Show HN: Cliapp.store – An App Store for CLI Apps
feram.io
feram.io
If that's not the case, this seems like yet another shady project, like plenty posted recently (I remember a similar one based on the softwarestack used), where the name of big successful opensource projects is used to collect money on their behalf and afterwards when enough money is piled up, they are offered to take the money on terms set by the marketplace.
As others have pointed out, you probably have the legal right to run this sort of store. However, you should strongly consider consulting each project before listing them -- you might find that many are hostile to this sort of platform, and would prefer not to be hosted on it.
Every time an open source project complains about the challenges of monetization (see the recent Redis controversy), people say "Don't like other companies making money off your software? Then don't license it that way!"
But now that someone is actually doing that, people are not happy.
My hypothesis is that people's opinion on this subject depends on what's convenient for them, and is not necessarily a reflection on whether the act itself is a good one or not.
People can already get all these CLI apps very conveniently from a package manager, for free, and that is the reason why the idea of a paid app store disgusts people.
Every time a GPL vs BSD conversation comes up, most people support BSD, saying that it's "more free". But I think the true reason is that people want to be able to use BSD-licensed libraries in their apps, which they profit from.
Why were so many people against Redis Labs trying to protect their revenue streams? I think it's because people felt threatened that they may have to pay more in the future.
We, as a community, need to make up our minds and stop being misled by our own agendas. It is fine to have one's own agenda but stop conflating that with moral issues.
> You can try out Pandoc for free. To use it regularly, you must buy a license.
They do not detail how they intent to share the money with the authors. Did they prepare with all the authors, are or they collecting money in their name without them agreeing to that? E.g. money paid to buy something is different than a donation from a tax perspective: how many authors are actually going to go to the paperwork to get the money?
The pricing info link also sounds dangerously like what other projects have done in the past: "we take the money and put it in a pot, and at some point the author can ask us for the money and we'll figure out how to get it to them". This means users wanting to support the dev unwittingly put the money in a pot the dev has then to go through additional effort and potentially expense to access, which the users would have avoided if they'd known, e.g. through a direct donation. If you actually have clear agreements with authors on how this is going to work, you should emphasize that. If you don't, that should be clear too.
Did @woodruffw say that anywhere? Otherwise it's not really a double standard but just different people having different opinions.
> We, as a community, need to make up our minds and stop being misled by our own agendas.
We as a (presumably "open source" community) should accept that people within our community have a divergent range of views on monetisation and are all entitled to express those views.
@woodruffw is a Homebrew maintainer and I'm the Homebrew lead maintainer. We're both surprised to learn about a project that's monetising the work of the package manager we work on (and many others) without any sort of heads up. There's no obligation to provide one, of course, but at the same time we have no obligation to make it easy for or be happy about our work being used in this way.
Right now, a party that is independent of the original developers has attempted to charge money for the work. There's no indication that the original authors consented to this, and there's no assurance besides some platitudes in a blog post that the authors will receive any part of the payment
The ethical problem, here in particular, is presenting yourself as an official storefront for the open source community. I don't care if Amazon integrates my projects into their infrastructure (they probably already do!) -- they don't present themselves as my financial middleman.
This guy is just sticking his hand in a pot I feel he doesn't need to.
Where it isn't with money, I support with time to the project. Yes, I can't support _every tiny thing_ I use, but it's not a requirement.
Which license does this notice message refer to? This is completely wrong!
Is any of that money going to the authors?
Of course it is technically legal to charge for these things. But it is unlikely to endear you to the community.
The payment is composed of following parts:
19 % (0.57 €) is German VAT
Of the remaining 81 % (2.42 €)
70 % (1.69 €) go to the developer of the app (Ricardo Garcia). This amount is not transferred immediately, but aggregated until a threshold of 10 € is exceeded to reduce transaction costs.
30 % (0.73 €) go to us (Feram GmbH) in order to power this website and ensure a sustainable development.
[1] https://github.com/feramhq/cli-apps/blob/master/git/main.yam... [2] https://github.com/feramhq/cli-apps/blob/master/git/main.yam...
In case of copyleft licenses, the only thing not allowed is preventing your buyers from exercising the same freedom you had. That is, they are allowed to redistribute without cost, and they too are allowed to sell.
That being said, I'm finding myself reactive viscerally to this site and what feels like an abuse of friendly licenses.