I'll say it: why would they pay him if he's already doing the work for free from their PoV?
Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.
Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.
IMO I think foundational projects that every single bigtech uses like ffmpeg should get on this licence yesterday. They would start getting millions because it still would be way cheaper than making it themselves in their bloated cost structures.
See the comment of Manly read in this section. Once the threat of payment approaches, you can just switch to a free fork. A single person can't really win a trial against a big, well-funded company.
Might as well hire the actual expert.
But maybe that's fine. The world is different from 1980's. Different license approaches are needed and Richard Stallman is not God.
The model probably has the lib in it tbh.
(I’m not an accountant!)
Would be hilarious to bury a clause like “Modified MIT license — head of HR must publicly announce any employment application rejections of the maintainers while wearing a chicken suit).”
Companies usually have no problem paying for stuff that saves them money, but need to be forced to do so if there is a cheaper alternative. There is a very specific reason why I put the cost matching their own staffing costs, it's so the company will choose the easier and cheaper option vs. doing the more expensive option of hiring staff to make it themselves.
They can also get it even cheaper by hiring the maintainer at a sr or staff eng cost. You create the financial ammo so staff inside can do the right thing.
And these shenanigans are usually sidestepped with subsidary type of language that places like the EU uses for enforcing laws.
But that might be just my frustration from experiences.
To continue the devil's advocate: why bother with all of this, if the company doesn't have to and the OSS version is enough anyway?
I don't know about the author's approach to this matter, but if I would find out that a company is making a killing using my software and then that company would refuse to even give me an interview I'd probably stop loving doing what I do. Sure, the software is under MIT license and it was the author's choice to do so, but what's the point of doing it under such a license when you can't even count of it mattering in a resume? What's the point of providing free labor to a company with revenue in billions? If you look at the author's blogpost, the only benefit the author mentions is making the number of downloads go up and that's just pathetic.
I am reminded of an another, similar case with a library called "FluentAssertions". This library used to be free to use by anyone until the author changed the license and started charging money for commercial use. The author did that because he spend several year maintaining the library on his own time and dime and megacorpos like Microsoft wouldn't even bother to donate despite using it extensively. What happened afterwards was that the author got shat on by everyone on the internet for daring to ask for money. In the company I work for his library has been replaced with an another free fork at a incredibly fast pace. All that free labor and the author got dropped as soon as they fell out of line.
The worst thing is that it wouldn't probably take much to make the author of the library happy. Even if they weren't interested in hiring him they could still acknowledge him, talk to him a bit to maintain good relations, throw him a nice donation as a thank you and now it would be a nice, good PR story instead of an another reminder that corporations are just looking to squeeze out value out of all of us.
Exploiting the passion for free work is a trade that will keep happening as long as there are passionate inexperienced people.
Hackernews is hugely responsible for many of the ailments of this field in 21st century. Own it.
I'm not entirely sure that was intentional. On Reddit, it would be called 'brigading', and basically getting your corpo-techbros to -4 and flagkill posts.
If done fast enough, you only need 5 500+ karma accounts to sink a post.
Sometimes, I'll say something unpopular, but defensible. Its interesting to see the dramatic swings those contentious posts take.
Are you telling the management of this outfit never looked into this phenomena?
How about ageism? Mr. Paul Graham and personality cult asserting that anyone over 20 something is no longer viable for leading edge tech work?
We used to call these VCs "vulture capitalists" in the 90s. We geeks were so right about so many things in the 90s: We were right about GPL. We were right about VCs. We were right about surveillance tech. We were right about outsourcing ...
But alas, "corpo-techbros" empowered by thoughtless forum software courtesy of Paul Graham and company got into this mess.
To counter, I think that HN is being used as a testcase to shove techbro and VC ideology across all of tech. And secondly, its some of the most potent tech market research. Its a textsearch goldmine.
I believe YC knew what they were doing, and intentionally chose this course of action.
I'm guessing you're not in the VC or founder club. I only found about that https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
> Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's usernames show up in orange, which — although not an explicit benefit — does allow fellow YC founders to immediately identify one another in discussions.
Even with the significant bias here, I still read it. I also read lobsters as well, which is here minus techbro insanity.
Seems plausible. They certainly are not dummies. They just have a different 'value system'. So, yeah.
(Thanks for lobsters tip. til.)
You've stretched that analogy past the breaking point. Downvotes barely change your role and there's nowhere else to go up from there regardless of your posting quality. Peter Principle does not apply.
According to HN, it's literally impossible to use GPL software and any sentiment against corporations is communist brainwashing.
It's very sad, but the resigned and almost subservient tone of the author does not lead me to believe a lesson has been learned.
> I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop using enigo
Obviously, you've provided value to a company in a really in-demand area. It doesn't feel right to treat the contributors like this. Sadly, it seems that the companies have the power and the intent to just abuse and exploit
I don't have a solution. I am just expressing my frustration from the perceived injustice.
I wouldn't delete old versions even if I could though. My goal is to publish a rock solid library that everyone can depend on and build awesome projects with
A competitor could hire the OP instead, get them to work on improving the software for a few years. Giving the competitor a major head start.
Worst-case scenario, the tool they are building doesn't work out and Anthropic has a pretty good developer to put on other projects.
An FOSS project is rarely production ready that is really free as in beer considering TCO. Especially for a tech company.
If this wasn't available for free, they would gladly pay for a programmer to create it. But if it's already free, they can use it as a starting point. Maybe they'd need to internalize/extend it. But the option of paying for the work already done is gone.
Do this for each npm dependency and you're looking at huge savings.
If every company using a library chose the former, then every hour of development would be paid for (from the perspective of the maintainer) and the cost would be spread out across all its users.
You can use what is as is. Then you can ignore all of the other issues if they don't impact your bottom line.
Don't get me wrong, I like your corporate OSS financing model. But there seems to be not enough incentive for companies to use it. Why take ownership for a small cost, when you can use an imperfect thing with no cost?