I use his work, but for me the situation is more complicated my prior experiences with the author.
He's been making similar complaints about his lack of renumeration for quite a while. In an older GitHub where he requested contributions, I pointed out that he had barely worked on the project for many months (at that time), and not published a new version to npm in years[1], despite making a $600 withdrawal from his Open Collective fund in June 2018 with the explicit purpose of releasing v5[2].
In the thread, I suggested that I and others might be willing to contribute, but I wanted more certainty on what exactly my contribution would be paying for. As I saw it, at that point he had a number of regular donors who were essentially paying him to do nothing.
He responded very angrily, saying nobody had any right to question his actions or to expect anything from him, even if they were paying him. He then deleted my comment entirely and banned me from commenting further. This interaction didn't exactly leave me with a strong desire to contribute. I think he's a rather volatile individual and the community would indeed be better off forking this project than indulging his sense of grievance.
You might see that as “volatile”, but I think I can see what he’s getting at. A charitable reading of his whole stance:
• We can enter into a formal contract where I actually do owe you work-on-this-project in exchange for pay;
• but without such a contract, donations to me are just that — donations — and don’t influence my work;
• but this is an open-source project, so you’re free to put whatever work you like into it, and keep/use/share the results (in your own space, that I don’t have to referee.)
• I’ll just be over here, doing what I want, unless/until someone makes a contract with me to do what they want. (Which, of course, they’re not obligated to do; they could just as well hire someone else to fork and maintain the project, rather than hiring me. That’s their choice.)
• So, in short, you’re not the boss of me; unless you’re literally my boss. (A patron is not a boss.)
Yeah, bringing money into free software equation complicates things.
It comes down to donors expecting something back for their donation, while authors expect something back for all the effort they put so far into the project that is obviously useful to other people.
For my open source project I made a hard decision not take any money. This curbs expectations and puts users at disadvantage, but lets me take as much time off as I want and I sleep better.
I've participated in a project using Bountysource some years ago; in total I received something on the order of 1500-2000 $. Which is nice. I assume a lot of people did a lot more work than I did back then and never saw any money for it. So I probably have no right to complain or lament about these transactions in any way. But, in a way, it is very hard to not think about dollar per time, especially with Bountysource being attached to solving specific issues. I believe this contributed to my mentality souring over time, because in the back of my head I never got rid of the idea that I'm sort-of at work here, but at about 2 $/hr average wage. I stopped contributing to that project completely after about just two years or so.
For most people, the funding mechanisms on the Internet pretty much all carry an expectation that they're to support ongoing work that will be used to either explicitly deliver a product, as with Kickstarter, or is to fund an artist's/coder's/etc. ongoing work. Not many people are making donations based on past effort.
I sold a (non-open source) shareware product way back when. Money definitely provided the incentive to put more work into it than I otherwise would have. On the other hand, it made me treat it as a business, albeit a part-time one.
This feels like a semantic non-sequitur. Maybe that's actually a great example of core of the problem at hand!
You're trying to argue a conclusion based on the specific word "donor", but many of these "donors" (or in this thread's case potential "donor") don't see themselves that way; they are not interested in "donating" with no strings, it seems like they are more interested in "patronage" or some sort of "sponsoring", where their money is not no-strings, but instead conditional on some specific threshold of level/quality of support/service.
Perhaps we just need a bit richer vocabulary for these discussions; if the project author is only interested in unconditional donations, that's their prerogative, and you're free to fork or fund accordingly. But also recognize that at the margin, "donate with no strings" is a much tougher sell for enterprises than "patronage will buy you X quality of service".
So if you're actually making an effort to turn an open-source project into revenue, I think you'll probably need to listen to your potential customers/patrons a bit more and give them the assurances they are looking for. Again, any open source author is free to do as they please! But as the GP notes, bringing money into the situation complicates things, and I don't think it's reasonable or rational to expect companies to start throwing donations your way without listening to what they want to get in return.
By my understanding, in the US, if you solicit donations and say you will do something specific with them (e.g., use them to pay yourself to work on a project), then those aren't really donations. They're payment for a service. You may not think that you entered into a contract with the "donors" by accepting the "donations," but you did. You made an offer to perform an action in exchange for money and someone accepted that offer by paying you. That's a contract and anyone who donated could take you to court to get the money back.
I do not think he 'deserves' to get paid. It is nice if he gets paid, but I dont even see a moral obligation (not speaking of legal). I mean the idea of gpl2 (at least from linus and my perspective) is nicely laid out here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU
Paraphrasing:'I give you my sourcecode and if you change it and give the software away, please give me the changes'.
For MIT license (which Marak choose) (this is not in the video link), it is more like: 'please use this for whichever cause you like, I dont even expect software changes back'.
Everyone deserves to get paid (in the sense of moral desert; i.e. people "deserve" human rights.) You don't have a personal obligation to pay them, though.
Solving that discrepancy isn't going to be done in an HN comment; it's the Great Work of capitalist statecraft.
I agree he deserves to get paid like everybody else, but not because of this work he did. Unfortunately not all societies do that, so uually the common route to get paid is to get (a) work (contract), somebody is willing to pay for.
I believe prison laborers deserve to be paid minimum wage, despite their convictions and despite their inability to negotiate. Additionally minimum wage should be raised to a living wage.
You’re taking an overly reductionist view, incompatible with things like “equal pay for equal work.” He definitely deserves to get paid for his work, and it’s obviously a matter of by whom, and he’s fed up with giant corporations using his stuff despite being able to pay him, and he’s totally in the right even if he’s insert-some-undesirable-here.
I agree with the other commenter that "deserves" is a strong word.
If you want to sell something for money, you put a price on it. And people decide to buy it or not.
If you give it away for free, going back after the fact and asking for a donation is fine. But I don't think it's required. And it doesn't make people who choose not to donate bad in any way.
He should probably figure out his next business and get to working on that. Start a business, sell a thing, profit.
Having been on both sides of that pay discrepancy, I have come to the conclusion that most of our economic theory about the nature of business and competition is bullshit. I now see corporations as social organizations which exist to keep educated people fed and controlled, everything else is secondary. The sums are big because the money has to get divvied up amongst everyone, even if the work involved is just changing a hex value by the lowest paid and probably most technically skilled person in the network.
Yep, that money has to pay for not only the developer "doing the work", but all the overhead: the product managers, QA, release/deployment... then redo of work because someone used the wrong shade of blue.
He was co founder of Nodejitsu, the company who raised kickstarter funding for NPM, the same time NPM raised money from investors . There was a legal conflict about who owns NPM, they didnt refund or make a statement the money they raised for a project they don't own. That Kickstarter campaign was a scam and they got away with it.
He's been making similar complaints about his lack of renumeration for quite a while. In an older GitHub where he requested contributions, I pointed out that he had barely worked on the project for many months (at that time), and not published a new version to npm in years[1], despite making a $600 withdrawal from his Open Collective fund in June 2018 with the explicit purpose of releasing v5[2].
In the thread, I suggested that I and others might be willing to contribute, but I wanted more certainty on what exactly my contribution would be paying for. As I saw it, at that point he had a number of regular donors who were essentially paying him to do nothing.
He responded very angrily, saying nobody had any right to question his actions or to expect anything from him, even if they were paying him. He then deleted my comment entirely and banned me from commenting further. This interaction didn't exactly leave me with a strong desire to contribute. I think he's a rather volatile individual and the community would indeed be better off forking this project than indulging his sense of grievance.
[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker.js [2] https://opencollective.com/fakerjs/expenses/3972