Comment by bussierem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bussierem | Hacker News Reader

So he made a useful service, put it behind an extremely permissive license, another company tried it, copied what they wanted to copy, and then utilized the permissive license to use his service for the rest. Then, "Retool is offering this new service for free".

So let's review the title:

> Retool is reselling our API...

According to TFA, they are not selling it.

> ...without permission

Except that your MIT license is permission.

I noticed the CEO has shown up here to say he's looking into it. I genuinely feel bad for him. Imagine that conversation.

"Guys I hear we are using this open source project and people say we shouldn't"

"....yeah? It's open source. It has an MIT license. What's the issue?"

"Apparently that person didn't REALLY mean for it to be open source, and now a bunch of people on an internet forum are upset."

"Do any of them pay us?"

"A couple I think? Two said they might stop paying us."

"....I'm confused boss, what did we do wrong?"

---

Now imagine that conversation having to happen and this worry happening every time someone decided they want to use a FOSS library or API for their work.

Can't imagine why OSS is having trouble.

This comment refers to the submitted title: "Retool Is Reselling Our API Without Permission". We replaced that with the article's title, in keeping with the site guideline "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

(Since Retool is a YC co, I initially hesitated to do that because of the principle described here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... But since the submitted title doesn't appear anywhere in the OP, I ended up going with standard HN moderation in this case.)

Thank you for the clarification dang I hadn't checked again to see that the title changed. Appreciate the help!

I came to the same conclusions. I looked over the Retool website. There's no mention of faker.js anywhere as a product, service, etc. that they are offering to their customers or any hint that test tooling in general is a feature they pitch to their customers. It's a data integration tool with a slick UI and lots of nice integrations.

So, they are not Amazon blatantly ripping off some oss company, infringing on a brand name, and offering a me too service. This is a very simple case of a company using an oss library licensed to them under the MIT license in good faith. They even paid for it, which they are not required to do. Companies doing the right thing here is something positive and it should not be expected just received graciously.

Now as for OSS being hard to monetize; some of it is. Some of it does pretty well and some companies have raised hundreds of millions, IPOed or been around for many years selling, supporting, and providing OSS. Most OSS is not like that. By design OSS software is about taking low value commodities and doing a great job of them and providing it for free so we can all focus on adding value elsewhere and solving more valuable problems.

Retool are a great example of a company that figured out a way to add value that their customers are willing to pay for and investors are willing to back. They of course use OSS, just like just about any commercial entity developing software. They probably have numerous dependencies on all sorts of things. Name me a software company that does not do this. This is completely normal in our industry. There is absolutely nothing amoral about it. Faker.js is basically considering themselves more special than all the other packages Retool no doubt also depends on. Why?

Most OSS developers have no illusions or expectations of revenue. I know, because I'm one of them. It's my way of saying thank you for all the OSS I depend on myself. I actually once wrote a little Java library called inbot test fixtures, which is a very simple test data generator not unlike faker.js (in the small): https://github.com/jillesvangurp/inbot-testfixtures. A tiny amount of people got some value out of that over the years. Good for them. The original account for that is long gone (the startup failed) and I moved the code base to my private account and it's technically one of my less popular efforts. However, it's code I wrote because I needed it and I recognized it as non core, non differentiating for our product. So, I put it out there as OSS. The backbone for the library is actually somebody data provided by another github project. I actually reused the library in my latest startup and it saved me time not having to reinvent that wheel.

I've done that with other stuff over the years as well. My philosophy is that most software is low value and hard to monetize like that and therefore is best served as OSS so that you maximize its potential.

I find it interesting how in these cases lots of people are defending company x, because what they do is legal. Something can be legal and still a shitty thing to do. For example if you are running a food kitchen for the needy somewhere, you'd be pretty upset if some rich company (e.g. Olive garden) comes with a truck takes all the food and sells it in their restaurants. It might be perfectly legal, it's still shitty.

if you produced an infinite, free food duplicating machine, and ran a food kitchen with it, but also saw that Olive Gardens took some of the food, and resold it in their restaurants, would you be just as upset?

It doesn't stop the needy from having the food just because Olive Garden also benefited.

Ok so should Olive Garden be allowed to call the police if I go and take the food from their restaurant without paying? Because you just said they have an infinite supply of it.

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