Individual contributors in large companies, especially, would want their companies to fund FOSS projects they use. But approval processes are generally extremely complicated and there's nothing to gain internally by doing it. And we're talking about money that these corporations spend each millisecond. They barely need approvals for many other activities costing 10x, 100x in other domains.
In theory, this was enforced by copyleft requiring derivative works to also be free software. In practice, companies use software with permissible licenses instead because then they can reap the benefits without any requirement to pay it forward.
> If you’re expecting to get paid for it, it’s not FOSS.
Being paid for your time has nothing to do with whether your source code is public or what freedoms users have when using your software. Conflating free software with volunteer labor is exactly what leads to situations like this one, where the author's business based on faker got copied wholesale by a competitor who simply ignored their attempts to reach out.
> Deciding you can’t maintain a project anymore is fine, but pulling it out from under the people that are using it is incredibly anti-FOSS.
The mechanisms that allow a rug-pull are entirely choices made by the users of the libraries for their own convenience; the author did everything needed for you to download a working copy and use it in perpetuity. It's your fault for choosing to rely on NPM, choosing to not cache your dependencies, and choosing not to pin your dependencies.
If you want to fix this, stop contributing to permissively-licensed software. If you have a change you want to make, make or find a GPL fork of it and contribute it to that instead.
- They're contributing while at work and work only allows permissive licenses - They're familiar with permissive libraries because of the previous point - Permissive licenses are perceived as simpler - They've been pushed away from the free software movement by the FSF/Stallman/Linus - They don't think copyleft is the right form of enforcement
The OP is also attempting to use a proven failure of a business model, and then throwing a tantrum when it fails. Sure he’s within his rights to do so, but he has no moral high ground here, and I don’t think he’s entitled to any sympathy for adopting a business model that everybody knows for sure doesn’t work.
> it stops being yours, but you benefit from having a huge number of people improve it for you
It stops being yours, but somehow everyone who works on it can say they're helping you. This isn't fair. You don't have to pay for it, but fixing and adding features to the software that you use to make a living can't be counted as charity work.
But what happened here is that free/open source software doesn't have a consistent stance on paying maintainers or contributors, and this author feels that it's unfair and (potentially in the midst of other personal issues, it seems?) took advantage of a problem with how the ecosystem pulls in dependencies to complain about it.
As a matter of practicality, commercial entities using a maintainers' work should donate to maintainers to incentive them to, well, at least not go rogue, or to be on their good side when they rogue. Companies pay their employees to incentive them to function in the interests of the company. While this isn't fool-proof (principal-agent problem), it lowers the odds of a pissed off employee having the will/self-righteous fury to pursue something more aggressive than resigning in a huff.
FOSS is licensing, not religion. Rug-pulling a project from people who are enjoying using it isn't "anti-FOSS" IMO. This may not apply to you, but for all the contrast that OSS people project between their pragmatism and Free Software people being insane religious zealots on a jihad against money, OSS advocates seem to imbue a lot of flaky new agey spiritism into what FOSS is or isn't.
Why should this one developer collect payment but not everyone else who contributed it?
Regardless, it’s ridiculous to give something away openly under a permissive license and then later get angry when people use it exactly as you license it.
Doing your best to live in a bad system does not invalidate the complaints you have about that system.
That's the goal. Or at least one goal. But you can't just press a button and do that.
Being in charge of and an expert on open source software can be a way get people to buy your labor, but it's much harder than it should be. Instead many companies will demand you work for free, because it's open source!
Also trying to do something good for the world shouldn't make it so hard to make money. The companies get value but don't want to pay even a pittance.
It's hard to get paid when you decide to give your work away. If only there was some way a person could enter into a contract in order to guarantee payment in exchange for their work. What a radical idea...
2. You shouldn't have to take the option that hurts everyone else just to get paid.
Exactly, no one said _only_ the lead maintainer should be compensated. _All_ of the labor, not just the labor that happens to have a day job that benefits from it, should be compensated. That includes non-coding labor like support or community management, too.
The maintainer wants to have their cake and eat it too - they likely believe in FOSS for moral reasons yet consider it immoral when companies take their software and use it freely under the terms offered.
If you want people to pay you for your work, don't give it away for free. If you give it away for free, don't have a temper tantrum if someone gets rich off of your work without compensating you, because those were the rules you chose to play under.
Point is, maybe 10 people. And that’s if you like ramen.
Moderately skilled it engineers other of backgrounds and devs can make much more than $200k, just go check levels.fyi
To the parent comments point
> It's a bit wild that the sum total money spent on salaries for engineers handling potential problems stemming from this or defending against the possibility in the future could probably have covered paying the maintainer a living wage many times over.
The collective effort across numerous companies is much more than just $200k and you can bet your butt on that.
Even in America outside of the coasts and outside of FAANG, making $140-$150+ as a senior developer is very good (and compared to almost all other industries is absurd) - salary.com which doesn't just rely on self-reported info as levels does reports the median salary + bonus for senior software engineers as $120k
https://www.salary.com/tools/salary-calculator/senior-softwa...
Outside of the US, even in more expensive places in the EU, even the equivalent of $100k for a super senior lead architect would be Very Good - I don't know a single SWE in the midwest in the US - including senior embedded systems engineers working on medical devices, senior firmware devs working on networking equipment, or any web engineer that makes more than $175k and I know plenty of Very Good senior full-stack web devs that make $125-$150
$125k a year is still a top of the top salary in the US, so don't cry for them tho
That's why the number they used for a living wage is so low too.
Dumb comments saying software engineers make 100x a living wage (as if this would be a bad thing) are the flavor du jour. It’s hard not to respond in kind.
But thank you, for what it’s worth. I remember you from 2010. It was quite a time.