5 ms·

I'll say it: why would they pay him if he's already doing the work for free from their PoV? Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a b

I'll say it: why would they pay him if he's already doing the work for free from their PoV? Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.

RMPR 1y ago
Implementing the features they would want to prioritize. Just like most companies hiring OSS maintainers.
- ArcHound 1y ago
  That is also a good point, but I worry that the power has shifted. I worry that companies might get away with no compensation for such efforts.
  - bravesoul2 1y ago
    Only through trickery. E.g. "you might get a job if you work for free for us". In other news see many tech job ads these days :)
jaccola 1y ago
Because - They can decide more easily what he works on - They know he loves this work and is very capable of doing it - They can own his output, a competitive advantage - He will likely cost them ~nothing anyway
- ArcHound 1y ago
  While that sounds rational, I worry that the same reasoning is not applied in the HR department. But that might be just my frustration from experiences. To continue the devil's advocate: why bother with all of this, if the company doesn't have to and the OSS version is enough anyway?
  - ManlyBread 1y ago
    This is an incredibly short-term thinking. The reason is simple: the author is not obliged to continue while this sort of thing can be demoralizing. I don't know about the author's approach to this matter, but if I would find out that a company is making a killing using my software and then that company would refuse to even give me an interview I'd probably stop loving doing what I do. Sure, the software is under MIT license and it was the author's choice to do so, but what's the point of doing it under such a license when you can't even count of it mattering in a resume? What's the point of providing free labor to a company with revenue in billions? If you look at the author's blogpost, the only benefit the author mentions is making the number of downloads go up and that's just pathetic. I am reminded of an another, similar case with a library called "FluentAssertions". This library used to be free to use by anyone until the author changed the license and started charging money for commercial use. The author did that because he spend several year maintaining the library on his own time and dime and megacorpos like Microsoft wouldn't even bother to donate despite using it extensively. What happened afterwards was that the author got shat on by everyone on the internet for daring to ask for money. In the company I work for his library has been replaced with an another free fork at a incredibly fast pace. All that free labor and the author got dropped as soon as they fell out of line. The worst thing is that it wouldn't probably take much to make the author of the library happy. Even if they weren't interested in hiring him they could still acknowledge him, talk to him a bit to maintain good relations, throw him a nice donation as a thank you and now it would be a nice, good PR story instead of an another reminder that corporations are just looking to squeeze out value out of all of us.
    - ArcHound 1y ago
      Is it short term? Seems like the MS and the others got exactly what they wanted. Exploiting the passion for free work is a trade that will keep happening as long as there are passionate inexperienced people.
      - yubblegum 1y ago
        Sorry but have to call b.s. here. Many of us did in fact, in this very forum, kept pointing out that dumping on GPL (and the man and his ideas behind it) was a mistake and that non-gpl oss was for chumps. And we were greyed to oblivion. Same exact story as with surveillance tech. Hackernews is hugely responsible for many of the ailments of this field in 21st century. Own it.
- trueismywork 1y ago
  They probably already have someone working on top of it but it's just closed source because of the license.
  - dmurray 1y ago
    But they are hiring someone else to work on it. > I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop using enigo
pentamassiv 1y ago
Right now it is just a hobby and there are still a number of bugs remaining. Since I don't have an income from it, I can't dedicate more time to it. Hiring me would allow me to work on fixing them full time and make the progress much faster
- trueismywork 1y ago
  Do you think they already have hired someone to work on it but are just not releasing the source code?
  - pentamassiv 1y ago
    I don't think so. They use an outdated version straight from crates.io (at least in the publicly available version of Claude Desktop).
    - joelfried 1y ago
      Seems like it's time to remove links to outdated versions. Replace them with your resume?
      - nathan_douglas 1y ago
        I believe crates doesn't really allow that, partially so that people can't easily sabotage the supply chain like that :)
        pentamassiv 1y ago
        Correct, you cannot remove a version or the whole crate unless very specific criteria are fulfilled. You can "yank" versions. That prevents people from adding the version as a new dependency, but if you relied on it before it got yanked, your build will succeed. I wouldn't delete old versions even if I could though. My goal is to publish a rock solid library that everyone can depend on and build awesome projects with
- 1y ago
bravesoul2 1y ago
That's like having someone say gives you free tractor blueprint but you can hire its inventor to come and put it together, or some other engineer. An FOSS project is rarely production ready that is really free as in beer considering TCO. Especially for a tech company.
mac-mc 1y ago
Lets make a new license: If you wont hire me, use my library and make over $100m in revenue a year, you must pay a commercial license to use my software equivalent to the total cost (equity grants included) of an average principal engineer or director who manages 50+ people at your company in your highest COL metro, whichever is higher. For OSS work that isn't mostly one author, make it go to the foundation for the OSS project instead and apply the rule to principal maintainers. You could even scale it in multiples of revenue in principle engineer units of $1b per principle engineer of global revenue. IMO I think foundational projects that every single bigtech uses like ffmpeg should get on this licence yesterday. They would start getting millions because it still would be way cheaper than making it themselves in their bloated cost structures.
- ArcHound 1y ago
  I agree with the spirit of this comment, but I worry about the implementation. See the comment of Manly read in this section. Once the threat of payment approaches, you can just switch to a free fork. A single person can't really win a trial against a big, well-funded company.
  - mettamage 1y ago
    They can fork it, but can they find the maintainers? If it's just their own internal employees, then they definitely have less expertise in that codebase. Might as well hire the actual expert.
  - Etheryte 1y ago
    I don't really see how this is an issue, depending on the license text it's trivial to make the license apply in the same manner. As for winning, I think that's more of a US-centric view, if you sue elsewhere in the world there's plenty of courts that are happy to slap big tech.
    - ArcHound 1y ago
      Genuine question that might sound trollish: do you please have examples of such cases?
dirkc 1y ago
I can't say for Anthropic, but I've seen Google hire people working on open source projects that were aligned with the skills they were looking for. Desktop search and collaborative editing comes to mind, although I might be mis-remembering?
that_guy_iain 1y ago
But he's not doing the work for free. He's doing something else for free which they use. He has domain knowledge with the library that noone else has, their can either pay someone to learn it or they can hire someone with it.
- ArcHound 1y ago
  And that's exactly what these companies can abuse. If this wasn't available for free, they would gladly pay for a programmer to create it. But if it's already free, they can use it as a starting point. Maybe they'd need to internalize/extend it. But the option of paying for the work already done is gone. Do this for each npm dependency and you're looking at huge savings.
  - imtringued 1y ago
    This is still illogical. You can hire the original maintainer and pay an incremental cost, or you can hire a random developer and pay the initial learning cost + higher incremental cost. If every company using a library chose the former, then every hour of development would be paid for (from the perspective of the maintainer) and the cost would be spread out across all its users.
    - ArcHound 1y ago
      A counterproposal: You can use what is as is. Then you can ignore all of the other issues if they don't impact your bottom line. Don't get me wrong, I like your corporate OSS financing model. But there seems to be not enough incentive for companies to use it. Why take ownership for a small cost, when you can use an imperfect thing with no cost?
mywittyname 1y ago
Why wouldn't a company want to hire the fore-most expert in a tool that is critical to the company? They are hiring for someone with that exact expertise. A competitor could hire the OP instead, get them to work on improving the software for a few years. Giving the competitor a major head start. Worst-case scenario, the tool they are building doesn't work out and Anthropic has a pretty good developer to put on other projects.

I'll say it: why would they pay him if he's already doing the work for free from their PoV? Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.

RMPR 1y ago

Implementing the features they would want to prioritize. Just like most companies hiring OSS maintainers.

ArcHound 1y ago
That is also a good point, but I worry that the power has shifted. I worry that companies might get away with no compensation for such efforts.
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  Only through trickery. E.g. "you might get a job if you work for free for us". In other news see many tech job ads these days :)

jaccola 1y ago

Because - They can decide more easily what he works on - They know he loves this work and is very capable of doing it - They can own his output, a competitive advantage - He will likely cost them ~nothing anyway

ArcHound 1y ago
While that sounds rational, I worry that the same reasoning is not applied in the HR department. But that might be just my frustration from experiences. To continue the devil's advocate: why bother with all of this, if the company doesn't have to and the OSS version is enough anyway?
- ManlyBread 1y ago
  This is an incredibly short-term thinking. The reason is simple: the author is not obliged to continue while this sort of thing can be demoralizing. I don't know about the author's approach to this matter, but if I would find out that a company is making a killing using my software and then that company would refuse to even give me an interview I'd probably stop loving doing what I do. Sure, the software is under MIT license and it was the author's choice to do so, but what's the point of doing it under such a license when you can't even count of it mattering in a resume? What's the point of providing free labor to a company with revenue in billions? If you look at the author's blogpost, the only benefit the author mentions is making the number of downloads go up and that's just pathetic. I am reminded of an another, similar case with a library called "FluentAssertions". This library used to be free to use by anyone until the author changed the license and started charging money for commercial use. The author did that because he spend several year maintaining the library on his own time and dime and megacorpos like Microsoft wouldn't even bother to donate despite using it extensively. What happened afterwards was that the author got shat on by everyone on the internet for daring to ask for money. In the company I work for his library has been replaced with an another free fork at a incredibly fast pace. All that free labor and the author got dropped as soon as they fell out of line. The worst thing is that it wouldn't probably take much to make the author of the library happy. Even if they weren't interested in hiring him they could still acknowledge him, talk to him a bit to maintain good relations, throw him a nice donation as a thank you and now it would be a nice, good PR story instead of an another reminder that corporations are just looking to squeeze out value out of all of us.
  - ArcHound 1y ago
    Is it short term? Seems like the MS and the others got exactly what they wanted. Exploiting the passion for free work is a trade that will keep happening as long as there are passionate inexperienced people.
    - yubblegum 1y ago
      Sorry but have to call b.s. here. Many of us did in fact, in this very forum, kept pointing out that dumping on GPL (and the man and his ideas behind it) was a mistake and that non-gpl oss was for chumps. And we were greyed to oblivion. Same exact story as with surveillance tech. Hackernews is hugely responsible for many of the ailments of this field in 21st century. Own it.
trueismywork 1y ago
They probably already have someone working on top of it but it's just closed source because of the license.
- dmurray 1y ago
  But they are hiring someone else to work on it. > I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop using enigo

pentamassiv 1y ago

Right now it is just a hobby and there are still a number of bugs remaining. Since I don't have an income from it, I can't dedicate more time to it. Hiring me would allow me to work on fixing them full time and make the progress much faster

trueismywork 1y ago
Do you think they already have hired someone to work on it but are just not releasing the source code?
- pentamassiv 1y ago
  I don't think so. They use an outdated version straight from crates.io (at least in the publicly available version of Claude Desktop).
  - joelfried 1y ago
    Seems like it's time to remove links to outdated versions. Replace them with your resume?
    - nathan_douglas 1y ago
      I believe crates doesn't really allow that, partially so that people can't easily sabotage the supply chain like that :)
      - pentamassiv 1y ago
        Correct, you cannot remove a version or the whole crate unless very specific criteria are fulfilled. You can "yank" versions. That prevents people from adding the version as a new dependency, but if you relied on it before it got yanked, your build will succeed. I wouldn't delete old versions even if I could though. My goal is to publish a rock solid library that everyone can depend on and build awesome projects with
1y ago

bravesoul2 1y ago

That's like having someone say gives you free tractor blueprint but you can hire its inventor to come and put it together, or some other engineer. An FOSS project is rarely production ready that is really free as in beer considering TCO. Especially for a tech company.

mac-mc 1y ago

Lets make a new license: If you wont hire me, use my library and make over $100m in revenue a year, you must pay a commercial license to use my software equivalent to the total cost (equity grants included) of an average principal engineer or director who manages 50+ people at your company in your highest COL metro, whichever is higher. For OSS work that isn't mostly one author, make it go to the foundation for the OSS project instead and apply the rule to principal maintainers. You could even scale it in multiples of revenue in principle engineer units of $1b per principle engineer of global revenue. IMO I think foundational projects that every single bigtech uses like ffmpeg should get on this licence yesterday. They would start getting millions because it still would be way cheaper than making it themselves in their bloated cost structures.

ArcHound 1y ago
I agree with the spirit of this comment, but I worry about the implementation. See the comment of Manly read in this section. Once the threat of payment approaches, you can just switch to a free fork. A single person can't really win a trial against a big, well-funded company.
- mettamage 1y ago
  They can fork it, but can they find the maintainers? If it's just their own internal employees, then they definitely have less expertise in that codebase. Might as well hire the actual expert.
- Etheryte 1y ago
  I don't really see how this is an issue, depending on the license text it's trivial to make the license apply in the same manner. As for winning, I think that's more of a US-centric view, if you sue elsewhere in the world there's plenty of courts that are happy to slap big tech.
  - ArcHound 1y ago
    Genuine question that might sound trollish: do you please have examples of such cases?

dirkc 1y ago

I can't say for Anthropic, but I've seen Google hire people working on open source projects that were aligned with the skills they were looking for. Desktop search and collaborative editing comes to mind, although I might be mis-remembering?

that_guy_iain 1y ago

But he's not doing the work for free. He's doing something else for free which they use. He has domain knowledge with the library that noone else has, their can either pay someone to learn it or they can hire someone with it.

ArcHound 1y ago
And that's exactly what these companies can abuse. If this wasn't available for free, they would gladly pay for a programmer to create it. But if it's already free, they can use it as a starting point. Maybe they'd need to internalize/extend it. But the option of paying for the work already done is gone. Do this for each npm dependency and you're looking at huge savings.
- imtringued 1y ago
  This is still illogical. You can hire the original maintainer and pay an incremental cost, or you can hire a random developer and pay the initial learning cost + higher incremental cost. If every company using a library chose the former, then every hour of development would be paid for (from the perspective of the maintainer) and the cost would be spread out across all its users.
  - ArcHound 1y ago
    A counterproposal: You can use what is as is. Then you can ignore all of the other issues if they don't impact your bottom line. Don't get me wrong, I like your corporate OSS financing model. But there seems to be not enough incentive for companies to use it. Why take ownership for a small cost, when you can use an imperfect thing with no cost?

mywittyname 1y ago

Why wouldn't a company want to hire the fore-most expert in a tool that is critical to the company? They are hiring for someone with that exact expertise. A competitor could hire the OP instead, get them to work on improving the software for a few years. Giving the competitor a major head start. Worst-case scenario, the tool they are building doesn't work out and Anthropic has a pretty good developer to put on other projects.