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Not a great take.

Corporations who use and benefit from software should be made to pay for their use of that software, but they don't want to, which is why they'll happily spend money promoting the use of corporate-friendly and maximally exploitable open source licensing among the passionate individuals who maintain the lions share of their dependency tree.

https://lgug2z.com/articles/on-evils-in-software-licensing/


If you don't want to give your software away for free, don't give your software away for free. When they decide it is in their best interest to pay for it they will, i.e. support, bug fixes, changes. If you make open source software that just works they are unlikely to start writing checks nor should there be any expectation that they do that.

> When they decide it is in their best interest to pay for it they will, i.e. support, bug fixes, changes.

Maybe, but also maybe they just fork internally and fix the bug internally and don't publish the bugfix. And maybe it's never in their best interest to pay for it, maybe it's in their best interest to just freeload forever.

> If you make open source software that just works they are unlikely to start writing checks nor should there be any expectation that they do that.

I think it's good when we expect corporations to write checks to the people that write the open-source stuff they rely on. "A rising tide lifts all boats" is not automatically true in software, we have to choose to make it true. I think a world in which we make that choice is a better world. I'm not convinced we currently live in that world.


Make the license non-commercial.

That is not how people and society function. The status quo and culture is that open source is good for society and all. You are not told about why big corporations can use all this code for free. You’re actually told you’re doing a good deed by making code open source.

Then you jump on to a place like Reddit or HN and you have people mostly supporting the status quo. Of course people are going to do open source more than they should. And then if they complain later on, you will say they chose to make it open source. Reinforcing the status quo by blaming the individual.


It certainly no other persons fault than the person that wrote the software and gave it away. Making them out to be the victim in all this is ridiculous.

We can make similar arguments for the corporations: if you want to sell your software in the US market, you need to pay for a VAT for digital services that fund national endowments giving grants to individual US developers that apply to the program.

Corporations should start paying their fair share, they've scammed society enough.


They aren't scamming anyone by using open source software made available to them for free.

The are purposely ruining the commons as any corporation does to society. Companies take advantage of open source all the time without ever truly giving back, which is why we should lobby the government to compel big tech into this.

If it helps, voter sentiment against big tech is quite high and the profit margins that big tech has means there's a lot to plunder for the public.

The only question is who do you want to do the plundering?


this argument that companies are plundering something given away for free without taking it away from someone else is tiring.

> If you don't want to give your software away for free, don't give your software away for free.

I don't, and I spend a lot of my time and efforts encouraging others not to, and doing the work to prove out alternative models :)

https://lgug2z.com/articles/normalize-identifying-corporate-...

https://lgug2z.com/articles/komorebi-financial-breakdown-for...


Giving something away for free and then whining that people use it for free confuses me. I mean, what did you think would happen?

> Giving something away for free and then whining that people use it for free confuses me. I mean, what did you think would happen?

Such a weird thing to reply to someone who very publicly disavows the use of open source licensing for individuals


Such an aggressive response to a perfectly rational response to "Corporations who use and benefit from software should be made to pay for their use of that software."

> created: 46 days ago

Checks out


I'm a fan of this. My own projects on GitHub have an action[1] which autocloses and autolocks any opened issues until they have been reviewed and accepted by me, and I only consider feature requests from sponsors.

The real miss here is that there isn't a way on GitHub to only allow maintainers to create issues, instead we are left with these subpar workarounds.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi/blob/master/.github/workf...


1. Set a default label for issues (e.g. “autoclose”) 2. Make your auto closing and locking logic based on that label (eg the label-actions github action) 3. As a maintainer, remember to remove the label when creating an issue!


Nice to see some more interesting use of this kind of educational source licensing


Not consistently, but there have been a few months this year where I have hit $500 selling individual commercial use licenses for my tiling window manager[1]

https://lgug2z.com/software/komorebi


Nice licensing


I'd buy it for a 20 USD one-time fee


The experiment is end-user mediated wealth redistribution from large corporations by leveraging reimbursement mechanisms, and so far I'm content with the results


I like this, bookmarked in case I'll ever be forced by work into MICROS~1 operating systems again.


I also think this naming is misleading - there is a very clear association with "bare metal", which is not what is being offered here


Took a look at this and it feels like it is implemented using public macOS frameworks so it shouldn't break between macOS updates

My guess is that kAXWindowMovedNotification, kAXWindowResizedNotification, kAXMainWindowChangedNotification etc. are being listened to on the currently focused window using the Accessibility framework, and there is a callback which gets the latest position of the tracked window whenever it is fired, and uses that position as a reference to update the border position

The border window itself is most likely an NSWindow, which is why the tracking of the border with the target window feels quite sluggish


Developer of the app here. You’re correct. Accessibility APIs + timer + transparent top-level NSWindow that ignores input and draws a border.


Fwiw I think this is the right approach. The trade-off between stability across OS updates vs tracking performance is a no-brainer for me - the absolute last thing that I would want is a deluge of bug reports with no other information than "it stopped working" when Apple pushes out an update


As a developer I would interpret that as "try it in the new OS and you will immediately see what is wrong so there is no reason for me to write a tedious and unnecessary message to you".


Very nice idea, thank you for developing it. With an M1 iMac, though the window border lags the position of the window quite a lot if you drag it around, so probably not usable for me.


Some lag is probably going to be unavoidable with a third-party app. The only way to have perfect synchronization of window dragging/resizing and the border is for macOS to implement this as a first-party feature.


I really ponder what is the usecase here that requires dragging windows "quite a lot" and also makes a lagging window border "not usable".


You seldom resize, or drag windows?


I thought I take a look at the code, but I can only find readme and license?


It's very sad that none of these Linux DEs expose APIs for customization in anything other than JavaScript - I would love to be able to build on Gnome or KDE with something equivalent to windows-rs or objc2


js is the easiest language to handle safely and securely (due to its origins in the browser, of course), and can even be run fairly efficiently since it is now probably the most optimized language. And most importantly, is probably the most widely known language.


I'd love to read more wherever this came from if you could link the source


Great to see more projects not opting into licenses which permit megacorp exploitation by default


Many megacorps provide value to users. For example Google and Apple are used by maybe 75% of humanity. Google in particular appears to have given back into the ecosystem (often to Google's detriment). It isn't as binary as you make it to be.


Would love to see someone running this theme + a tiling window manager!


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