Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

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Okay, there is more actually.

Marak develops this very useful tool and gives it away for free, receives praise but no money. After realising that there is no money in giving stuff for free with no further plan down the road, gets cranky as others are not giving Marak free services and don't accept applause as a payment method, says that someone needs to pay for it or take over the development. Declares that will no longer do free work for corporations[0] but corporations seems to be unimpressed that the free worker will no longer work.

Since no one seems to be interested to pay for work offered for free, Marak launches SaaS of the tool as fakercloud.com, which is a popular strategy and sometime can actually work.

Unfortunately, according to Marak[1], engineers from Retool copy the SaaS platform and launch it as a part of Retool. Marak realising what has happened offers the CEO of Retool to sell the fakercloud.com to them. The CEO ghosts Marak, maybe because doesn't want give evidence for a lawsuit or maybe doesn't see the point of purchasing a product that the internal engineers already build.

As a result, Marak gets angry and deletes everything and posts conspiracy theory memes and links everywhere. As this tool is a popular one and people depend on it, NPM suspends Marak's account and continues to provide lates working version that Marak gave them for free.

Honestly, I feel for Marak. What a talented engineer and romantic businessman.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032105

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211030075524/https://marak.com...

Very romantic: https://abc7ny.com/suspicious-package-queens-astoria-fire/64...

Just WOW! It's fascinating when you put a face on an online persona. Sooo, is He doing these things from Guantanamo or was the incident considered "no biggie"?

Charged with a misdemeanor, no data to show he was convicted. Or if he was, it might have been through a program that allowed the conviction to be wiped.

This man should be thankful he’s not in jail right now. For reasons unbeknownst he basically got a slap on the wrist. If he wasn’t caught who knows what may have happened.

My guess is that you're legally allowed to own all the different bomb-making pieces unless they can find any solid evidence you planned to commit harm with them. I wonder whether the court ordered a psych evaluation for him?

> receives praise but no money

Sort of. faker.js has an open collective [0] which receives some money each year. However, living off a single open source package - even one widely used like faker - is very difficult even in lower cost of living areas.

[0]: https://opencollective.com/fakerjs

Nobody has an issue if an unpaid open source developer doesn't feel like developing anymore. The issue here is that he tried to take back what was already out there.

In the old days that wasn't a problem - when you released some OSS, you put a tarball somewhere and told people to download it. Some of those people were redistributors (mostly Linux distros or BSDs, but also CD vendors, people running FTP sites of neat things, etc.). Many of those redistributors, in turn, got their software to people from further redistributors (mirrors, people burning CDs and passing them around, etc. - up to even a decade ago I was both giving and receiving Ubuntu CDs). More people got your software from a redistributor than directly from you.

If you tried to "un-release" some OSS, not only would that not work, it would be abundantly clear to you that it wouldn't, and moreover that would be clear to you well before you even published the first version, so you wouldn't feel like you were tricked or didn't have the chance to think this through.

With the new world of GitHub and NPM and such and especially tools like Go that pull directly from GitHub, the role of the distributor is basically n more than the role of GeoCities: they provide hosting for you, but it's in your account. So you can take things out of GitHub and NPM just as easily as you can un-publish a web page. (In fact an analogy could be made here to blogs, where you can un-publish, vs. newsgroups/mailing lists, where you can't.) There could be mirrors, certainly, but there aren't necessarily mirrors, and the social norms on both ends are against them: you aren't explicitly asking people to mirror your code and distribute it independently from you, and other people may feel that it is rude/inappropriate to continue to distribute code that you've chosen to stop distributing.

There are certainly very strong advantages in scale of participation (and in the loss of a certain gatekeeping that could not scale) in this new world, but it does seem like it would be good to recapture this one feature of the old world.

It's a bit similar to your email address not only being just a way to send you email, but also effectively your identity.

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