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Comment by ampdepolymerase | Hacker News Reader

For all those people in this thread praising his work, now's the time to put your money where the mouth is. If you have used his work, push your companies to sponsor/donate. Asking irrelevant questions like whether he has a job does not help the situation. The community's response to events like this is what determines the future of open source. People like to complain about copyleft vs libre licenses. But if you have benefitted much from open source software and are hesitant about contributing back financially, you are part of the problem. This is not just about Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Fortune 500s. If you are a tech startup with revenue or funding and uses his software in your products, consider a 5 to 6 figures contract, or at the very least a significant one time donation.

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I use his work, but for me the situation is more complicated my prior experiences with the author.

He's been making similar complaints about his lack of renumeration for quite a while. In an older GitHub where he requested contributions, I pointed out that he had barely worked on the project for many months (at that time), and not published a new version to npm in years[1], despite making a $600 withdrawal from his Open Collective fund in June 2018 with the explicit purpose of releasing v5[2].

In the thread, I suggested that I and others might be willing to contribute, but I wanted more certainty on what exactly my contribution would be paying for. As I saw it, at that point he had a number of regular donors who were essentially paying him to do nothing.

He responded very angrily, saying nobody had any right to question his actions or to expect anything from him, even if they were paying him. He then deleted my comment entirely and banned me from commenting further. This interaction didn't exactly leave me with a strong desire to contribute. I think he's a rather volatile individual and the community would indeed be better off forking this project than indulging his sense of grievance.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker.js [2] https://opencollective.com/fakerjs/expenses/3972

It looks like the package may have duplicate entries on NPM; the more-regularly-released package is posted here:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker

You might see that as “volatile”, but I think I can see what he’s getting at. A charitable reading of his whole stance:

• We can enter into a formal contract where I actually do owe you work-on-this-project in exchange for pay;

• but without such a contract, donations to me are just that — donations — and don’t influence my work;

• but this is an open-source project, so you’re free to put whatever work you like into it, and keep/use/share the results (in your own space, that I don’t have to referee.)

• I’ll just be over here, doing what I want, unless/until someone makes a contract with me to do what they want. (Which, of course, they’re not obligated to do; they could just as well hire someone else to fork and maintain the project, rather than hiring me. That’s their choice.)

• So, in short, you’re not the boss of me; unless you’re literally my boss. (A patron is not a boss.)

This is more of a matter of, if some Internet rando has a comfy development job, it's easy to go and flame nonconformists like Marak on the Internet.

Even if Marak was a jerk or a liar, he still deserves to be paid!

I do not think he 'deserves' to get paid. It is nice if he gets paid, but I dont even see a moral obligation (not speaking of legal). I mean the idea of gpl2 (at least from linus and my perspective) is nicely laid out here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU Paraphrasing:'I give you my sourcecode and if you change it and give the software away, please give me the changes'. For MIT license (which Marak choose) (this is not in the video link), it is more like: 'please use this for whichever cause you like, I dont even expect software changes back'.

Everyone deserves to get paid (in the sense of moral desert; i.e. people "deserve" human rights.) You don't have a personal obligation to pay them, though.

Solving that discrepancy isn't going to be done in an HN comment; it's the Great Work of capitalist statecraft.

I agree he deserves to get paid like everybody else, but not because of this work he did. Unfortunately not all societies do that, so uually the common route to get paid is to get (a) work (contract), somebody is willing to pay for.

I believe prison laborers deserve to be paid minimum wage, despite their convictions and despite their inability to negotiate. Additionally minimum wage should be raised to a living wage.

You’re taking an overly reductionist view, incompatible with things like “equal pay for equal work.” He definitely deserves to get paid for his work, and it’s obviously a matter of by whom, and he’s fed up with giant corporations using his stuff despite being able to pay him, and he’s totally in the right even if he’s insert-some-undesirable-here.

I agree with the other commenter that "deserves" is a strong word.

If you want to sell something for money, you put a price on it. And people decide to buy it or not.

If you give it away for free, going back after the fact and asking for a donation is fine. But I don't think it's required. And it doesn't make people who choose not to donate bad in any way.

He should probably figure out his next business and get to working on that. Start a business, sell a thing, profit.

Yeah, bringing money into free software equation complicates things.

It comes down to donors expecting something back for their donation, while authors expect something back for all the effort they put so far into the project that is obviously useful to other people.

For my open source project I made a hard decision not take any money. This curbs expectations and puts users at disadvantage, but lets me take as much time off as I want and I sleep better.

Donors shouldn't expect something back, because per definition from Wiktionary:

donation

A voluntary gift or contribution for a specific cause.

This feels like a semantic non-sequitur. Maybe that's actually a great example of core of the problem at hand!

You're trying to argue a conclusion based on the specific word "donor", but many of these "donors" (or in this thread's case potential "donor") don't see themselves that way; they are not interested in "donating" with no strings, it seems like they are more interested in "patronage" or some sort of "sponsoring", where their money is not no-strings, but instead conditional on some specific threshold of level/quality of support/service.

Perhaps we just need a bit richer vocabulary for these discussions; if the project author is only interested in unconditional donations, that's their prerogative, and you're free to fork or fund accordingly. But also recognize that at the margin, "donate with no strings" is a much tougher sell for enterprises than "patronage will buy you X quality of service".

So if you're actually making an effort to turn an open-source project into revenue, I think you'll probably need to listen to your potential customers/patrons a bit more and give them the assurances they are looking for. Again, any open source author is free to do as they please! But as the GP notes, bringing money into the situation complicates things, and I don't think it's reasonable or rational to expect companies to start throwing donations your way without listening to what they want to get in return.

For most people, the funding mechanisms on the Internet pretty much all carry an expectation that they're to support ongoing work that will be used to either explicitly deliver a product, as with Kickstarter, or is to fund an artist's/coder's/etc. ongoing work. Not many people are making donations based on past effort.

I sold a (non-open source) shareware product way back when. Money definitely provided the incentive to put more work into it than I otherwise would have. On the other hand, it made me treat it as a business, albeit a part-time one.

I've participated in a project using Bountysource some years ago; in total I received something on the order of 1500-2000 $. Which is nice. I assume a lot of people did a lot more work than I did back then and never saw any money for it. So I probably have no right to complain or lament about these transactions in any way. But, in a way, it is very hard to not think about dollar per time, especially with Bountysource being attached to solving specific issues. I believe this contributed to my mentality souring over time, because in the back of my head I never got rid of the idea that I'm sort-of at work here, but at about 2 $/hr average wage. I stopped contributing to that project completely after about just two years or so.

I call BS. The tagline on his opencollective page is "Continue to make faker.js the best open-source fake data solution available."

That implies that if people donate then the funds will be used to improve the project.

To be fair, it would be nice if he explicitly expressed such a stance rather than tacitly implying it, but otherwise that sounds about right.

By my understanding, in the US, if you solicit donations and say you will do something specific with them (e.g., use them to pay yourself to work on a project), then those aren't really donations. They're payment for a service. You may not think that you entered into a contract with the "donors" by accepting the "donations," but you did. You made an offer to perform an action in exchange for money and someone accepted that offer by paying you. That's a contract and anyone who donated could take you to court to get the money back.

> despite making a $600 withdrawal from his Open Collective fund in June 2018 with the explicit purpose of releasing v5[2].

I just want to point out how crazy it is that we expect people to releasing a whole major version for $600

Meanwhile in the commercial world, changing the colour of a button in your iOS app will cost you $1000s...

Having been on both sides of that pay discrepancy, I have come to the conclusion that most of our economic theory about the nature of business and competition is bullshit. I now see corporations as social organizations which exist to keep educated people fed and controlled, everything else is secondary. The sums are big because the money has to get divvied up amongst everyone, even if the work involved is just changing a hex value by the lowest paid and probably most technically skilled person in the network.

Yep, that money has to pay for not only the developer "doing the work", but all the overhead: the product managers, QA, release/deployment... then redo of work because someone used the wrong shade of blue.

Then he shouldn't take the money.

See also: "Let them eat cake."

He was co founder of Nodejitsu, the company who raised kickstarter funding for NPM, the same time NPM raised money from investors . There was a legal conflict about who owns NPM, they didnt refund or make a statement the money they raised for a project they don't own. That Kickstarter campaign was a scam and they got away with it.

If you're using his work, pay him something. Everything else is just excuses.

I feel for him being in his tough spot, but let's be clear on what faker.js is. I suspect many companies (like mine) use it to create "decent"-looking data for tests. But we could trivially do without it, and basically just used it because it was there. I contrast this with some other open source projects we use that we specifically contribute to (using GitHub donations) because they are central libraries to our code base.

That's going to be true to some extent of every library your company uses, but for every library someone writes and offers as FOSS, you don't have to spend the cycles designing, developing, and maintaining your own, nor training new hires on using it. You're fundamentally misunderstanding the value of having good quality tools developed by someone else.

And I'm not even going to _start_ on what I think of your attitude towards test tooling vs "central libraries" other than to note that if you don't consider test tools central to your development process, I think you have bigger problems.

You're completely mischaracterizing my post. My point is that if faker were anything slightly above free, we really wouldn't have used it, and our code quality wouldn't suffer from not having it. It was more of a "ooh, that's kinda nice" thing when we used it.

> And I'm not even going to _start_ on what I think of your attitude towards test tooling vs "central libraries" other than to note that if you don't consider test tools central to your development process, I think you have bigger problems.

That's not my attitude at all and is a bullshit strawman. I actually do donate to libraries that are fundamental to our test framework. Faker is just definitely not one of them.

> and our code quality wouldn't suffer from not having it

Your code quality is irrelevant. What matters is did it save you time, and what is that time worth to you and your business.

Their whole point is that it didn't actually save any time; if it didn't exist for free, they wouldn't have done it themselves.

How often have you implemented a trivial feature and, after adding tests, debugging, doing code review, etc, you find it’s taken a nontrivial amount of time. And it’ll likely take maintenance too as you learn what you need (easier when you’ve seen it done already).

Most of these trivial things probably take nontrivial time, and if you add all of them together for all the trivial projects you use, it’s probably saved a really serious chunk of time.

The ocean is made of “trivial” drops of water, yada yada.

Likewise, the trivial or novel that you borrow for free isn’t really free when you need to use it suddenly in ways that the license doesn’t permit or it is just technically inconvenient. It is sort of like leasing vs buying, but not really a good analogy.

Let's be clear, this is the difference between your test user being called Tom Smith with email tom@smith.com and Joseph Baker with email jbaker@bigcorp.com versus being called Foo Bar and Foo Bar2 with emails foo@example.com and foo2@example.com

"Let's be clear, action developer actually took versus action developer didn't take but in my opinion isn't that different, as someone who didn't take any actions at all" is a bad hill to die on.

I think the point is that generating pretty fake data as opposed to bland fake data is a "nice to have" rather than a "must have" for 98% of companies. And by the time you get up to AirBnb and FB, etc., they have their own internal testing data and standards based on years of real-world false negatives and false positives.

It's really a content library, which is useful, but it's not in the mission-critical category where developers can get a rubber stamp budget approval from their boss. It's a great project to get your name out there as an open source developer, rather than a viable business model IMO.

That just goes to show you how rough the real world really is. Like, it’s free and a pretty good solution, but still replaceable lol.

Tough crowd.

Always charge, or get value somehow, because I can promise you people will feel entitled to whatever baseline you give them (in this case ‘free’).

Everyone and everything is replaceable, oh cruel world, why you do us dirty like that?

That's not how tough the world is, it's how tough people choose to make it.

Yeah but it is also hilarious when the contributors of free open source software rage quit when they realize others can use their work for free while the contributors forget to make money.

Software developers, man!

For a bi-weekly hilarious rage quit, check out Andre Conje on twitter!

That’s horrible. If you produce something for free, and someone uses it to reduce effort and expenses, at least throw some money their way! Doesn’t even have to be much.

I wonder if npm packages should operate in a similar way YouTube does. Why can’t people sell a license via npm? That would be a nice way to browse packages, pay a buck or two for Faker.js for commercial projects. Plenty of us have budgets that $50 dollars could get you some solid pro versions of a lot of software.

We devalue ourselves really.

I'm not sure that's the case here. It sounds like their apartment caught fire and now they are homeless. In my opinion, this sounds more like a desperation move than anger; this developer really needs money ASAP in order to keep a roof over their head.

Yeah.

And this other time I saw a hardware company be “in the spirit of open source” and then saw another company use their code in cheaper hardware sold for less and then the first company went on a rage tirade and tried to edit their commit history to change the license, tarnishing themselves in their whole community and customer’s eyes at the time.

FOSS rage quits are hilarious.

> If you have used his work, push your companies to sponsor/donate.

That's not how any of this works. Most people work for companies that do not just donate to random software developers. If you want companies to send you money, you need to have something on an invoice. You don't actually have to make the commercial edition different than your community edition, especially if you're charging a low amount, finance isn't going to grill you about why you aren't using the free version. But you need to align how you expect to get paid with how companies are set up to pay people. Charge for stuff!

What I do, is ask for a receipt before I donate. Then it becomes a business cost to me.

Honestly, he should have used the GPL and allowed other licensing options for commercial entities. Frankly I wouldn't use MIT license for personal open-source projects.

Debian (for example) has 51,000 free software packages. How do we decide which ones to fund and how much they get? Do you earn money for being the maintainer. LOC you commit? Bugs you report or fix? What about people that write documentation or packaging?

Yes, it is a good look to donate money so this guy can make more bombs.

I mean, I'm not using faker.js but I'm not exactly sure I'd finance a potential terrorist.

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