Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?
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TIL of somebody else going "it would be great if people actually got reminded that I'd like to earn some money for all my effort".
So apparently the developer inserted some (initially obfuscated) code which would grab information about the current user, hash it and then during a build make an HTTP request to determine if said user is a sponsor, and at times it would actually make the build slower on a developer machine:
People were obviously unamused to the point that a bunch of Github comments piled up.
The developer doubled down on his actions until it turned out that MacOS X builds were crashing due to some Windows-specific code in the sponsor detection routines. However, he keeps defending his actions and stays on the lookout for different monetization schemes, currently one involving "bug bounties".
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It’s still stupid, still indefensible but people do deserve to get paid for their work even if they’re socialistic enough to want to give away the cool thing they made.
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There's Tesla logo on your hat. Your argument is invalid.
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
It’s still stupid, still indefensible but people do deserve to get paid for their work even if they’re socialistic enough to want to give away the cool thing they made.
I don't think it's defensible to put out a categorical "deserve to get paid" like that.
I've given away software and never expected nor wanted to be paid. It was a hobby and I didn't want the obligations that I felt came with payments. Socialism not required.
If you're trying to support yourself, then you should figure out a way to sell your output or your time to someone who finds it worthwhile, but no one is obligated to do so.
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
It’s still stupid, still indefensible but people do deserve to get paid for their work even if they’re socialistic enough to want to give away the cool thing they made.
Yes, but in that case they should
a) announce that they'll change the license from version x.00 onward,
b) describe the licensing terms in an easy to understand manner,
c) maybe include a free tier for one-man-shows, hobbyists and the like and
d) preferrably do all of the above months in advance of the change.That's the way Duende did it for Identity Server.
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@boomzilla there is a difference between want/need and deserve.
There are people who thanklessly and selflessly maintain core infrastructure (be that languages, tools, whatever). They don’t necessarily care about being paid to do it, but that doesn’t change the fact that that work should not go unrewarded because others would be fucked if they had to do it themselves.
It’s not even socialism to just respect the time and effort others have put in, and pay it forward somehow. That was always the view I had about open sources that if I’m not paying for the thing and I’m not expected to pay for the thing, is there some other way I can help out, out of respect for the time/effort gone in?
Edit: I understand I am pretty fucking socialist in my views, but I know I am not alone in that POV.
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@Rhywden yeah, you can do it intelligently. This chump, though, deserves every bit of Moqery he gets for doing basically all of the wrong things.
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@Atazhaia said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Ah, yes, the honeypot of commercial FOSS. Yes, you can use this for free but when you inevitably get stuck on an issue we got some nice support to sell you~
Perverse incentives ahoy! Anyone can see (and people have been pointing out since the 90s) that giving the product away for free but selling support gives you a good reason to build products with terrible usability that will generate lots of lucrative support calls. And indeed, Linux usability remains terrible to this day.
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@Gribnit said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@The_Quiet_One you should file a defect
CLOSED_WORKS_AS_DESIGNED
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Atazhaia said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Ah, yes, the honeypot of commercial FOSS. Yes, you can use this for free but when you inevitably get stuck on an issue we got some nice support to sell you~
I don't have a lot of time, or even less than that, frankly, for Mr Stallman, but if you look careful at his GNU Manifesto (the one I first read in 1995 when I found it on my Slackware 3.1 work PC), paid support is a perfectly reasonable way of making money off of libre software. (It is, as noted in that self-same document, "free as in liberty, not free as in beer".)
It's really not. See above, re: perverse incentives.
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Rhywden yeah, you can do it intelligently. This chump, though, deserves every bit of Moqery he gets for doing basically all of the wrong things.
The first of which, of course, was creating a library for mocks in the first place. The old line is as valid as it's ever been: using mocks in your automated tests is a good way to test that your mocks are working as designed.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Atazhaia said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Ah, yes, the honeypot of commercial FOSS. Yes, you can use this for free but when you inevitably get stuck on an issue we got some nice support to sell you~
Perverse incentives ahoy! Anyone can see (and people have been pointing out since the 90s) that giving the product away for free but selling support gives you a good reason to build products with terrible usability that will generate lots of lucrative support calls. And indeed, Linux usability remains terrible to this day.
Except my experience has generally been that commercial products have just as horrible usability and their support ends up being mostly useless anyway. Because there is the other perverse incentive: by the time you are asking the support for something, you've already purchased their product, so why should they bother?
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@Bulb Well, we're specifically talking about Linux here, so let's do a very simple, objective comparison.
In Windows, it's completely possible for a user, even a power user like you and me, to use it for years and years and never have to touch the command line. (Someone like us might dip into the command line from time to time for convenience, for example to write a script to automate things, but it's never necessary.)
In all my years, I have never found a Linux distro that could survive a single day without me needing to open Bash to do something that there's just no other way to achieve without the command line.
Commercial software 1,000,000,000; FOSS 0.
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
There are people who thanklessly and selflessly maintain core infrastructure (be that languages, tools, whatever). They don’t necessarily care about being paid to do it, but that doesn’t change the fact that that work should not go unrewarded because others would be fucked if they had to do it themselves.
@error_bot xkcd Dependency
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@boomzilla there is a difference between want/need and deserve.
There are people who thanklessly and selflessly maintain core infrastructure (be that languages, tools, whatever). They don’t necessarily care about being paid to do it, but that doesn’t change the fact that that work should not go unrewarded because others would be fucked if they had to do it themselves.
If they don't want to be rewarded with money, there's nothing wrong with that. If they want to be, then they should stop until they can find someone willing to pay.
It’s not even socialism to just respect the time and effort others have put in, and pay it forward somehow. That was always the view I had about open sources that if I’m not paying for the thing and I’m not expected to pay for the thing, is there some other way I can help out, out of respect for the time/effort gone in?
Edit: I understand I am pretty fucking socialist in my views, but I know I am not alone in that POV.
I fully agree. I'm pretty fucking anti-socialist in my views and I agree with the stuff in your paragraph there.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
And indeed, Linux usability remains terrible to this day.
It's the worst! Except for all the other options.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
In all my years, I have never found a Linux distro that could survive a single day without me needing to open Bash to do something that there's just no other way to achieve without the command line.
What sorts of things did you have to do every day like this?
Now, I do lots of stuff on the command line, because it makes a lot of sense to do stuff that way. Using some GUI to do similar things is a major PITA that slows me way down, and here the shittiness of Windows CLIs really hurts (which is a big part of why I do as little as possible in Windows). But that sort of stuff isn't regular user stuff, either.
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@boomzilla it’s the “needing/wanting to be paid” part that is so troublesome.
There’s plenty of people who’ve written perfectly wonderful tools but that no fucker (or not enough fuckers) want to put their hands into their pockets to support.
It’s actually a really hard problem to solve - see the lack of support OpenSSL used to get, or maybe still doesn’t get, despite the criticality of its implementation.
It’s easy enough if the project is big enough, because chances are if it made it big enough it’ll have a non-profit that big sponsors can throw money at for support or whatever.
It’s the one-person or few-person projects that really could do with a way to bridge the gap. These are the folks who’ll put up a Ko-Fi or a Patreon for maybe a couple of hundred bucks but what they could do with is a way to be compensated in a way that does actually benefit everyone involved.
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@boomzilla said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
What sorts of things did you have to do every day like this?
It's not "every day" so much as "the first day." To get a system set up, you need to install stuff. And so so so very much of the stuff you install, when installing it on Linux, requires you to go into
apt
.
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@Mason_Wheeler Ubuntu has a GUI frontend for apt, synaptic. I assume it came from Debian though. Other distros have similar.
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@Arantor I know. Have you ever tried to use it? (Emphasis on "tried"?)
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@Mason_Wheeler The alternatives being a flashy store? That's just the same, but with more marketing and a whole damn complex layer for taking payments and handling account binding and so on.
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@Mason_Wheeler yes, it worked fine last time I used it, I was able to install things without touching the command line.
Better than the MS fucking Store app.
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@dkf @Arantor Who said anything about the Windows Store? The alternative is a proper installer, which the Windows and Mac worlds mastered over 30 years ago.
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@Mason_Wheeler Windows “proper” installers for many years were genuine clusterfucks with InstallShield or NSIS or whatever doing fuck knows what.
But if you’re going to invoke MacOS we need to talk about storefronts because that is the canonical way to install software on MacOS.
Microsoft would very much like it if their Store were the same on Windows but the wasteland that is Windows “installation” (and we don’t talk about how many apps don’t ship with proper installers on Windows, it’s surprisingly common to just ship a single binary with everything compiled into it and run that from wherever) makes that difficult.
By comparison the most common stuff on Linux is available from the package manager via that UI (and on Debian and co, multiverse has a lot of stuff) such that anything you want outside of that probably doesn’t have an installer - so go find someone to make it.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Bulb Well, we're specifically talking about Linux here, so let's do a very simple, objective comparison.
In Windows, it's completely possible for a user, even a power user like you and me, to use it for years and years and never have to touch the command line. (Someone like us might dip into the command line from time to time for convenience, for example to write a script to automate things, but it's never necessary.)
In all my years, I have never found a Linux distro that could survive a single day without me needing to open Bash to do something that there's just no other way to achieve without the command line.
Commercial software 1,000,000,000; FOSS 0.
If you give commercial software a billion on that and FOSS 0, all it shows is that you're weak on the command line.
When I used Linux at work, I used the command line every day - but part of that was just the culture on that project. There was even a highly-secure room which had very few GUI tools installed.
At home, I go over a week sometimes without using the command line. Mostly it's just the software update window that opens a command line. My involvement there is to just press a key to get it to close.
On my current job, on Windows, I probably use a command line more often than I do on my personal Linux box.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
It's not "every day" so much as "the first day." To get a system set up, you need to install stuff. And so so so very much of the stuff you install, when installing it on Linux, requires you to go into
apt
.Really? The first day I rarely use the command line. I hardly ever use apt. I use Synaptic. That one job where I used Linux I used apt, but that was just because there were decades of tech debt in the environment as well as software made in-house..
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@boomzilla said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
It's the worst! Except for all the other options.
That one also works well for democracy/free market.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Arantor I know. Have you ever tried to use it? (Emphasis on "tried"?)
I use it (Synaptic) all the time. Maybe once or twice a year I'll have a problem with it.
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@jinpa said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
If you give commercial software a billion on that and FOSS 0, all it shows is that you're weak on the command line.
UX Rule #1: if the end-user has to know that a command line exists in order to use your product, you have failed.
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@Rhywden said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
It’s still stupid, still indefensible but people do deserve to get paid for their work even if they’re socialistic enough to want to give away the cool thing they made.
Yes, but in that case they should
a) announce that they'll change the license from version x.00 onward,
b) describe the licensing terms in an easy to understand manner,
c) maybe include a free tier for one-man-shows, hobbyists and the like and
d) preferrably do all of the above months in advance of the change.Which, for projects popular enough that it all actually matters, invariably leads to a free fork.
That's the way Duende did it for Identity Server.
Never heard of it, did some quick googling, and it looks like this move caused a lot of drama in its community and the end result is that Duende had to commit to making a completely* free, open source community edition with full feature parity with their commercial product.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
UX Rule #1: if the end-user has to know that a command line exists in order to use your product, you have failed.
I would not go that far. But if your point is that people who are double-digits should stick with Windows or Macs, I would not disagree. (Not meant to be a personal dig - I was speaking generally. Linux isn't for everyone.)
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
In Windows, it's completely possible for a user, even a power user like you and me, to use it for years and years and never have to touch the command line.
Bullshit. Fresh example from yesterday: I had to disable the hypervisor to make Virtualbox work and literally the only way this is possible is through
bcdedit
command. None of the myriad "advanced startup settings" menus that Windows accumulated over the years allows you to untick that box, onlybcdedit
can do it.
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@Gustav Sounds to me like a deficiency in Virtualbox's installer.
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@Mason_Wheeler Virtualbox installer is a 3rd party tool. If you need 3rd party tools to avoid using command line on Windows, then it's not any better than Linux in terms of not having to use command line.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Which the Windows and Mac worlds mastered over 30 years ago.
Yeah... no....
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@Tsaukpaetra What? We had working installers in the pre-Win95 days. I was there.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Tsaukpaetra What? We had working installers in the pre-Win95 days. I was there.
"Working" versus "mastered".
All my computers are working, wouldn't you agree?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
All my computers are working, wouldn't you agree?
No, I very much wouldn't.
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@Gustav said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
All my computers are working, wouldn't you agree?
No, I very much wouldn't.
But they sure try!
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@jinpa said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
At home, I go over a week sometimes without using the command line.
I use it all the time. Because navigating to a directory and opening the file in vim is a lot faster than using explorer and double-clicking.
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@dcon Stockholm Syndrome thread is
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
By comparison the most common stuff on Linux is available from the package manager via that UI (and on Debian and co, multiverse has a lot of stuff) such that anything you want outside of that probably doesn’t have an installer - so go find someone to make it.
As long as you're willing to put up with hopelessly outdated packages, as well as packages that do not play nicely together because they have incompatible assumptions about core libraries.
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@Benjamin-Hall But that is a problem with the other ways of doing things too. It's just and entropy.
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@dkf said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Benjamin-Hall But that is a problem with the other ways of doing things too. It's just and entropy.
If I want an updated package on windows, I can always go and get it myself, replacing the old one outright. And other things (because they don't try to share libraries) generally don't care. Linux...I've had mixed results. Mostly bad.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
There's Tesla logo on your hat. Your argument is invalid.
This. Before I even read his argument.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@jinpa said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
If you give commercial software a billion on that and FOSS 0, all it shows is that you're weak on the command line.
UX Rule #1: if the end-user has to know that a command line exists in order to use your product, you have failed.
The only failure here is you and your CLIphobia, which has apparently lead you to believe all sorts of untrue things.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@dkf said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Benjamin-Hall But that is a problem with the other ways of doing things too. It's just and entropy.
If I want an updated package on windows, I can always go and get it myself, replacing the old one outright. And other things (because they don't try to share libraries) generally don't care. Linux...I've had mixed results. Mostly bad.
Doing a local installation of something is usually easy, provided it isn't doing something that tangles deeply into the OS (such as a custom device driver). That's what
/usr/local/
is for, or you can do a single-user install beneath your home directory with no elevated privileges at all. Almost everything is happy with that.
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@dkf said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@dkf said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Benjamin-Hall But that is a problem with the other ways of doing things too. It's just and entropy.
If I want an updated package on windows, I can always go and get it myself, replacing the old one outright. And other things (because they don't try to share libraries) generally don't care. Linux...I've had mixed results. Mostly bad.
Doing a local installation of something is usually easy, provided it isn't doing something that tangles deeply into the OS (such as a custom device driver). That's what
/usr/local/
is for, or you can do a single-user install beneath your home directory with no elevated privileges at all. Almost everything is happy with that.But then you have to dance around with your PATH or simlinks, because lots of programs expect to see <other thing> in the package-manager-provided area. And lots of those packages are either
- compile it from source (yeah, no thanks)
- use your package manager (exactly what I'm trying to avoid, because it's outdated).
In part because "linux" isn't a thing, it's a category of things. So there's no stable target to provide binaries for.