I'm just kinda curious about some comments on Twitter and here. Ok, the guy made an open source library, with no strings attached, a big company used it for god knows what and acknowledged him. Why would the company give him anything more than acknowledgement? As far as we know they didn't demand any updates or support from him, why are they expected to give him freebies, contribute to the code or anything else?
Last but not least is just the feeling that your code is running in so many places! What a feeling of accomplishment. Over a career, you start to think more and more about what code you have running in the world. Where it used to run. Where you'd like it to run.
That's a pretty satisfying feeling, and it also makes him one of the few bona fide people in the world at whom you can throw money to fix (or change) the library.
I don't expect anything from them, they don't ask anything from me and just knowing that it is useful for such a big project is all endorsement I need.
In a funny twist of fate, Microsoft now uses SheetJS open source to power some Excel exports in Office 365! https://tasks.office.com/License.html is the license disclosure, and you can actually see it in action in the exported files.
We were blown away when we found out. It's the ultimate endorsement! Oftentimes we just wonder what would have happened if Microsoft just let the original project adopt a standard open source license.
It’s weird to me that developers write code that other companies use to make profits, while they just get paid with a “feeling” of satisfaction.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/building-computer-labs-in-w...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software#...
"Netscape's act prompted Raymond and others to look into how to bring the FSF's Free software ideas and perceived benefits to the commercial software industry. They concluded that FSF's social activism was not appealing to companies like Netscape, and looked for a way to rebrand the Free software movement to emphasize the business potential of sharing and collaborating on software source code. The new name they chose was "Open-source", and quickly Bruce Perens, publisher Tim O'Reilly, Linus Torvalds, and others signed on to the rebranding. The Open Source Initiative was founded in February 1998 to encourage the use of the new term and evangelize open-source principles."
It states this as a source: https://opensource.org/history
I spent this Saturday morning working in my front yard. It looks nice for my benefit, but it also benefits my neighbors. It would be really strange for me to approach my neighbors and ask for financial remuneration because they've been enriched by my yardwork. Yardwork is enjoyable and I like making the world better in this fashion.
I wouldn't join a yardwork company and work for free.
Software is similar. We can use OSS to share the benefit when we do something we want or need to do anyway.
My open source is my way of volunteering to make the world a better place. Whether some for profit company uses it is irrelevant to me. Plenty of companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, ...) give back way more than they take and even though I have about 100-160 original repos on github my free output pales in comparison to the amount of stuff I take for free. Nintendo might give less today but lead by example and that might change. Though if it never changes it still doesn't bother me in the least.
Oh no.
> Plenty of companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, ...) give back way more than they take
OH NO.
In what planet is donating to a charity the same as "donating" code to a for-profit enterprise, but even more insane (in my opinion ofc) in what planet do google and facebook "give more than they take"??
Consumer surplus?
Do you really think the ability to use their search engine is worth more than that to you?
With less than 0.1% of their annual ad revenue I could retire tomorrow, debt-free, and set up a trust fund for my daughter so she'd never have to work a day in her life.
People say that ads work so of course you are affected by them, but I am pretty sure lots of people aren't affected that much by ads. Luckily for ad companies there are a lot of ad-whales out there, people who are very easy to influence and get money from. These are the same kind of people spending lots of money in free to play games, at casinos or who falls for MLM schemes.
Google's entire ad revenue, of course, comes from "a few ads".
There are a ton of project owners who would love nothing more than to be used by a big, popular platform. That's a pretty big win with hardly any risk. It means their thing beat out something that could have been made in-house by the world's best devs. Can you imagine discovering that your little thousand-star github library is present in, I don't know, Gmail? Presumably, at the very least, it means an auto-hire if you apply to any of the biggies for a very high total comp.
(And if you refuse on principle to cash in on that endorsement? I say good for you and I would like to hire you to be on my "wizard council". These are people I subscribe to to be diligent, principled, skeptical, and open about any software update I consume. This would include, BTW, a holistic definition of "software" to include firmware, FPGAs and so on. Please talk to me like an adult about InfoSec! Thank youuuu!)
Yes of course they are under no obligation outside the license, but I'd like to see them send the author a toy anyway.
A company like Nintendo sends out tons of swag to people who have collaborated with the company in some way, just add the author to the list.
https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?s=20
I used to be a big believer in open source software, but as for profit enterprises continue to pillage the community without giving anything back more and more I feel that it’s not worth the time or effort involved, unless the work is protected by a proper GPLv3 license.
That is the ethos, it's what open source and CC is about. I may not be in a position to profit from some of my work, or I might be willing to donate it for free. If someone else can do something valuable enough to other people with it that they get paid to do it, good for them. The world is a better place. At the end of the day companies and corporations are just made up of people making a living.
Yeah that's weird. I think it's partly people realizing the difference between MIT/BSD and GPL (or even AGPL) licenses. Or the diff between some ideal "how open source works" and what the licenses actually say.
This is a good thing. People may realise that the choice of license actually matters.
But: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
I think they'll never have to fizzbuzz again, but probably still lots of whiteboarding in their future.
Recently I was chatting with a young woman who competes in motorcycle racing at an international level. She's almost old enough to get a driver's license to drive on public roads. Do you think she gets to skip the driving test because she can ride better than all but a few people in the country? No, she'll do figure eights in a parking lot like everyone else.
Big company bureaucracy functions similarly to government bureaucracy. The rules are built for the common case and exceptions for individuals, however reasonable, are hard to make.
When I interviewed, one or two of the questions were stereotypical "reverse the string in Pig Latin while solving tic-tac-toe" or whatever. Most of the questions were directly relevant to real-time safety-critical embedded systems stuff though.
At some point while I was there, Google did some viral marketing leetcode foobar challenge recruiting thing. If you searched for certain keywords, your web browser would do a fancy 3D zoom effect and then give you coding challenges. I did some of them for a couple hours one time. Some of them were tricky word problems, but algorithmically none of them were particularly difficult. The only one I remember had maybe 5 paragraphs of text, and my solution was literally one line of python.
It cuts both ways; some users expect more support than promised.
Modding communities have historically leaned on self-penned bespoke licences tending toward the, "only Tool fans can use this! Do not rip my sprites without permission, that means you XxSephiroth494 YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!" school of legal text. But as an open-source project, there is a convention to upload things to the content distribution network with a GPL or Creative Commons licence.
This causes some rather dramatic fallouts when "I don't have to give you any source code, it's mine and I wrote it" or "he can't just take my mod and build his own version of it" meet the inevitable response of, "you released it under the GPL, that's how it works". It gets rather messier when said work includes upstream things which were originally released under the Tool Fan Restricted Licence or similar where the original creator forbade further sharing of source code.
Mind, it's not to the same level as this guy: https://github.com/jonschlinkert
Chances are it's just found itself as a dependency of a dependency, rather than being used directly. Not to shit on either of them, but they both 'maintain' a large amount of trivial packages that any language with a sensible standard library wouldn't require.
The Buffer security issues that Mathias Buus and I uncovered led to the deprecation of `new Buffer()` in Node.js and the creation of the `Buffer.from()` and `Buffer.alloc()` APIs. There is an explanation here: https://github.com/feross/safe-buffer#why-is-buffer-unsafe
I created `safe-buffer` as a demonstration of how the API could be fixed to be safe. Then, the ecosystem adopted `safe-buffer` as a polyfill to get that safety even before `Buffer.from()` and `Buffer.alloc()` were included in Node.js. And to this day it continues to be used to provide safety in older versions of Node.js which lack the newer APIs.
tldr; We fixed Node.js and made it safe for you. But, by all means, feel free to continue mocking me and the volunteer work I've done for the community :/
Because it would be cool, and some good press that very few people would read.
After the tweet likely started to trend you see the start of the eternal GPL vs MIT/BSD debate, but the first couple just seemed pretty like they thought it would be neat if he got a Switch.
How much did he paid for the compiler?
It seems like you're drawing some false equivalence between the open source developer and Nintendo.
I bet his compiler is opensource too.
LLVM is NOT GPL.
If someone wants to distribute their software with the expectation or requirement that derivative works in some sense give back to the community they should use the GPL or AGPL.
If you scroll down, you'll see some of the tools (I assumed) he used.
If you go to one of his projects (Twitch), you can see what he used for it: https://theymadethat.com/projects/7da659d8-629f-5c10-9160-7a...
That in turn should show up in the main product profile, which results in credit being given like IMDB
https://theymadethat.com/things/wz7/twitchtv/show_built_with...
The problems are two fold:
1. It's more work to do than a normal resume since it's project-centric. Also unless you're constantly tracking this, does everyone remember all the libraries they're using? Probably not (There's still a lot of work needed on the UX front. It's not very optimized for mobile)
2. People have to start using it. (I have never marketed my IMDB for everything well enough) See #1
So this is some sort of middle ground, folks feel like there should be a more meaningful gesture than is required by the license without feeling like it should be put into the psychological category of compensation/market rate.
Not everyone is a fan of that requirement, which is why Unlicense, 0BSD, 1-clause BSD and Boost licenses were created.
Usually the sentiment I see expressed in these threads reads to me as: hey, it's not fair that this company is profiting on your (permissively licensed) work without sharing the profit.
But I think that is not the sentiment being expressed here, and rather it is the thing you said.
The top comment in this thread, the one I replied to, is basically "I'm happy for the guy, but why do people think Nintendo should/would contribute back?" It's the same GPL vs BSD discussion, just people aren't trying to rain on the individual's celebration.
See his "experiment" (https://github.com/feross/funding) and selling terminal ads during npm install (https://dev.to/adriansandu/npm-bans-terminal-ads-and-mozilla...)
Because there is a level above "doing the absolute minimum necessary" that is a nice-to-have, but not at all mandatory nor expected.
It seems like everyone is purposefully going out of their way to not understand that throwing him a freebee that's cheap compared to the cost of engineering time (e.g. a nintendo switch) would be a pleasant thing to do and a way to buy goodwill.
I disagree that it's "expected" that the company gives him anything, there's generally no expectation like that in OSS. BUT it'd be super-cool if they did give him a Switch!
Because they make big money with his work and he does not.
So sure, legally they do not owe him anything, but morally a material compensation would be adequate.
If the idea spreads of freely compensating OSS, then more OSS work could be done fulltime. Money still rules the world.
Also, yes, the Switch makes a lot of money, but if I had to assign a percentage of revenue that is attributable to feross' library, I think I would assign it exactly 0.00000%
How do you know? Did you followed internal developement of the switch?
"Since feross would materially gain from being gifted something from Nintendo, should feross give partial ownership of the Switch to the authors of the open source tools he used to build his library?"
Why not? Whats wrong with inviting them over for a gaming round, or sending parts of the money? Depends on the amount.
> Why not?
Nothing's wrong with that. But if the author doesn't do it, I won't call him an ungrateful asshole and berate him on twitter.
Ok, well, I didn't. And probably neither did most people on twitter. That being said, you probably know too, that even some lines can be very valuable, if they prevent crashing bugs. In either way, it is a value.
It just would be nice, if companies could find more ways, of giving back to OSS, if they use it.
The internet sentiment is, 'they' are exploiting the OS community - thats why the harsh reactions, even though maybe not justified in this case.
And it's possible that they aren't even directly using his code, and don't even really know about it beyond an automated system publishing the licenses. Due to the way licensing works, Nintendo could be using OSS library A that they shower their largess upon with free switches, but library A uses library B, which uses library C, which uses safe-buffer. Safe-buffer would still have to have their license published in that manner, but it isn't really clear that nintendo is exploiting that party. Hell, it could even be the case that the author's code is never actually executed on the switch, if for example it was bundled in but is part of a feature that is never called, because Nintendo wanted to use other parts of the same library that happened to include safe-buffer.
By the way, I just checked Nintendo's open source switch library, and there are at least 36,000 copyright notices present in the archive. That's a lot of free switches!
They don't make big money with his work. They make big money with their own work, and he delivered a very tiny gear in that. It's not like he made some genious unreplaceable part which is worth billions on it's own. It just happend to be there and fullfil a demand they had. They can acknowledge it and give him something extra, or just follow the lizense and mention what's neccessary. It's up to them and how much value his work has for them.
My opinion is that if we knew, fully understand and answered your questions we would have nearly ended all the past, current and future political debate.
Some people just always wanted more, especially those who are making more profits.
For everyone that thinks he should get a switch for his work - I wonder if they also think that the author should, say, lend out his switch to open source authors for a week or two for using the open source software that he almost certainly used in order to build his library which was included in the Switch.
It would be great press too.