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Comment by Crazyontap | Hacker News Reader

Looks like this hasn't happened to him for the first time either. First page results for faker.js show how he has been ripped off before too(1). Really sad how big companies abuse OSS.

(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/jquo97/fakerjs_...

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He needs to figure out if he wants to be paid or not. Offering a free product and support and then complaining people don’t pay you is honestly fucking weird.

He has a paid product, fakercloud.com. Retool seems to be using or at least linking to it without permission.

You’re assuming things he didn’t say. He didn’t investigate that in depth. All we saw is the hosted images. Which is wrong, but most likely a mistake done by the devs charged with copying him.

And you’re being incredibly charitable to Retool, who haven’t even said their side of the story. Those URLs don’t create themselves. It looks to be using a hash of some sort, which means it needs to be something generating them, it’s not just them appending a hash to https://fakercloud.com. And even if it were, why use fakercloud, a paid service that you don’t subscribe to, and not your own? In either case, your original complaint is that the author can’t decide between working for free or paid. It’s clear that isn’t the case considering, as I pointed out, they have a cloud service that’s paid. They clearly have figured out some way to be paid for their work.

Now you’re assuming even more he didn’t say.

And I’m not charitable to retool. They’re opportunists. But they were provided with a screaming opportunity here.

It’s like getting naked, rubbing some condiments on yourself, going to the woods and screaming EAT ME. Eventually something will start chewing on you, and then you start whining about how unfair life is? Please.

Note that Retool already has a $500/mo donation to faker.js via Open Collective.

Getting paid and complaining you work for free is even more weird.

This is a rounding error amount of money in the US tech world. The real question is, does Retool’s usage fall within the terms of service?

Retool operates within their own budget, not with the budget of the US tech world.

How many other OSS libraries are they using? If Retool should get 10x that amount, how much should they be paying out to every other library author that published an open source/free-as-in-freedom library?

I'm sure Retool can afford to pay for their use of Faker, but this divide between "the poor individual" and "the rich with infinite money" that has become culturally accepted in society is pulling us farther and farther away from truth.

Can't blame Retool for deciding $500 is adequate, when the author's advertised price for Faker is $0.

It's like something out of Curb Your Enthusiasm: "I don't want money" means "I want money". And "anything helps" means "actually anything below UNSPECIFIED AMOUNT is insulting". Like, how the F do you deal with such people? It's just bait and switch blackmail.

It’s debatable whether generating links that point to your cdn is you using a service. It’s definitely not desirable, but also they’re just links.

This is probably retool using faker assets for testing and forgetting this in production.

He should have licensed it under AGPL, or chosen a non-free license. His problem was wanting the benefits of open-sourcing his code without wanting the detriments. That said, Retool using images hosted from his own site is pretty scummy.

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