Hacker News Reader

Comment by pixelbeat | Hacker News Reader

You owe the GNU coreutils project $392

> This project is satire and was made during the 2015 Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon.

That's good, because it would be extremely disturbing if someone from the FSF/GNU coreutils team thought charging like this was okay.

The 'announcement' for this feature is great for the ridiculous fake quotes. e.g.

"We've scaled enough. It's time to monetize." -Richard Stallman, Founder. FSF.

https://diafygi.github.io/gnu-pricing/website/

I agree with the general idea that contributing to these projects is good. However, the link is slightly misleading: "GNU programs are used billions of time every day all over the world. However, the intellectual property owners, the Free Software Foundation, don't make a cent from it. What a raw deal! This project aims to fix that by monetizing many popular command line tools that GNU maintains."

Maybe true, but keep in mind that the main coreutils maintainers (including the parent) are funded by Red Hat. There are plenty of FOSS projects that do suffer from a lack of funding; coreutils, GCC, etc are certainly not one of them. As such, if your goal is to help the FOSS community at large, you might want to consider channeling the money to other important projects.

Maybe the donation link already does such channeling; I am curious about this.

It's a joke

It's a joke that's very much not obviously a joke. This is social commentary about the state of free software and/or Hacker News, I'm just not sure what the social commentary actually is.

Seemed pretty obvious to me.

woosh! The sound of sarcasm going over your head.

This project is entirely satirical. Read through to the bottom of the README.

What leads you to believe OP doesn't use FreeBSD or any other Unixalike? :)

I mostly do (MacOS), but:

  $ which ls
  /usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin/ls

I'd say $392 seems like less than I should contribute.

Well, if it's shipped from Apple as part of their OS (I'm not sure it is from your path), then Apple would be responsible for licensing it.

Which makes me wonder, does Apple have an official stance on supporting open source they use?

It's not. Default ls on Mac OS X is /bin/ls.

I figured as much. I'm sure Apple is using some BSD version, possibly modified in-house.

OS X has been based on an amalgamation of several BSD flavors for a while now.

no, I installed gnu coreutils using homebrew. - /usr/local/opt/ is where homebrew puts installed binaries.

This is actually awesome!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com