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Comment by tikotus | Hacker News Reader

I used to work at Rovio (the creator of Angry Birds). Everyone was telling the story of a talk given by Peter Vesterbacka, the head of marketing. When it was time for questions, a man from the audience asked what physics engine the game uses. Vesterbacka gives the correct answer, Box2D, to which the person replied with another question. "Why isn't it mentioned in the credits? And by the way, I'm Erin Catto, the creator of Box2D." To this Vesterbacka replied "Come talk to me after the show". Maybe that's when Erin was given the hoodie? Also, his name was soon added to the credits.

But one thing amazed us all. It was impressive that the marketing guy knew which physics engine was used!

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>But one thing amazed us all. It was impressive that the marketing guy knew which physics engine was used!

Yeah that was my immediate take away.

To the larger point, do you know if Rovio did support/pay Eric in any other way than that hoodie?

Angry Birds generated $500M [0], supposedly.

I would also not be surprised if the Rovio developers, designers, testers, etc. who worked on this game did not get a share of that $500M pie - I actually assume they didn't.

But still, you know. Dare I say it - what about "fairness"? :-)

[0] https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/02/28/angry-birds-2-reven...

I find it odd how we frame fairness in regards to open source software. He licensed his software as MIT. It says anyone can you use it without owing the author anything. So how is it unfair?

To be clear, I think that open source maintainers deserve much more, but I don't understand why we rarely inspect the licenses as the source of the problem.

Well there's this little pesky thing in the MIT license:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

That's what he was asking for, a mention in the credits.

He got his name in the credits. The question was if he is owed anything else. The contract he created says he was not. I’m simply suggesting he might need a different contract.

Only if he wants to force something different. Which it seems he does not.

I bet if you caught a homerun ball in a baseball game, you wouldn't give it to the kid next to you because "I don't owe the kid anything".

Depends on what the little kid intends to do with it. A lot of them collect MLB baseballs to sell them for cash.

> A lot of them collect MLB baseballs to sell them for cash.

You have evidence of this? Because it would be my first guess that the parent coerces their child to sell the ball.

At least a dozen times this season I've personally witnessed small kids talking about what they could buy with the money they would get from selling a foul ball that someone gave to them (out of guilt or public pressure) while their parents asked if they wouldn't rather keep it for the memories.

However, my home team is the Dodgers, so the experience is probably different in other markets where the local team sucks and nobody cares about the players (like the Anaheim Angels, where fans are more likely to throw the ball back onto the field than keep them).

If the comment above is correct, he was only added to the credits after he had to ask for it after the fact.

So the ONLY thing the license asked for is to be named and that was supposedly violated. So a multi million dollar company can just violate a generous license and then after a fact cling to this exact license while arguing to not pay a single cent more than the license asked for. Alright...

But only after $$ was made.

It’s not a contract, a contract requires an exchange of value both ways.

Since he eventually got the credit, your unfairness argument better build entirely on the damage the creator suffered by the delay of his credit.

If I made 500M$ using an Open Source library and didn’t send at least 1M$ to the author, I would be an objectively bad person.

I find this whole conversation baffling. Licenses and contracts are not a replacement for being a decent person.

Sure, but contracts is the remedy society has developed to the problem that there are lots of indecent people around (not to mention that reasonable persons can disagree without being unreasonable).

You can't have a good contract with bad people.

Only if you can afford to sue

I find it baffling in the other direction. The whole point of licensing is to ensure you’re a decent person.

If you’re creating something new and you dare try to copy anything without a license, the pushback is unanimous and universal: everyone agrees you’re a bad person for even thinking of it.

This is the same argument in the opposite direction. By fulfilling the terms of a license, you’re ensuring you play by the rules. In fact, licenses are the only real protection that open source maintainers have.

So why diss on someone for following the license terms? This whole moralizing and tut-tutting is a weird branch of the convo.

> So why diss on someone for following the license terms?

you're being deliberately obtuse now. this has been explained clearly several times in this thread.

That’s a fine perspective, but the whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes. The license could easily say “if you make more than $500M, you must pay me $1M”. Why is that not an acceptable solution here?

An interesting approach is the dual GPL and commercial license. This is used for example by the CGAL geometry library [1]. In this case, a user of the library has the choice of either paying for the library, or open sourcing the code of their software.

[1]: https://doc.cgal.org/latest/Manual/license.html

Have you ever taken part in a legal dispute? The "whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes" sounds like someone who has not.

The easiest, most "acceptable solution" is to obviously throw the oss maintainer who made your hundreds of millions possible a bone. It's not that complicated. Why you find this such an odd notion I find rather strange.

I find it strange you’re arguing for something beyond the licensing terms. Imagine if companies were run that way. "Hey, we did an especially good job mowing your lawn, so please pay us double. You have a rich house, you can afford it. Oh and if you don’t pay us, you’re a bad person and should feel bad."

This is exactly the same argument: you’re saying the open source maintainer who knowingly released their code as open source (and got famous for it being open source) should be paid way more than they asked for ($0) based on vibes. Society doesn’t work that way. Companies don’t work that way. And it’s baffling people are saying open source should work that way. He already got the fame and free publicity from being the maker of Box2D, which he wouldn’t have gotten unless he released it for free. You can’t get the major benefits of that and then ask for a million dollars because "kindness".

If you want to be professional, keep it professional. Otherwise everyone here saying that the company should feel bad are fooling themselves. You’re owed what you ask for.

Tipping culture has obscured this somewhat. You’re supposed to give more money if they do a really good job. But it’s that way so that the business can pay employees less money. Tipping, like identity theft, is one of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time: you’re considered a bad person if you don’t tip, and that it’s your fault if your bank fails to verify your identity. Both of these are bogus.

I tip, because 15% is the normalized rate. But it shouldn’t be our problem. It’s the company’s problem to pay their employees. And it shouldn’t be the business’s problem that they made a lot of money using something that was knowingly given away for $0.

He didn’t ask for it, as far as I can tell. It looks like a Rovio customer asked how they treat downstream partners. I think that’s allowed under capitalism.

Be that as it may, plenty of engineers don’t understand the full ramifications of their open source license choice. Undoubtedly some, if not many, regret it afterwards. Companies change the terms or revoke licenses all the time. But, the dumb, naive engineer that gave their work away didn’t pay a lawyer to advise how to best give their work away, so screw ‘em.

If I made a boatload of money on the back of someone else’s work, I’d reward them. You wouldn’t. Neither one of us is legally required to. I’m not fond of taking advantage of people that don’t realize their worth. And I think the whole open source thing works best giving and taking, whether that’s code, money, or time.

But, this cutthroat approach to open source also hasn’t always been the societal norm. IBM and others made sizable donations to groups like the Apache Software Foundation back in the 90s and 00s and were more or less expected to do so. It seemed to me more a case of both sides agreeing a bunch of money could be spent on lawyers to iron out whatever terms or we could keep the licensing simple and have a gentlemen’s agreement on how to conduct ourselves. I’ve never heard of the Box2D guy so I hope that fame was worth something. It sounds a lot like being paid in exposure.

To your point, I don’t know how to codify a “leave a penny, take a penny” approach to open source and really don’t have the inclination to spend either the time or the money on a lawyer to figure that out. So, nowadays I just don’t release open source code anymore or, if I do, it’s AGPL just so I can protect my interests. I don’t think I’m alone in this. The camaraderie aspect of it has been supplanted by maximum value extraction and I don’t think that’s really sustainable. But between LLMs and an endless source of naive optimists, maybe this is fine.

> Imagine if companies were run that way

oh no, won't someone think of the companies

You sound cheap and a little scroogey. I’d buy you a drink if we were at a bar, help you relax a bit :)

"Society doesn't work that way" from the guy who says "the whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes".

Ok buddy. Why is tipping the analogous model? Do the economics fit at all? Why is it tipping that is teaching us about the economics of oss? I also don't give the grocery store extra money just for "kindness". Why not go with that one? You think an oss maintainer reflecting on someone making hundreds of millions with their work is analogous to a server waiting to see what you write down on the check? Is that it? Who is the business (not) paying the server in this case? The oss maintainer is both the emotionally manipulative server and the benefiting business owner? Because "exposure"? Or are you saying they are stupid for not acting more like a business in the first place, meaning the two should become the one? Why are you putting a human in front of me and making me come to some sort of pseudo-moral judgement? What does my contract say? Is that your point?

I just have to level with you and say your argument is deeply unimpressive. You also repeat maxims like "you're owed what you ask for" as if this is self evident. Then you call other people fools and say what other people can and can't do, all from this position of supposed hard-nosed knowledge of the the real world and how things work when it's pretty clear you have no idea what you're talking about. Trying to go from grandstanding about tipping culture (go off) to some self evident law about how humans should share rewards in something like oss is not obvious, despite your brilliant legal and economic insights.

And feeling bad is not something you can legalize your way out of. Another comment already touched on this. You don't seem to understand the point being made. No one is claiming there is a legal obligation or there was some company to company transaction. You know not everything in life is a contract, right? Morals and law are not the same. Your inability to acknowledge this basic fact feels pretty antisocial to me. I'm not really impressed by your shallow attempt at diagnosing society, or whatever your move from tipping to identity theft was supposed to prove... it seems to me underlying your replies is a resistance to feeling guilt. Not to psychoanalyze you but frankly, the degree to which you don't seem to understand how simple this is and instead seem to think this is some kind of emotional scam (why are you making me feel bad about giving you pennies on the dollar when the contract said it was free) makes me, at the risk of violating the HN equivalent of the Goldwater rule, simply wonder who hurt you.

Fair, to be honest.

But you probably depend on over 500 open source libraries and tools, mostly ones you're not aware of. (Do you ever use a linux VM to run or just develop your stuff? Ever use git or curl etc? Did you know that tools and components in turn use other open-source libraries that you didn't pay for?) The main reason you use such things is so that you don't have to worry about this question.

Because there’s a clear mismatch between the value generated from Box2d vs the value the creator receives, and that’s common for open-source in general.

It would be common decency to donate even a small portion of that $500 million, even if the license technically doesn’t require it.

But if this expectation really were very common, what would be the harm of putting it in a licence?

MIT is simple, open, and common which is a big benefit for indie projects, small studios, and anyone with limited legal resources.

It means there’s lots of info on the internet explaining how to use the license and they can be relatively certain they won’t accidentally fall into some legal trap or misinterpret the license. It also means there’s legal precedent around the license.

All that to say, custom licenses are actually a big issue for small players.

You seem to be confusing what is legally/contractually required with what is fair. Fairness, in general, isn't defined by law or contracts, although some laws try to codify it.

I don’t think this is about fairness so much as a wish that developers would look out for their own self interest just a tiny bit.

We all get the full-court open source brainwashing during our early years of learning about programming, so it’s hard to ever step back and look at creating something from any other lens than “I should release this as open source”.

That’s the default, and anything less might get you grumped at by “the community”, so it’s the safest option.

But if your thing can be picked up by a megacorp and used as the basis for their $100M product, it might be in your best interest to carve yourself out a little clause that lets you capture some of that.

I think box2d was zlib licensed at the point angry birds was made. Not that the sentiment changes.

Box2d is open source. For better or for worse, Rovio are entitled to use it.

I don't know enough to give an answer. But I also wonder if Unity, using Box2D to empower games generating billions, paid him anything.

Personally, I define fairness as being able to use a piece of code however the license permitted. "Kindness" might be a better word.

I think you’re confusing something being permissible with something being fair

> I would also not be surprised if the [staff] on this game did not get a share of that $500M pie

That's almost certainly the case, yes. Anything like royalties / residuals is pretty much unheard of in gamedev. You do the work, you do the crunch, you don't talk about conditions, you don't talk about pay, you are actively hostile towards the 'U' word, your boss _________ ____ __ _____. For your service, you get the chance to be in the credits, provided your service continues after going "gold"[0], of course. Then you get laid off which is actually a win because you get to leave the company without getting blacklisted. Please forgive the gentle hyperbole, it's illustrative.

The situation may have improved (slightly)[1] with ~actors as SAG-AFTRA was a growing influence in the industry some years ago. I'm a bit out of the loop on that side of things, though.

[0] not that anyone ships after going gold anymore

[1] improved slightly relative to "I'm the voice of Niko Bellic and I got paid in Famista cassettes" -- no this is not a true story, I'm actually not even a voice actor.

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