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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

This kind of knowledge has historically been shared for free. We are not entitled to it, as much as the author is not entitled to compensation.

At the risk of being downvoted to oblivion, I’ll say this: asking for donations is great, complaining that people are “leeching” your CC-licensed content, not so much. If you don’t have the bandwidth to maintain a project, just stop. Humanity will be fine.

This move to monetize everything is a huge step backwards (or forwards into the abyss…).

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Meanwhile, Dwarf Fortress made a new release, is selling it for $30, and everyone is rushing just to give the developer $30 because they want to support them.

> have all those ppl been playing free DF for 25 years and just waiting for an opportunity to pay $30?

> Yes

* times 50 pages

https://steamcommunity.com/app/975370/discussions/0/37093075...

Something about selling tools to developers just brings out the worst of "bah, I could build that in a weekend so it's not worth anything so I'm not going to pay for it"-ness.

It is well over 100 pages now.

That is amazing!

The flipside would be if the author put it on steam, had barely any sales, and then started complaining about how people leeched on his work for 25 years.

It’s mind-blowing that the 8th wonder of humanity, the open-source software in general, which runs the entire world, reached other planets and has even taken off from them (the helicopter on Mars ran Linux), has been a giant cooperation and donated for free by its owners. It far outdid the previous wonders and yet, it’s immaterial.

It’s a stretch to call Linux donated imo. A ton of work is paid and the companies only “donate” because the license requires them too

The GPL doesn't require anyone to contribute back to the upstream project, only contribute forward to downstream users, who may or may not care about source code and even if they do, may or may not bother to publish the code they receive, and even if they do, they/others may or may not try to contribute that code back upstream. It is only a culture of contributing back upstream and more importantly the costs of forking vs merging that leads to upstream contributions. Of course the GPL and copyleft are a big part of forming that culture, but not all of it.

It's not only culture, it's also mutually beneficial, the cost of maintaining a forked version of the kernel is not worth it. Meanwhile working on a patch and publishing it upstream is relatively easy "fire-and-forget", the patch is there, other people will use it and contribute back.

Companies still have a ton of private code that never makes its way into the open source world.

I mentioned the forking cost too, my main point though is the license doesn't require people to upstream their stuff.

This move to monetize everything is a huge step backwards

The guy can't afford to replace his 10 year old laptop, meantime rents and profits are at an all-time high. Seems like there's a few segments missing in the virtuous circle.

Or it’s hyperbole and there are many reasons the guy has a 10 year old laptop. People donating a euro for a list of commands is unlikely when 10 euros gives them a billion hours a month on Netflix.

The marginal value of these commands is really, really low when you start comparing it to all the stuff that people could spend.

Most everyone has high rents and old laptops.

Author here. I don't expect people to pay me for anything. My main motivation was (and still is) to just give back, since I profit from free information and software created by others as well. I fully expect this temporary increase in traffic to net exactly what it has netted before: almost nothing. And you know what? I'm fine with that. Donations are not the reason this little project exists.

What I am is struggling to make ends meet for some time. A new laptop is near the bottom of my priorities right now. Money will run out around the beginning of February. It makes me sad to read cynical comments like this. That's all I have to say.

Thanks for putting the list together, the commands have really helped me.

I hope your fortune turns and you soon find a job.

The offputting thing to me was the faulty logic of 14% of people starred donated. That’s a phenomenal donation rate that’s unprecedented. So it’s like prefacing my work with “if money rained on my front yard” or something along those lines.

And I don’t like the discussion that guilts people who don’t donate. I donate to projects on GitHub. Not much and not to yours. But it’s something. But I contribute in other ways and would like to discourage nagging people (not by you as your preamble comment was pretty benign) who don’t donate.

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