12 ms·

What happened to Captura? OSS maintainer burnout (2023)

82 points by olvy0 2y ago

eXpl0it3r 2y ago
How often is pride in the way of building a team of maintainers, which could reduce the risk of burnout? Is this the case here? I don't know.
- szundi 2y ago
  Not too late though
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    Well, we saw how that went with xz
  - eXpl0it3r 2y ago
    The GitHub repository has been archived
- portaouflop 2y ago
  Building and keeping a team of maintainers is either a lot of work or you need to get very lucky.
- Timshel 2y ago
  After the author the second most active contributor has only 5 commits so I would say probably not the case here ...
- boesboes 2y ago
  I think it's more of a question of how often do people just want to make something nice and not deal with managing a community and the idiots making demands and threats that come with it. Mind you, this happens regardless, but it get's harder to ignore if you actively want to build community.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  For a lot of devs, that would exacerbate burnout. I, for one, dabble in small, focused FOSS projects to keep myself sane in a world where working on a team on a feature-creeping project is the norm.
- langsoul-com 2y ago
  Running a company (that is a team of maintainers) is wildly different from writing code. Questions raised like how do you find these people, are they paid? Legalities and how to make money. Now you have to organise and lead a group of people. All of that isn't why most people want to write code.
  - eXpl0it3r 2y ago
    Lots of open source projects are run by a team of maintainers without having a company behind it
DexesTTP 2y ago
Captura is a great piece of software - I've used it for years, and I still use the latest release today. It is a complete, all-in-one tool - very straightforward UI, lots of formats supported (especially through ffmpeg integration) and very easy to use in terms of window or screen area selection for recording - and more importantly for my use-cases, it's portable (no install, no admin rights needed). Really a great example of what's possible in that space. I didn't participate in the project, but I've checked out the PRs and issues list every now and then and it's been frustrating seeing the author struggle against the store republishing issues for literal years. The issue tracking that (#405[1]) is not a happy read for sure. The fact that Captura's MIT licensing gave effectively a "license to steal" to people and that it's so easy to publish something and sell it on the Microsoft store didn't mesh well. I've however been really disappointed by Microsoft's non-response through all of that republishing debacle. Republishing free software is a difficult topic to get right for edge-cases, sure, but the Captura case was obvious to rule on and Microsoft did nothing for years - it was clear that there was no process for this kind of scenario, and that the solution was to do nothing. It took the author taking down the project for them to react, and even then I'm convinced that's only because whoever handled that case assumed that the republisher was the one taking it down, not the project author. [1] https://github.com/MathewSachin/Captura/issues/405 https://github.com/MathewSachin/Captura/issues/405
- jicea 2y ago
  Years ago, I made a significant piece of money with a game on the Windows Mobile app store. I'm French and, at that time, was unable to get the right documents to receive my money on my bank account. It was as if the Microsoft store was only conceived for US citizens. I kept trying to contact anyone at Microsoft, using various communication channels but received 0 response and the money kept growing. Fortunately, I won a Microsoft chalenge about apps development. I had the opportunity to go to Seattle and assist to the next Microsoft mobile OS (Windows Phone). At the presentation, I took the opportunity, during a coffee break, to explain my situation to the presenter. He was so sorry and gave me an operational contact. Days later everything was resolved and I finally received my money. Lesson learned: Microsoft is a huge bureaucracy but you can manage to find real involved and competent people. As a French person, I know how to deal with bureaucracy: avoid it if you can. I switched to other development platform and never go back to Microsoft.
szastamasta 2y ago
Oh man, sorry to hear about the dev burnout. But what do you expect? We made software worthless by giving away ready products for free. It’s not a library for other devs to use, so we can all „stand on the shoulder of giants”. Stuff like this should be paid from the start.
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  what... No, what should happen is that we should dispense of the expectations that anyone should provide maintenance and support for free. You solve your problem and share the code for everyone to use. They can fork and change it to solve their own problems, you've finished working on it a while ago.
- moepstar 2y ago
  Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ And yes, being paid should always be an option. The only question seemingly no one has solved is: how? ...especially so that everybody wins - individuals and corporations, benefitting from said software, the maintainers _and_ their collaborators (sidenote: that's something that kinda grinds my gears - sponsored projects receive all the dough, with their various collaborators essentially working for free??) etc. etc.
  - phoronixrly 2y ago
    My best tool to benefit corporations is to release my code under the AGPL. Always. No exceptions.
  - aaomidi 2y ago
    It is solved. It’s called AGPL. Folks are just ignorant of licensing the majority of the time. GPL is why Linux is still around :)
    - bluGill 2y ago
      The continued existance of bsd proves you are wrong, it isn't the license.
finchisko 2y ago
I recently switced to Captura from from ActiveScreen recorded and I love it. Didn’t observe any bugs at all. Great piece of sw.
trustno2 2y ago
Microsoft Store is like App store, except Microsoft doesn't give two shit about quality and you're not locked-in. It's like they took entirely wrong lessons from App Store.
ed_mercer 2y ago
The list of donations is depressing to watch. So little received for so much delivered value.
- marginalia_nu 2y ago
  OSS donations are in a weird place. I think a lot of maintainers just aren't asking for them with any sort of clarity because it's uncomfortable and you're kinda putting yourself out there. It seems pretty common that you kinda have to go look for ways of funding a project, and it's like buried in the back of the website somewhere. Willingness to donate also seems to really depend on the type of project. It appears easier to get institutional support, or individual "whale" donations, if your ambitions are a bit loftier than if you're building small individual widgets or libraries that do one thing well. I think people are perhaps more willing to pay for what a thing might become than what it is today, when it's more like an investment than a payment for goods delivered.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  I think it shows exactly what kind of people FOSS users are. Big on talking about their freedoms and rights and how they're oppressed and victims of everybody else and everything else. But in reality they just want free stuff. Small time developers should come over to the Mac side of things, where users are happy to pay a fair price for apps of any size, and especially boutique apps. That's how I as a user respect the developer: by paying for his work.
enbugger 2y ago
Windows's Game Bar (Win+G) seems to successfully replace this tool, at least for me.
shadowgovt 2y ago
Good to see the author got over their fear of running ads, if this blog is any indication.
j1elo 2y ago
This idea resonated well: Writing code for free is charity. I always saw creating open source code akin to being a plumber or carpenter who applied their hard earned knowledge and worked for free in homes they chose. A plumber who works for free is a rare thing to see, however in software it seems lots of people _expect_ it to be created like that. Not uncommon at all to see comments in HN saying that "oh well if it's not OSS I won't try this software you're showing off". Try saying to a carpenter that if they don't give away their new chairs for free, you wouldn't even start to think of getting one! :) But then, if you care about the "right to repair" (so to speak) of your software, well at least use a strong copyleft, not a permissive license that basically grant the permission to "steal".
- tkiolp4 2y ago
  I still think it’s about ego as well. If you happen to release a piece of software that is used massively, then you become a “rock star” (well, at least in the scope of the software engineering world). That means, you may not need to work for others anymore (if you get sponsors), or that you boost your employability by 10x (“Oh, he’s the author of X!”), etc. So there are many devs out there that want to win the jackpot. I don’t blame them.
  - Drakim 2y ago
    Notably very few plumbers do years of work for free in hopes of being branded the "Rockstar plumber".
    - marginalia_nu 2y ago
      To be fair, after having accidentally ended up with a tiny modicum of name recognition I'll say if you do earnestly want that, you're probably much better off chasing visibility than thanklessly grinding away giving away free stuff hoping people will take notice. You need to write your own story for people to be aware of it. What most people who have any sort of fame have in common is that they're good at crafting a narrative. What sets John Romero apart from the next level designer and game dev is that John Romero loves talking about John Romero. Your blog is much more important than your git repo. I don't think talking is enough on its own, but it is extremely important to put yourself out there.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
amindeed 2y ago
A bit out of context, but I would really appreciate some explanation/answers here. Has anyone shared some sort of analysis of external/community contributions to Hashicorp's OSS products, following their licensing change, to then come to a conclusion about some "internal to external" contributions ratio that would justify all the frustration with which that decision has been received? I mean, people tend to always assume that OpenSource software is the ownership of a world-wide community of contributors, and not the person (or group of people) that had initiated it and decided to share the code; but, I've hardly seen cases outside of these two, when serious problems surface: 1. Indie OSS maintainer that suffering from some burnout, or even struggle to make a living, while their work is being freely used by thousands of people, and even help dozen of companies make money in some way. 2. OSS project that is mainly supported and maintained by some company/corporate, to the point that if they would ever decide to stop doing it, the software would not as actively receive significant fixes/updates (if any). Which basically means: the sofware is freely available (along with its source code), mainly because there are people paid to work on it.
KronisLV 2y ago
Currently I use a tool called ScreenToGif on Windows, which allows making both GIFs as well as render a video out of the captured sequence of frames: https://www.screentogif.com/ https://www.screentogif.com/ (source: https://github.com/NickeManarin/ScreenToGif https://github.com/NickeManarin/ScreenToGif) That said, a lot of open source software faces issues with funding and also developer burnout, or something other reasons for a project just... ceasing. Like there's this lovely piece of backup software called BackupPC, that covered all of my needs, but there hasn't been a new release in forever: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc What's worse, sometimes the community is just left with no status updates, and don't even know whether a project is abandoned: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/issues/518 https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/issues/518 In cases where nobody cares enough to make forks and keep it alive it just... fizzles out. This might sound a bit off, but I sometimes wish there was a feature where you could say: "Hey, I'm willing to pay X$ for the maintainer of the software to address this issue on GitHub or do a release, I've placed the amount of money in escrow and it will be released to the dev upon completion." With enough people pooling resources together, how much the community actually cares would be quite obvious and the devs could actually benefit from OSS. Donations are too unreliable and detached from the units of work done (I've done some donations in the past, but would do more monetary contributions for specific issues). If streamlined enough, it wouldn't be different from buying the developer a beer, or the equivalent of Patreon or Kofi.
- nurple 2y ago
  If you think money will motivate the dev, why not lead with that in your issue? I don't think offering to pay money is against TOS. However, there is a large number of FOSS devs that don't give two shits about your money. Oh hey! Isn't that nice? Doing something you love, and something that brings value to your fellow human, without it being tainted by money? Some people view the need of money as the problem, and the lack of it involved in their project a very conscious decision.
  - KronisLV 2y ago
    > I don't think offering to pay money is against TOS. Yeah, that's why I think a bot for aggregating/suggesting financial support would be a good idea. Then again, when npm package maintainers were looking for donations and output that in the console, there was a lot of backlash, so I suspect similar opposition would happen to a bot commenting: "Hey, this project accepts financial support. If you'd like to indicate that this issue matters to you, you can optionally put money in a reward pool for this issue here: some_link. Money in the pool so far: X$." > However, there is a large number of FOSS devs that don't give two shits about your money. That's fair, but definitely isn't the situation for many, especially those who don't have cushy day jobs and are either financially struggling or just feeling the pressure of our current economy. Articles like this come to mind: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html The whole log4j debacle also comes to mind, summed up by this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ > Some people view the need of money as the problem, and the lack of it involved in their project a very conscious decision. That is admirable, but you can't eat praise. Either way, that is their choice. I just feel that if there are a lot of companies extracting money from people with disposable income in the form of mobile games, gacha games and microtransactions wherever you can, as well as if there's a commonplace tipping culture for restaurants in many countries, might as well take the same principles and apply them to get some money in the hands of deserving developers. I'm not saying that it'd necessarily decrease burnout or solve the other issues about open source, but at the very least it'd give some financial stability. If people aren't urged towards that, very few will donate of their own volition, call it psychology.
wszrfcbhujnikm 2y ago
I understand why he may not want to do it but simply commercializing the software could keep it going, then use that money to help defeat the cooyright infringers. But that is business which he probably never wanted to do. He wanted to code.
palata 2y ago
People (both developers and users) need to understand the limitations and benefits of open source: For companies, it is about control. Google did not care about contributing protobuf to the world: a company does not "care", it maximizes profit. Open-sourcing protobuf was most likely not a big cost, and it had benefits for Google (otherwise it would not have been rational to open source it). For instance, Google benefits from external engineers who already know protobuf when they join Google (no need to teach them). Google can benefit from external projects exposing a protobuf API (though I am not sure if that is frequent), and by having protobuf out there, they keep control: the biggest issue of Cap'n Proto is that it does not support all the languages protobuf/gRPC do. If protobuf was not open source, something like Cap'n Proto may take its place, and that's not good for Google. Same goes for Chromium or AOSP. For individuals, there are two cases: as employees and as "hobbyists" (for a lack of better term): As an employee, I benefit from my code being open source: I will keep access to it after I leave, and it serves as a portfolio you can show when you look for a new job. I really, really do NOT understand why software developers are NOT systematically pushing very hard to get their code open source. Many times you just need some kind of "yes" from a manager (even if they did not really understand the consequences) and once it's open source, it's done. And many times it does not impact the company at all (and honestly, why should you care?). I have this Marshall home smart speaker that is pretty good hardware, but the software is a piece of crap. Marshall does not benefit from not making it open source: people like me would make their speaker better. Not because I want to help Marshall, but because I want a good speaker and I am ready to work for it. It's just that nobody at Marshall cares/understands. As a "hobbyist" (again, bad term but I don't have a better one), it is a bit of a philosophy. I like using open source software, because I can compile it for my specific needs, I can debug it, I can tweak it. If I am aligned with the creator, I can even contribute upstream as long as I do benefit from it (mostly because I need it or I enjoy it). The risk is that someone else may resell my code, but let's be honest: if I could sell my code myself, I would not make it open source. Of course it's frustrating when someone else makes money from your work, whether they honor the attribution clause of the MIT license or not. BTW if you don't want to live the frustration of seeing a business make money from your work, a good start is copyleft licenses. They can still make money from it, but at least they contribute back to your project. I just don't understand why hobbyists go for permissive licenses at all. Now hobbyists (like the maintainer of Captura) need to really understand that they don't owe anyone anything. You work for free, you should work for yourself. If someone wants a feature you don't care about, don't implement it or make them pay for it. If they are being jerks, ignore them. If they fork away, great! And IMHO you should favour contributions to projects that have a copyleft license. If you contribute to permissively-licensed projects (or if you sign a CLA), then you are not allowed to be frustrated when the company makes money from your code without giving anything back.
woadwarrior01 2y ago
OT: This is the first time I'm seeing a cookie banner on Github pages. :| https://imgur.com/a/5J85yv6 https://imgur.com/a/5J85yv6
- sneak 2y ago
  I hate to be the “It’s Microsoft, what do you expect from people who put ads in the start menu” guy, but, hey, it’s Microsoft, what do you expect from the people who put ads in the start menu? GitHub and VS Code and npm are going to start really squeezing now that the switching costs are so high. Get out while you still can.
  - danirod 2y ago
    Sorry to dismiss your conspiracy theory, but if an user adds a cookie dialog into their GitHub Pages-hosted site, that's on the author, not on GitHub.
    - sneak 2y ago
      It’s not a theory that Microsoft is buying up popular open source software tools and services and putting tons of surveillance functionality in them, as they do with all of their products. It doesn’t matter if in this particular instance the dialog was coming from Microsoft or the pages author.
- page_fault 2y ago
  There's a now a whole group of blocklists targeted specifically at cookie banners in uBlock Origin settings.
- trustno2 2y ago
  That's weird, I'm in EU and don't see anything? Is this from the github page itself or from github?
  - woadwarrior01 2y ago
    I'm in the EU too. This is from the the author and not Github, AFAICT.
qwerty456127 2y ago
> Subsequently, I discovered that certain individuals had stolen the application and were selling it on various platforms, including the Windows Store, under a different name without crediting me as the original developer... Efforts to reach out to Microsoft Store proved to be largely unfruitful for nearly a year... Lack of proper curation and human communication are among the major reasons to hate app stores. Free app stores like in Ubuntu often ship versions not polished enough because nobody has enough spare time to really care without being paid, commercial app stores like of Microsoft and Google just don't care and feel Ok welcoming all sorts of scammers as long as they pay the rent, all they apparently do is nuking accounts of good people for no clear reason.
- palata 2y ago
  Note that Captura being MIT-licensed means that the authors would only have had to hide a copy of the license in some "About..." page hidden in some submenu. It's not like they have to credit the author on their front page. And it's completely legal to resell MIT-licensed code (of course with the attribution).
  - qwerty456127 2y ago
    Sure, yet people like this would often create multiple ad-sponsored, data-stealing and paid clones of some version of the same free app under different brands, give zero fucks about bugs and mentioning the author, buy some 5-star reviews from bot farms and enjoy a steady stream of "passive income" from non-techies clicking without thinking. They hardly ever care to even look what the original license is, it could as well be GPL for the same result. As we can see here, some would even bully the author to force him remove the source code.
    - graemep 2y ago
      It would make a big difference if it was GPL. If they did not make the source available you can sue them. You can issue the store that distributes it with a DMCA notice or a cease and desist. In this case it appears that the same could have been done, but the author says he "reached out" but did he actually use the right legal threats?

82 points by olvy0 2y ago

How often is pride in the way of building a team of maintainers, which could reduce the risk of burnout? Is this the case here? I don't know.

szundi 2y ago
Not too late though
- raverbashing 2y ago
  Well, we saw how that went with xz
- eXpl0it3r 2y ago
  The GitHub repository has been archived
portaouflop 2y ago
Building and keeping a team of maintainers is either a lot of work or you need to get very lucky.
Timshel 2y ago
After the author the second most active contributor has only 5 commits so I would say probably not the case here ...
boesboes 2y ago
I think it's more of a question of how often do people just want to make something nice and not deal with managing a community and the idiots making demands and threats that come with it. Mind you, this happens regardless, but it get's harder to ignore if you actively want to build community.
shadowgovt 2y ago
For a lot of devs, that would exacerbate burnout. I, for one, dabble in small, focused FOSS projects to keep myself sane in a world where working on a team on a feature-creeping project is the norm.
langsoul-com 2y ago
Running a company (that is a team of maintainers) is wildly different from writing code. Questions raised like how do you find these people, are they paid? Legalities and how to make money. Now you have to organise and lead a group of people. All of that isn't why most people want to write code.
- eXpl0it3r 2y ago
  Lots of open source projects are run by a team of maintainers without having a company behind it

DexesTTP 2y ago

Captura is a great piece of software - I've used it for years, and I still use the latest release today. It is a complete, all-in-one tool - very straightforward UI, lots of formats supported (especially through ffmpeg integration) and very easy to use in terms of window or screen area selection for recording - and more importantly for my use-cases, it's portable (no install, no admin rights needed). Really a great example of what's possible in that space. I didn't participate in the project, but I've checked out the PRs and issues list every now and then and it's been frustrating seeing the author struggle against the store republishing issues for literal years. The issue tracking that (#405[1]) is not a happy read for sure. The fact that Captura's MIT licensing gave effectively a "license to steal" to people and that it's so easy to publish something and sell it on the Microsoft store didn't mesh well. I've however been really disappointed by Microsoft's non-response through all of that republishing debacle. Republishing free software is a difficult topic to get right for edge-cases, sure, but the Captura case was obvious to rule on and Microsoft did nothing for years - it was clear that there was no process for this kind of scenario, and that the solution was to do nothing. It took the author taking down the project for them to react, and even then I'm convinced that's only because whoever handled that case assumed that the republisher was the one taking it down, not the project author. [1] https://github.com/MathewSachin/Captura/issues/405 https://github.com/MathewSachin/Captura/issues/405

jicea 2y ago
Years ago, I made a significant piece of money with a game on the Windows Mobile app store. I'm French and, at that time, was unable to get the right documents to receive my money on my bank account. It was as if the Microsoft store was only conceived for US citizens. I kept trying to contact anyone at Microsoft, using various communication channels but received 0 response and the money kept growing. Fortunately, I won a Microsoft chalenge about apps development. I had the opportunity to go to Seattle and assist to the next Microsoft mobile OS (Windows Phone). At the presentation, I took the opportunity, during a coffee break, to explain my situation to the presenter. He was so sorry and gave me an operational contact. Days later everything was resolved and I finally received my money. Lesson learned: Microsoft is a huge bureaucracy but you can manage to find real involved and competent people. As a French person, I know how to deal with bureaucracy: avoid it if you can. I switched to other development platform and never go back to Microsoft.

szastamasta 2y ago

Oh man, sorry to hear about the dev burnout. But what do you expect? We made software worthless by giving away ready products for free. It’s not a library for other devs to use, so we can all „stand on the shoulder of giants”. Stuff like this should be paid from the start.

phoronixrly 2y ago
what... No, what should happen is that we should dispense of the expectations that anyone should provide maintenance and support for free. You solve your problem and share the code for everyone to use. They can fork and change it to solve their own problems, you've finished working on it a while ago.
moepstar 2y ago
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ And yes, being paid should always be an option. The only question seemingly no one has solved is: how? ...especially so that everybody wins - individuals and corporations, benefitting from said software, the maintainers _and_ their collaborators (sidenote: that's something that kinda grinds my gears - sponsored projects receive all the dough, with their various collaborators essentially working for free??) etc. etc.
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  My best tool to benefit corporations is to release my code under the AGPL. Always. No exceptions.
- aaomidi 2y ago
  It is solved. It’s called AGPL. Folks are just ignorant of licensing the majority of the time. GPL is why Linux is still around :)
  - bluGill 2y ago
    The continued existance of bsd proves you are wrong, it isn't the license.

finchisko 2y ago

I recently switced to Captura from from ActiveScreen recorded and I love it. Didn’t observe any bugs at all. Great piece of sw.

trustno2 2y ago

Microsoft Store is like App store, except Microsoft doesn't give two shit about quality and you're not locked-in. It's like they took entirely wrong lessons from App Store.

ed_mercer 2y ago

The list of donations is depressing to watch. So little received for so much delivered value.

marginalia_nu 2y ago
OSS donations are in a weird place. I think a lot of maintainers just aren't asking for them with any sort of clarity because it's uncomfortable and you're kinda putting yourself out there. It seems pretty common that you kinda have to go look for ways of funding a project, and it's like buried in the back of the website somewhere. Willingness to donate also seems to really depend on the type of project. It appears easier to get institutional support, or individual "whale" donations, if your ambitions are a bit loftier than if you're building small individual widgets or libraries that do one thing well. I think people are perhaps more willing to pay for what a thing might become than what it is today, when it's more like an investment than a payment for goods delivered.
carlosjobim 2y ago
I think it shows exactly what kind of people FOSS users are. Big on talking about their freedoms and rights and how they're oppressed and victims of everybody else and everything else. But in reality they just want free stuff. Small time developers should come over to the Mac side of things, where users are happy to pay a fair price for apps of any size, and especially boutique apps. That's how I as a user respect the developer: by paying for his work.

enbugger 2y ago

Windows's Game Bar (Win+G) seems to successfully replace this tool, at least for me.

shadowgovt 2y ago

Good to see the author got over their fear of running ads, if this blog is any indication.

j1elo 2y ago

This idea resonated well: Writing code for free is charity. I always saw creating open source code akin to being a plumber or carpenter who applied their hard earned knowledge and worked for free in homes they chose. A plumber who works for free is a rare thing to see, however in software it seems lots of people _expect_ it to be created like that. Not uncommon at all to see comments in HN saying that "oh well if it's not OSS I won't try this software you're showing off". Try saying to a carpenter that if they don't give away their new chairs for free, you wouldn't even start to think of getting one! :) But then, if you care about the "right to repair" (so to speak) of your software, well at least use a strong copyleft, not a permissive license that basically grant the permission to "steal".

tkiolp4 2y ago
I still think it’s about ego as well. If you happen to release a piece of software that is used massively, then you become a “rock star” (well, at least in the scope of the software engineering world). That means, you may not need to work for others anymore (if you get sponsors), or that you boost your employability by 10x (“Oh, he’s the author of X!”), etc. So there are many devs out there that want to win the jackpot. I don’t blame them.
- Drakim 2y ago
  Notably very few plumbers do years of work for free in hopes of being branded the "Rockstar plumber".
  - marginalia_nu 2y ago
    To be fair, after having accidentally ended up with a tiny modicum of name recognition I'll say if you do earnestly want that, you're probably much better off chasing visibility than thanklessly grinding away giving away free stuff hoping people will take notice. You need to write your own story for people to be aware of it. What most people who have any sort of fame have in common is that they're good at crafting a narrative. What sets John Romero apart from the next level designer and game dev is that John Romero loves talking about John Romero. Your blog is much more important than your git repo. I don't think talking is enough on its own, but it is extremely important to put yourself out there.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

amindeed 2y ago

A bit out of context, but I would really appreciate some explanation/answers here. Has anyone shared some sort of analysis of external/community contributions to Hashicorp's OSS products, following their licensing change, to then come to a conclusion about some "internal to external" contributions ratio that would justify all the frustration with which that decision has been received? I mean, people tend to always assume that OpenSource software is the ownership of a world-wide community of contributors, and not the person (or group of people) that had initiated it and decided to share the code; but, I've hardly seen cases outside of these two, when serious problems surface: 1. Indie OSS maintainer that suffering from some burnout, or even struggle to make a living, while their work is being freely used by thousands of people, and even help dozen of companies make money in some way. 2. OSS project that is mainly supported and maintained by some company/corporate, to the point that if they would ever decide to stop doing it, the software would not as actively receive significant fixes/updates (if any). Which basically means: the sofware is freely available (along with its source code), mainly because there are people paid to work on it.

KronisLV 2y ago

Currently I use a tool called ScreenToGif on Windows, which allows making both GIFs as well as render a video out of the captured sequence of frames: https://www.screentogif.com/ https://www.screentogif.com/ (source: https://github.com/NickeManarin/ScreenToGif https://github.com/NickeManarin/ScreenToGif) That said, a lot of open source software faces issues with funding and also developer burnout, or something other reasons for a project just... ceasing. Like there's this lovely piece of backup software called BackupPC, that covered all of my needs, but there hasn't been a new release in forever: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc What's worse, sometimes the community is just left with no status updates, and don't even know whether a project is abandoned: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/issues/518 https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/issues/518 In cases where nobody cares enough to make forks and keep it alive it just... fizzles out. This might sound a bit off, but I sometimes wish there was a feature where you could say: "Hey, I'm willing to pay X$ for the maintainer of the software to address this issue on GitHub or do a release, I've placed the amount of money in escrow and it will be released to the dev upon completion." With enough people pooling resources together, how much the community actually cares would be quite obvious and the devs could actually benefit from OSS. Donations are too unreliable and detached from the units of work done (I've done some donations in the past, but would do more monetary contributions for specific issues). If streamlined enough, it wouldn't be different from buying the developer a beer, or the equivalent of Patreon or Kofi.

nurple 2y ago
If you think money will motivate the dev, why not lead with that in your issue? I don't think offering to pay money is against TOS. However, there is a large number of FOSS devs that don't give two shits about your money. Oh hey! Isn't that nice? Doing something you love, and something that brings value to your fellow human, without it being tainted by money? Some people view the need of money as the problem, and the lack of it involved in their project a very conscious decision.
- KronisLV 2y ago
  > I don't think offering to pay money is against TOS. Yeah, that's why I think a bot for aggregating/suggesting financial support would be a good idea. Then again, when npm package maintainers were looking for donations and output that in the console, there was a lot of backlash, so I suspect similar opposition would happen to a bot commenting: "Hey, this project accepts financial support. If you'd like to indicate that this issue matters to you, you can optionally put money in a reward pool for this issue here: some_link. Money in the pool so far: X$." > However, there is a large number of FOSS devs that don't give two shits about your money. That's fair, but definitely isn't the situation for many, especially those who don't have cushy day jobs and are either financially struggling or just feeling the pressure of our current economy. Articles like this come to mind: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html The whole log4j debacle also comes to mind, summed up by this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ > Some people view the need of money as the problem, and the lack of it involved in their project a very conscious decision. That is admirable, but you can't eat praise. Either way, that is their choice. I just feel that if there are a lot of companies extracting money from people with disposable income in the form of mobile games, gacha games and microtransactions wherever you can, as well as if there's a commonplace tipping culture for restaurants in many countries, might as well take the same principles and apply them to get some money in the hands of deserving developers. I'm not saying that it'd necessarily decrease burnout or solve the other issues about open source, but at the very least it'd give some financial stability. If people aren't urged towards that, very few will donate of their own volition, call it psychology.

wszrfcbhujnikm 2y ago

I understand why he may not want to do it but simply commercializing the software could keep it going, then use that money to help defeat the cooyright infringers. But that is business which he probably never wanted to do. He wanted to code.

palata 2y ago

People (both developers and users) need to understand the limitations and benefits of open source: For companies, it is about control. Google did not care about contributing protobuf to the world: a company does not "care", it maximizes profit. Open-sourcing protobuf was most likely not a big cost, and it had benefits for Google (otherwise it would not have been rational to open source it). For instance, Google benefits from external engineers who already know protobuf when they join Google (no need to teach them). Google can benefit from external projects exposing a protobuf API (though I am not sure if that is frequent), and by having protobuf out there, they keep control: the biggest issue of Cap'n Proto is that it does not support all the languages protobuf/gRPC do. If protobuf was not open source, something like Cap'n Proto may take its place, and that's not good for Google. Same goes for Chromium or AOSP. For individuals, there are two cases: as employees and as "hobbyists" (for a lack of better term): As an employee, I benefit from my code being open source: I will keep access to it after I leave, and it serves as a portfolio you can show when you look for a new job. I really, really do NOT understand why software developers are NOT systematically pushing very hard to get their code open source. Many times you just need some kind of "yes" from a manager (even if they did not really understand the consequences) and once it's open source, it's done. And many times it does not impact the company at all (and honestly, why should you care?). I have this Marshall home smart speaker that is pretty good hardware, but the software is a piece of crap. Marshall does not benefit from not making it open source: people like me would make their speaker better. Not because I want to help Marshall, but because I want a good speaker and I am ready to work for it. It's just that nobody at Marshall cares/understands. As a "hobbyist" (again, bad term but I don't have a better one), it is a bit of a philosophy. I like using open source software, because I can compile it for my specific needs, I can debug it, I can tweak it. If I am aligned with the creator, I can even contribute upstream as long as I do benefit from it (mostly because I need it or I enjoy it). The risk is that someone else may resell my code, but let's be honest: if I could sell my code myself, I would not make it open source. Of course it's frustrating when someone else makes money from your work, whether they honor the attribution clause of the MIT license or not. BTW if you don't want to live the frustration of seeing a business make money from your work, a good start is copyleft licenses. They can still make money from it, but at least they contribute back to your project. I just don't understand why hobbyists go for permissive licenses at all. Now hobbyists (like the maintainer of Captura) need to really understand that they don't owe anyone anything. You work for free, you should work for yourself. If someone wants a feature you don't care about, don't implement it or make them pay for it. If they are being jerks, ignore them. If they fork away, great! And IMHO you should favour contributions to projects that have a copyleft license. If you contribute to permissively-licensed projects (or if you sign a CLA), then you are not allowed to be frustrated when the company makes money from your code without giving anything back.

woadwarrior01 2y ago

OT: This is the first time I'm seeing a cookie banner on Github pages. :| https://imgur.com/a/5J85yv6 https://imgur.com/a/5J85yv6

sneak 2y ago
I hate to be the “It’s Microsoft, what do you expect from people who put ads in the start menu” guy, but, hey, it’s Microsoft, what do you expect from the people who put ads in the start menu? GitHub and VS Code and npm are going to start really squeezing now that the switching costs are so high. Get out while you still can.
- danirod 2y ago
  Sorry to dismiss your conspiracy theory, but if an user adds a cookie dialog into their GitHub Pages-hosted site, that's on the author, not on GitHub.
  - sneak 2y ago
    It’s not a theory that Microsoft is buying up popular open source software tools and services and putting tons of surveillance functionality in them, as they do with all of their products. It doesn’t matter if in this particular instance the dialog was coming from Microsoft or the pages author.
page_fault 2y ago
There's a now a whole group of blocklists targeted specifically at cookie banners in uBlock Origin settings.
trustno2 2y ago
That's weird, I'm in EU and don't see anything? Is this from the github page itself or from github?
- woadwarrior01 2y ago
  I'm in the EU too. This is from the the author and not Github, AFAICT.

qwerty456127 2y ago

> Subsequently, I discovered that certain individuals had stolen the application and were selling it on various platforms, including the Windows Store, under a different name without crediting me as the original developer... Efforts to reach out to Microsoft Store proved to be largely unfruitful for nearly a year... Lack of proper curation and human communication are among the major reasons to hate app stores. Free app stores like in Ubuntu often ship versions not polished enough because nobody has enough spare time to really care without being paid, commercial app stores like of Microsoft and Google just don't care and feel Ok welcoming all sorts of scammers as long as they pay the rent, all they apparently do is nuking accounts of good people for no clear reason.

palata 2y ago
Note that Captura being MIT-licensed means that the authors would only have had to hide a copy of the license in some "About..." page hidden in some submenu. It's not like they have to credit the author on their front page. And it's completely legal to resell MIT-licensed code (of course with the attribution).
- qwerty456127 2y ago
  Sure, yet people like this would often create multiple ad-sponsored, data-stealing and paid clones of some version of the same free app under different brands, give zero fucks about bugs and mentioning the author, buy some 5-star reviews from bot farms and enjoy a steady stream of "passive income" from non-techies clicking without thinking. They hardly ever care to even look what the original license is, it could as well be GPL for the same result. As we can see here, some would even bully the author to force him remove the source code.
  - graemep 2y ago
    It would make a big difference if it was GPL. If they did not make the source available you can sue them. You can issue the store that distributes it with a DMCA notice or a cease and desist. In this case it appears that the same could have been done, but the author says he "reached out" but did he actually use the right legal threats?