Faker.js: No more free work from Marak - Pay Me or Fork This

[Marak]

Respectfully, I am no longer going to support Fortune 500s ( and other smaller sized companies ) with my free work.

There isn't much else to say.

Take this as an opportunity to send me a six figure yearly contract or fork the project and have someone else work on it.

[asim]

Kudos to you sir.

[p410n3]

Power to you!

[darthbob88]

SOLIDARITY FOREVER.

[chovy]

bad ass.

[marsop]

Completely understandable..

[fabianhjr]

P2P Foundation has been writing about this and might be of interest to you; in particular as copyfair and copyfarleft.

[jccgsk]

Would Open Collective be an alternative for you?

[trevyn]

For those of us who have not been following, what specifically prompted this? Have Fortune 500s been asking for certain features/support and not been willing to pay?

[dodyg]

Probably this? https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272

[deanputney]

Seems like Github ought to have some goals on that sponsor tool. Monthly, per commit, per release, total, something! Crowdfunding has real proven mechanisms. People want to make it happen. Good for you for pushing on this, the financial tooling is long overdue.

[arunkp]

God bless you mate! A Patreon page would really help.

[idcmsbeta]

second, open source doesnt mean free. Support still need to paid.
** i up the robot picture in my fb.

[teito-dev]

Good luck marak.

Thnx for all the work you’ve done till now.
May open source win

[kuesji]

maybe you should put this to head of readme.md too.

[Ujang360]

Pin the issue please 😁

[faissaloo]

[kLabz]

Probably this? https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272

Seems more likely to be linked to this one https://twitter.com/marak/status/1325612104808886274

[shirshak55]

Hello, Why would Fortune 500 pay you when they are themselves asking for donations.

See Jest: https://github.com/facebook/jest Its under the umbrella of facebook but collecting thousands of dollars from other people? I am not saying collecting donation is bad but collecting donation under the facebook is definitely bad.

Thanks for all the work Marak

[chovy]

We need some sort of open source software developer's union

On Mon, Nov 9, 2020 at 2:40 AM Shirshak [e-mail] wrote:

Hello, Why would Fortune 500 pay you when they are themselves asking for
donations.

See Jest: https://github.com/facebook/jest

Thanks for all the work Marak

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[maciejjankowski]

I understand your frustration, but why not pick a license which better supports your needs?

[idcmsbeta]

We need some sort of open source software developer's union
…

let said people dont understand including gov. E.g mysql , most of them thinking no need to paid license fee support like oracle. If development stall lack of money it will be fall back to the paid database. Hackathon also the worst enemy of developer. For fun and job are totally diff.

[nmohoni]

Join us 💪
xs:code (https://xscode.com)

[jpic]

maintainer.io tidelift.com

[tormeh]

You could charge for handling issues. The industry term for this is "Change Request". It essentially makes you into a consultant, although you can of course reject CRs you don't like

[dmihal]

You should create a grant on http://gitcoin.co/grants and see if you can get some community funding

[nmohoni]

Respectfully, I am no longer going to support Fortune 500s ( and other smaller sized companies ) with my free work.

There isn't much else to say.

Take this as an opportunity to send me a six figure yearly contract or fork the project and have someone else work on it.

We need some sort of open source software developer's union
…
On Mon, Nov 9, 2020 at 2:40 AM Shirshak @.*> wrote: Hello, Why would Fortune 500 pay you when they are themselves asking for donations. See Jest: https://github.com/facebook/jest Thanks for all the work Marak — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1046 (comment)>, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAAGV5LFXANA3FQPWRPK2RTSO7BK3ANCNFSM4TONL4UA .
-- Anthony

I don't think that a union is a solution. I think that OSS developers should decide if they want to support their users, how, and start to treat them as users/paying customers.
https://blog.xscode.com/736/the-right-sponsor-for-your-open-source-project/

[giannitedesco]

Good luck, brother. You should not have to struggle to be paid for what is, very obviously, worthwhile work!

[groundhogs]

Sure! How do you plan on enforcing this though?

[apisandipas]

Faker is love. Faker is life. I applaud this move. Someone sponsor this man!

[Etiene]

Sure! How do you plan on enforcing this though?

I would guess by not writing any more code until money comes in bank account. I'm not sure this is about code that has already been written.

[ludamillion]

Sure! How do you plan on enforcing this though?

I would guess by not writing any more code until money comes in bank account. I'm not sure this is about code that has already been written.

Yeah, the names are escaping right now but there are few developers who have successfully done some form of this. Working on their projects only when they get enough support from their users, or other interested parties.

[cloin]

Fuck you, pay me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XGAmPRxV48

[AlexanderBaggett]

More power to you man. I respect that a lot.

You also made me think of this XKCD comic

https://xkcd.com/2347/

[AlexAegis]

Love the community support here!

[hasokeric]

Perhaps create a new license that any Commercial entity must pay for the use of the code. They are probably never even contributing to it anyways.

[jwaldrip]

@Marak love the sentiment here. Open source work deserves support!

[pietrovismara]

I don't think that a union is a solution. I think that OSS developers should decide if they want to support their users, how, and start to treat them as users/paying customers.

@nmohoni What you are suggesting means killing OSS. OSS is not a commercial commodity and OSS devs shouldn't waste time finding ways to monetize, when they could use that same time writing awesome software that everyone can benefit from. What we need is for corporations to stop exploting people's dev work without giving anything back.

[wizzwizz4]

@hasokeric Or license the code under AGPL, with an MIT-licensed branch lagging behind – and each version will only be MIT-licensed when the money comes in. (Then again, I'm not sure how useful this would be – faker's mostly a testing tool, and some wording of GPLv3 means that unless the tests are distributed the code can stay proprietary. A custom license might be best.)

[andris9]

@hasokeric Or license the code under AGPL, with an MIT-licensed branch lagging behind – and each version will only be MIT-licensed when the money comes in. (Then again, I'm not sure how useful this would be – faker's mostly a testing tool, and some wording of GPLv3 means that unless the tests are distributed the code can stay proprietary. A custom license might be best.)

I set up similar system for my own OSS where I have AGPL licensed code publicly available from npm and MIT code from my paid private repository

[nmohoni]

I don't think that a union is a solution. I think that OSS developers should decide if they want to support their users, how, and start to treat them as users/paying customers.

Netanel Mohoni What you are suggesting means killing OSS. OSS is not a commercial commodity and OSS devs shouldn't waste time finding ways to monetize, when they could use that same time writing awesome software that everyone can benefit from. What we need is for corporations to stop exploting people's dev work without giving anything back.

I totally agree. What I'm suggesting is exactly this. Your code should be free, your time is not. Monetization of OSS is not the key to solve this, but giving value back to the users is. We must look into the OSS sustainability problem in the eyes of most of the developers - as users. developers who get free code don't have the resources to donate (most of them are working in companies) but they care a lot about the developers behind the code. We can build a relationship between the companies and the OSS developers, and that's exactly our focus.

[STIHLFredGuanzon]

Would Open Collective be an alternative for you?

Isn't this the same as Patreon?

[mishushakov]

hey @Marak
i came here from hackernews to support you

People deserve to be paid for things that bring value

[tobyhinloopen]

Is there a paid license or pro version I can buy to support this repo?

I prefer to pay for pro versions rather than donate for reasons. I really could some more realistic fake data as well. Something like $59 a year or something for a pro version would be an instant-buy for me.

[seanmorris]

There's no way you could provide this in a SaaS format? There are already faker providers online charging a premium.

[mabounassif]

6 figures salary for maintaining a faking library, let's go!

[ayewo]

@Marak I hope with the massive attention this has gotten, your personal situation also improves. OSS is mostly thankless, so thanks for all you do!

@nmohoni you should probably contribute some blurb regarding how you finance projects to this guide on funding OSS.

[ericmand]

Awesome and good luck. Perhaps @dff can help!

[pozylon]

We had a similar discussion in our team a week ago. One developer was suggesting to donate money to an open source project, everybody agreed but I was like yeah okay let's do it but then I flipped out.

I mean look at this:

• Vue.js Patreon + OpenCollective Budget summed up (https://vuejs.org/support-vuejs/#Recurring-Pledges). It's 250K a year.
• Eslint OpenCollective -> 150K a year.

Come on! THESE ARE MAJOR LIBRARIES and they can not even pay servers + core devs out of the sponsorships. Gosh they deserve millions thinking of the global popularity and the revenue that's getting generated on the back of these kind of libraries!

We release almost every single line of code as open source and still, it's up to us as individuals to put money into OpenCollective and Patreon?

Maybe we need some kind of Bio, MSC or Max Havelaar label for big corps that don't exploit open source developers 🤣. Or maybe unionize and tell these corps to properly fucking feel responsible and setup real funds.

[jondubois]

These days it feels like corporations are going out of their way to destroy open source.

[marcobiedermann]

Great statement! Open Source is not just a hobby and needs to be respected and values.
Is there anyone else who is maintaining this project or at least able to approve and review pull requests in order to continue working on what you build up?

[jondubois]

For transparency's sake, I want to point out that my project SocketCluster has never had a single corporate sponsor or corporate contract over the last 7 years https://socketcluster.io/ - All the support contracts I've ever received have been from struggling startups or blockchain projects (though some in the blockchain space eventually became successful). Any other open source authors have a similar experience?

[jondubois]

@tobyhinloopen Similar to Socket.io and gRPC but with its own twist. Maybe I need to rework some of the phrasing on the website. Developers used to know what 'realtime framework' meant. I guess now phrases like 'RPC framework' and 'pub/sub framework' are more common. Socket.io still uses the wording 'real-time engine' though.

[dimitrismistriotis]

From what I have observed and imho:

• Most devs do not care, they see the library they use it and that's it
• Some who care cannot easily give corporate money away. I would guess that mega-corps would have OSS budgets by now.
• An alternative that I have seen is that some people from within corp contribute with bug fixes, small features, documentation, even PR (retweets, shoutouts, stars) believing that they have done their part this way.
• Last I have heard the argument that an open source library developer most probably gets paid a lot as a consultant with the OSS project being their CV ace card or store front or another get-through-the-door analogy here. In that mindset OSS output is a side effect that gets cached out from the "normal" job... no need to pay for this
• Similar to the previous one, that there might be a company somewhere somehow that sponsors this work. Some companies really do and have these OSS projects as a place where people learn and experiment.

I have done very little OSS but I tend to create content mostly podcasts. There I have seen people who have donated nothing demanding stuff, and a very very low percentage of people supporting even with a retweet.

My 2¢ is that people of the last generation have been trained to have things for free or with ad support, a model which is coming to an end as the Internet costs become less or more ingrained to the bills we pay. A way out of this will be micro-transactions (every time I download that library/listen to that podcast/read that articke, I pay a tiny-tiny fee that eventually adds up). While this paradigm shift happens people in the in-between are screwed.

[yoni333]

you are right.
thank you on the great job!

[speculatrix]

I once worked for a credit card payment processor and we wanted to support the linux distro we used. We found it very difficult to find a way to pay the distro, debian, in a way we could get authorisation for. We didn't have the ability to get a charitable donation set up, and we tried to see if we could "buy" some consultancy.

In the past I've managed to "acquire" decent quality corporate branded schwag and send it to the maintainers as a gift, the best I was able to do, as at least it showed appreciation. e.g. I gave a really good golf umbrella, a fancy mug, and some fair quality polo shirts to Philip Hazel who was the creator and lead developer of exim.

[shushugah]

For everyone commenting here, who is frustrated, consider joining tech workers coalition! https://techworkerscoalition.org/subscribe

[maxpou]

reminds me this one:

Good Luck Marak.

[amihaiemil]

Sadly, nothing is going to change anytime soon, I believe.

Important tech decisions in corporations are usually made by suits who have no technical knowledge and are only interested in the cheapest and/or most profitable (yearly bonuses for them) contracts... it's pure politics, basically.

Big corps be bragging about opensource when all they do is take a bunch of OSS libraries, put them together and adding a brand on top if them -- paid licence to use, of course.

[b26]

Best of luck Marak. Love faker.

Everyone will always go after their best interests, I suggest you do the same.

[jondubois]

@b26 agreed.

If anyone wants to get together and launch a blockchain for their open source projects, contact me (email address in my profile). As open source authors and contributors, we need to get together and protect our interests.

Without capital, we have no voice. Open source developers need to move past the mental hurdle that money is evil. Instead, we should create our own money. One that works for us and benefits value creators, not value capturers and social manipulators.

[astephanus-levvel]

Software people need to unionize!

[philsturgeon]

We got you mate, $100 a month coming from @stoplightio on GitHub Sponsors. Thanks for making me think to check dependencies of dependencies instead of just dependencies. We were sponsoring json-schema-faker but didn't thinking to sponsor faker.js... At least we know now!

[prabhu]

@Marak I can understand your frustration. I have heard about this project few times but never got a chance to use it in any assignments. However, seeing all these great comments tells everything and it's awesome.

To start with, the free in open source is about freedom. It's not great to take away that freedom based on the email domain or who the end client of a product might be. You might have helped many engineers get a job, keep their job, or even get promoted with your opensource work. For example, a developer might have used faker.js to produce an excellent quality software which might have taken more time and effort without this project. Artificially limiting open source because of the end client would negatively affect ordinary engineers and people! (I have received stories from users of some of my personal work and it is those people that keep me motivated to contribute and not the money.)

Choosing a good opensource license is a wonderful way to balance freedom with behavior that promotes the spirit of opensource. In the past I have argued that MIT license often encourages a freeloading behavior since it is a do-whatever-you-want license. In contrast, Apache-2.0 and GPL-3.0-or-later encourages people to be a bit more mindful and think about opensource, the license conditions, and the contribution side of things. So, go ahead change the license if you want!

[rurban]

Probably this? https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272

Seems more likely to be linked to this one https://twitter.com/marak/status/1325612104808886274

But then you usually don't go after them by making bombs and endanger your neighbors. https://abc7ny.com/suspicious-package-queens-astoria-fire/6425363/

Looks like a longer prison term

[Marak]

Probably this? https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272

Seems more likely to be linked to this one https://twitter.com/marak/status/1325612104808886274

But then you usually don't go after them by making bombs and endanger your neighbors. https://abc7ny.com/suspicious-package-queens-astoria-fire/6425363/

Looks like a longer prison term

This is literally "fake news" started by the NY Post. The NY Post literally made up a fake news story about me getting "burned" and circulated it.

Other news outlets have embellished and recirculated that fake news.

Anyone with access to law enforcement databases can privately look at what is actually going on here.

[rurban]

Oops, sorry then.

[daniandl]

This issue should be pinned so it doesn't get buried in a few weeks.

[bhgames]

Hey @Marak I tried to find [email protected] in paypal to give you a boost after your apartment fire tweet referenced above but could not - paypal says this is not a valid paypal email. A friend sent me a link to this page this morning and I was horrified to say the least. Can you post here a valid paypal email, or some other form of payment email ? (Venmo, chase quick pay,etc?)

[cphrmky]

You missed an opportunity here, it could have been "_No more free work from Marak - Pay Me or Fork Off_".

:-)

[Marak]

Hey @Marak I tried to find [email protected] in paypal to give you a boost after your apartment fire tweet referenced above but could not - paypal says this is not a valid paypal email. A friend sent me a link to this page this morning and I was horrified to say the least. Can you post here a valid paypal email, or some other form of payment email ? (Venmo, chase quick pay,etc?)

Not sure why Paypal would say that, [email protected] is an active and valid account.

The only alternate methods I have are these BTC and ETH I created a few days ago:

1DHoyxwuZFoWLvUX4KZSTBDrz1VLMTLTeS

0x150eF95cdB28f7ac32926917b9342C0759DbEe04

Bless all of you. Thank you for the support. The kind words and statements posted here are the world to me. We are not alone.

🕊️ ☮️ 🕊️

[bhgames]

@Marak weird. I had to turn on PayPal search to enable it to find you. Such bad UX. Anyway, I was able to send you some money. I hope this helps you out man. Good luck.

[bhgames]

Oh also, please confirm you got it, @Marak , want to make sure I didn’t hit wrong person!

[mokanfar]

WHEN MARAK GENERATES MILLIONS OF DOLLARS FOR A FORTUNE 500 COMPANY FOR $0.

[keshlam]

The principle behind freeware -- whether open source or not -- has always been "Software wants to be free -- but support should cost."

If you don't want it used commercially (or not without being paid, or simply don't want it being sold/republished/offered as a service), pick an appropriate license. Creative Commons has examples that handle most of the standard combinations, and most company lawyers are already familiar with those if you use them as is.

If you don't want to accept company requests for support -- don't. Or tell them they're welcome to hire you as a consultant to handle that issue. Or tell them to fix it themselves but please submit the fix back to the project so the rest of the community also benefits. Or tell them, as others said, to fork off and not come back, but that's hurting yourself more than them.

If you're just tired of working on the project at all -- well, as you said, folks will fork it if they think it's worth continued development. A better solution in that case would be to hand over the main project to a new leader, if one can be found... or to tell GitHub that it's now unowned and they should add it to their lists of projects looking for leaders.

[InnovativeCoder]

Ain't Flossbank a good way to generate revenue? It shows advertisements on my terminal whenever I download any library and pay the advertisement amount to the creator. I think it could act like Youtube monetization.

[sontqq]

Why did you publish it if you don't want people to use it?

[tobyhinloopen]

Why did you publish it if you don't want people to use it?

I'm not marak, but I suspect you start out with sharing something you made for yourself. Suddenly others started using it and issues, notifications and bug reports started pouring in, including many people that "demanded" code reviews, support, bugfixes or something else.

I think he did want people to use it, but people using it is not the problem: people demanding support is usually the problem. Even worse, If a maintainer doesn't provide the proper support some people expect, people can become a real dick about it, like they somehow think they deserve (free, obviously) support, bugfixes or otherwise feedback on their bugreports, PRs or issues

Source: my experience in OS world, which might totally not align with Marak's view.

[sontqq]

Why did you publish it if you don't want people to use it?

I'm not marak, but I suspect you start out with sharing something you made for yourself. Suddenly others started using it and issues, notifications and bug reports started pouring in, including many people that "demanded" code reviews, support, bugfixes or something else.

I think he did want people to use it, but people using it is not the problem: people demanding support is usually the problem. Even worse, If a maintainer doesn't provide the proper support some people expect, people can become a real dick about it, like they somehow think they deserve (free, obviously) support, bugfixes or otherwise feedback on their bugreports, PRs or issues

Source: my experience in OS world, which might totally not align with Marak's view.

Ok i got it but why doesnt he make a business on it then? Giving support for premium users etc.

[thedamian]

pinging this so that this bubbles to the top as in the top there's some spam issues coming through.

[tobyhinloopen]

pinging this so that this bubbles to the top as in the top there's some spam issues coming through.

It's pinned, right?

[MorrisMuuoMulitu]

Damn right!

[chovy]

Join http://techrights.org

[rmoskal]

Bravo.

[imhazige]

Yes!

[JoseJesusOchoaTorres]

Hey maybe a good option could be Patreon; a lot of good Open source projects use it and works fine.

Thanks for your contributions.

[Marak]

Hey maybe a good option could be Patreon; a lot of good Open source projects use it and works fine.

Thanks for your contributions.

[Marak]

🧙‍♂️ @substack 🦾🤖🦾

[lukeocodes]

@Marak good for you <3

[denis-domanskii]

I think it's much more difficult to approve payments for SaaS or software in a huge companies - too much burecracy. That's why only startups support you - it's easy to get money when CEO sits near you.

I am respect you decision, but not sure that I totally agreed with your point of view. Why people create open source projects? For money? Definitely not. It can be for fun, and project dies when fun is ended. Or (it's my point) open source is created for karma. Every day we consume many things for free: Wikipedia, Stack overflow, Reddit memes and open source projects of course. Linux with whole it utils and software, docker, k8s, libre office, open source solutions for our work and pet projects. And every time when we use it - we taking a debt from an open source community. And we take more each day, each week and each year. But how to return it?

The only way to return this debt and make our world a little bit better - is a contributing to open source. By projects, by patches, by testing or sponsorship. Despite of problems, despite of FAANG and other billioner corporates - because it's not about them, it's about open source community, about ourselves.

You have done a great job, you have created an awesome product and you have paid your debt at all, IMHO. Thank you for all your income. I hope someday you will come back with more awesome projects, which will be created not for FAANG, but for thouthands of thouthands open source developers which working on their projects now. For fun and a better world hope.

[jondubois]

@denis-domanskii The real reason why corporations don't pay open source authors/communities support contracts is because of cronyism - The problem with open source is that there is no way for corporate insiders to profit from it.

There is a lot of hidden corruption occurring inside corporations whereby certain insiders try to steer the corporation towards certain expensive SaaS solutions instead of towards free open source solutions. Then, if successful, the corporate insiders either get a cut from the SaaS provider (bribe) or they will be promised a cushy job at the SaaS startup at a later date for a ridiculously high salary (which is essentially a bribe which can be redeemed at a future date).

It's similar to what is happening inside politics when politicians help corporations achieve certain objectives in exchange for a nice cushy job at a think-tank after they finish their terms in political office.

This kind of subtle corruption has seeped into every level of most large organizations and it is hurting honest people and value producers.

Bureaucracy is merely a pretext which allows the corporation to justify paying 100x for outsourcing a service instead of bringing it in-house and sponsoring a few open source developers for peripheral support.

[jondubois]

Why people create open source projects? For money? Definitely no.

It can be a mix of reasons and the motivations can change over time.

For most people, it starts out as a learning experience but it can also be a strategy to give a product a competitive chance to get attention. The tech industry is very competitive and sometimes the only way to get people to use a product is to offer it for free.

For those who aren't fortunate enough to have social connections with corporate insiders, sometimes the only way to get your foot in a door (any door at all) is to give away your work for free. It can be a business decision from start to finish. Nothing wrong with this either. It shows that you're willing to invest massive effort and expect minuscule margins in return...

The sad reality is that even that's not enough. Corporations seem to have gone out of their way to make open source a non-viable business model. Most of the financially successful (sustainable) open source projects are now decades old; the opportunity window has been closing.

[mgibson323]

Hell yeah! ✊

[Marak]

I have some potentially good news here.

I've been in communication with @GoDaddy and @indexzero about signing a contract that would have me working with GoDaddy to continue doing open-source, as well as transferring over ownership of my http://hook.io project to GoDaddy.

This could potentially be a big win for everyone as it would allow me to continue to develop open-source software under the umbrella of GoDaddy.

I'll let everyone know how this ends up. My fingers are crossed.

[lukeocodes]

@Marak thats great news!

[Marak]

I heard back from the CEO of GoDaddy and they have passed on sponsoring my Open-source work and the faker.js project.

That makes me a free agent as of today.

If any other companies are interested in this project or my continued open-source work please feel to reach out: [email protected]