifted something from Nintendo, should feross give partial ownership of the Switch to the authors of the open source tools he used to build his library?" Why not? Whats wrong with inviting them over for a gaming round, or sending parts of the money? Depends on the amount.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    I know because the author's project, safe-buffer, is obviously open source, and you can look at it on his github. It is 65 lines long, and mostly boilerplate. And what isn't boilerplate isn't even particularly complicated code (which is a good thing) - it just adds a few common sense safety checks to the Buffer class. > Why not? Nothing's wrong with that. But if the author doesn't do it, I won't call him an ungrateful asshole and berate him on twitter.

franciscop 6y ago

> "Why would the company give him anything more than acknowledgement?" [...] why are they expected to give him freebies, contribute to the code or anything else? I disagree that it's "expected" that the company gives him anything, there's generally no expectation like that in OSS. BUT it'd be super-cool if they did give him a Switch!

gumby 6y ago

The company is following the license, as they should for any other. I'm glad to see this (and/but will note in my experience Nintendo is an above board company).

bredren 6y ago

Because they have more resources, and open source is largely volunteer driven. It would be great press too.

ljm 6y ago

If you look at the library (and many of his other 100+), then the code itself is so simple that it barely counts as a library. It's 60 lines where the only logic is to type-check for a string or a number. Mind, it's not to the same level as this guy: https://github.com/jonschlinkert https://github.com/jonschlinkert Chances are it's just found itself as a dependency of a dependency, rather than being used directly. Not to shit on either of them, but they both 'maintain' a large amount of trivial packages that any language with a sensible standard library wouldn't require.

whoisthemachine 6y ago
I don't think that takes away from it. He's also the author of remarkable, which is a ... remarkable library.
feross 6y ago
You're downplaying my `safe-buffer` library without understanding the reasons that it exists. The Buffer security issues that Mathias Buus and I uncovered led to the deprecation of `new Buffer()` in Node.js and the creation of the `Buffer.from()` and `Buffer.alloc()` APIs. There is an explanation here: https://github.com/feross/safe-buffer#why-is-buffer-unsafe https://github.com/feross/safe-buffer#why-is-buffer-unsafe I created `safe-buffer` as a demonstration of how the API could be fixed to be safe. Then, the ecosystem adopted `safe-buffer` as a polyfill to get that safety even before `Buffer.from()` and `Buffer.alloc()` were included in Node.js. And to this day it continues to be used to provide safety in older versions of Node.js which lack the newer APIs. tldr; We fixed Node.js and made it safe for you. But, by all means, feel free to continue mocking me and the volunteer work I've done for the community :/

oh_sigh 6y ago

To be fair, that wasn't the author's viewpoint - just random people on twitter. You can find a lot of insane ramblings in responses on twitter. For everyone that thinks he should get a switch for his work - I wonder if they also think that the author should, say, lend out his switch to open source authors for a week or two for using the open source software that he almost certainly used in order to build his library which was included in the Switch.

finnthehuman 6y ago

>Why would the company give him anything more than acknowledgement? Because there is a level above "doing the absolute minimum necessary" that is a nice-to-have, but not at all mandatory nor expected. It seems like everyone is purposefully going out of their way to not understand that throwing him a freebee that's cheap compared to the cost of engineering time (e.g. a nintendo switch) would be a pleasant thing to do and a way to buy goodwill.

moritonal 6y ago

The conversation exists because this guy in particular has talked and implemented various (in my opinion hostile) methods for commercialising open-source work. See his "experiment" (https://github.com/feross/funding https://github.com/feross/funding) and selling terminal ads during npm install (https://dev.to/adriansandu/npm-bans-terminal-ads-and-mozilla-ceo-will-step-down-at-the-end-of-the-year-front-end-news-16-46mm https://dev.to/adriansandu/npm-bans-terminal-ads-and-mozilla...)

slightwinder 6y ago

I guess it's mostly about acknowledging his free contribution to their own work. Being thankful and such. Though, it's questionable how much value his work really have for them and whether the company is actually aware of it. Likely the devs at nintendo decide such things on their own and non of the manager who decide on gifting stuff even know about this.