Hacker News Reader

Comment by NKosmatos | Hacker News Reader

Try to look at it from another point of view. Marak is fed up of all these billion dollar companies (and other small projects) using his code, he has some financial problems and so he decides to teach them a lesson. I sympathize and for sure if I were responsible for a big company and I was using an open source component/project I would donate something. We all have to rethink of how the open source funding is supposed to work and have some Fortune 500 c9mpanies start giving back to people that deserve it.

View on HN

Like, I understand it. And he could easily have done something much more malicious, like running a ‘rm -rf /‘. This seems on the level of a very misplaced prank.

I feel like people (and especially corporations thst have freely used the library for years) are overreacting a bit.

This is just a warning signal that we depend on random packages too easily. The only thing standing between many products and disaster is the decency of maintainers.

Nobody wants to acknowledge that (me included) since it’ll mean my job becomes much more of a pain.

I think people overreact (or at least I overreact) because of two things:

1. A kind of "psychological contract" is in place between a package maintainer/creator and the developers using it and that is somewhere along the lines of "assuming good faith" or "good intentions" from the maintainer and giving back somekind of "kindness" to maintainer specially in cases of of some OSS (MIT, Apache, BSD-2/3 ...).

This maintainer broke this contract - the trust of its users. They are pissed and rightly so. He broke is because he also felt that another "psychological contract" was broken between himself and the market. So his users are pissed because they see this as retaliation from the maintainer to them without them doing anything to merit this.

2. Another aspect is that he could have gone multiple ways to try to get money from companies by pivoting his projects. But his action is an emotional response with a hint of political activism that caused damage also to developers who are not having the choice (they are not decision makers or not managing budgets) nor the desire to be part of this. So for them there is another breach of "contract" happening: using those libraries seems to have a hidden term "you will be used as collateral when needed in my fight against big companies" which they did not agreed and was not explicit.

The only contract that counts here is if they signed, you know, and actual written contract. With money changing hands, a consideration of services rendered for money paid.

No such thing was in place while money-rich corps got rich off his back. I can't blame him for getting fed up with this and reacting.

Maybe OSS projects should start with a different default license than MIT

There is no default license. You are the one to pick and choose and commit it to your repo.

faker and colors aren’t exactly high value libraries. They’re widely used but only because they’re easy to import and free. I think that’s part of the problem.

I concur.

The author of the packages wants to use the fact that there are so many downloads to justify their position that they should pay him. The only reason the downloads exist was because he gave it away free.

If the author had started by charging a license fee, they would have close to 0 downloads. Someone else would have made a library to wrap strings in ansi-escape characters and pull random values out of data packages assembled by the Perl community.

The author does seem to be having some sort of mental health crisis at the moment. I hope they get the help they need.

While I agree with your sentiment, he made the "mistake" of MIT licensing his work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com