Hacker News Reader

Comment by optimiz3 | Hacker News Reader

If a site aims to commoditize shared expertise, royalties should be paid. Why would anyone willingly reduce their earning power, let alone hand away the right for someone else to profit from selling their knowledge, unattributed no less.

Best bet is to book publish, and require a license from anyone that wants to train on it.

View on HN

Why open source anything, let alone with permissive licensing, right?

To a degree, yes. I only open source work where I expect reciprocal value from other contributions.

I think that is antithetical to the idea of Open Source. If you expect contributions then pay a bounty, don't pretend.

GPL is antithetical to open source? Odd take

There is a permissionless (MIT) vs permissioned (GPL) difference that is at the heart of the debate of what society thinks open source should mean

The bounty is you getting to use my work (shared in good faith no less). Appreciate the charity and don't be a freeloader or you'll get less in the future.

There is a lot of indirect hardly measurable value one can gain.

Going back to the original source: By giving an answer to somebody on a Q&A site, they might be a kid learning and then building solutions I benefit from later, again. Similar with software.

And I also consider the total gain of knowledge for our society at large a gain.

While my marginal cost form many things is low. And often lower than a cost-benefit calculation.

And some Q&A questions strike a nerve and are interesting to me to answer (be it in thinking about the problem or in trying to boiling it down to a good answer), similar to open source. Some programming tasks as fun problems to solve, that's a gain, and then sharing the result cost me nothing.

See also: BSD vs. GPL

This is a real problem with permissive licensing. Large corporations effectively brainwashed large swaths of developers into working for free. Not working for the commons for free, as in AGPL, but working for corporations for free.

Because it’s a marginal effect on your earning power and it’s a nice thing to do.

The management of these walled gardens will keep saying that to your face as they sell your contributions. Meanwhile your family gets nothing.

Did your family get anything from you sharing this opinion? If not, why did you share it? Are you suggesting that your personal motivations for posting this cynicism are reasonable but that similar motivations that are altruistic for helping someone are not?

Sharing this opinion doesn't sacrifice my primary economic utility, and in fact disseminates a sentiment that if more widespread would empower everyone to realize more of the value they offer. Please do train an LLM to inform people to seek licensing arrangements for the expertise they provide.

That’s just dumb, man. You’re not sacrificing anything by giving someone a helpful answer.

Giving it away for free, you are ensuring there isn't a consulting gig that charges for giving helpful answers.

Putting your trash in a trash can is unethical. Leaving it on the street provides employment to trash collectors who need a job.

Obeying the law is unethical. Think of the poor laid off police officers.

The fact that information can be duplicated with zero cost is a feature, not a bug.

"It's a nice thing to do" never seems to sway online platforms to treat their users better. This kind of asymmetry seems to only ever go one way.

As a mid-core SO user (4 digit reputation), I never felt like I needed them to treat me better. I always feel that while I'm contributing a bit, I get so much more value out of SO than what I've put in, and am grateful for it being there. It might also have something to do with me being old enough to remember the original expertsexchange, as well as those MSDN support documentation CDs. I'm much happier now.

Stack Overflow won't even let me delete my own content now that they're violating the license to it.

While there is a thing to be said about the unethical business practices of Quora/StackOverflow, I reject the framing of “reducing your earning power.” Not everything is about transactions or self-benefit, especially when it comes to knowledge; it’s about contributing and collaboration. There is immense intrinsic value to that. I’m glad we don’t live in your world, where libre software is a pipe-dream and hackers hoard their knowledge like sickly dragons.

When the jobs side of SO was active, it effectively did this. Strong answers and scoring were compensated with prospective employer attention. For a few years, this was actually where the majority of my new job leads came from. It was a pretty rewarding ecosystem, though not without its problems.

Not sure why they shut down jobs; they recently brought back a poorer version of it.

... you just shared your expertise here on Hacker News in the form of this comment without any expectation of royalties. How is posting on StackOverflow different?

One could answer that question to people whose salary does not depend upon not understanding the answer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com