I'm of two minds about this. "Stealing" does seem to be a little too harsh given the plugin did say it would take a percentage if you make more than $1K and didn't buy a license. The 30% seems underhand (only because it's not spelled out in the repo) but I do understand the plugin author's position. Open source work, especially something like Ionic/Cordova/Capacitor plugins, are hard to make any money on and I've seen the GH issues for many cordova plugins, it's /rough/. Also there are so many things you need to support and edge cases that I can't even imagine the patience of someone maintaining one of those plugins.
I think it's clear the plugin author was/is happy to let the 2-30% stipulation fly under the radar and sit back and collect which doesn't sit great with me but also I kind of get it. I mean if you are going to take OS work and use it for your own gain (something I'm plenty guilty of myself I'll admit) then don't be surprised if not reading the license bites you in the butt.
In a perfect world OS devs wouldn't need to these methods to make it worth their time but we don't live in a such a world, people rarely donate to OS projects and expect issues/features to be added quickly and for free. People need money to exist and they don't owe you anything. Honestly if this plugin author had called out the 30% in their license I would say this blog author has no leg to stand on. As-is I'm glad the app developer got their money back and the plugin author should either stop charging more than 2% or update their license accordingly. But "stealing"? Too harsh, especially since you got your money back.
I suspect the line of thinking behind the 30% seems to be something along the lines of "they're fiddling their numbers to reduce our 2% cut, so let's just take a bigger cut".
I don't think this is entirely kosher for a bunch of reasons, but I'm willing to believe that it was a naïve person doing something naïve after being burned by someone cheating him out of his cut, or something along those lines.
At any rate, since the author of this article was unaware of the 2%, it doesn't really matter if the 30% would have been mentioned or not. That they took any cut could have been clearer, perhaps – I don't know how it looked like before on that Ionic plugin site, but it's plenty clear now so that's a solved issue (if it was an issue to start with). That this was added after this exchange (and before it was published) without any pressure further demonstrates the plugin author is essentially acting in good faith.
(Ionic CEO here) I think regardless, it's something developers don't expect so we're removing it from our site right now to avoid confusion and surprises (we’re going to be changing the whole design of this list soon anyways so it’s moot). The plugin description came from another project we support and trust plugin authors to write their own descriptions but we're realizing we need to scrutinize those more closely. I have no qualms with a plugin stating they are going to have this kind of revenue share but it doesn't belong on our site and seen as “official” which is confusing, so we're fixing that right now.
I would love to see open source developers make a lot of money; I think it's a great future for everyone. But I don't think there is any dichotomy in this case. If the service declares its price in percentages or dollars (as SaaS does), it's terrible to charge 15 times more.
Mistakes happen, but in this case, it's a conscious decision by the plugin author; I think stealing is the right word, especially when it turns out you've done it with thousands of apps
So he used code straight off GitHub, didn’t read the license terms, and then has the gall to call it “stealing” when the program does exactly as it says it would.
Either learn to read licenses, or have a list of approved licenses (MIT, GPL, etc.) and only use software thus licensed.
EDIT: What I mean above is the 2% which is specified in the “Licence Agreement” page – the article author is clearly considering this, too, to be “stealing”. Regarding the increase from 2% to 30%, that is way more questionable, and I do not defend it.
I don't think taking 2% is theft. Maybe it's a dark pattern, but it's definitely not theft. In the article, I say that I calmed down after explaining with 2%, which means my agreement with the situation.
The way the increase to 30% is made and the number of users with such a percentage says that the author deliberately increases the percentage without warning the user, which is theft
I think it also speaks highly of you that you engaged with him, signed your name, and made rational arguments. These are not the actions of a thief, but of someone who has thought about their business model and is willing to stand by it.
That said, if you really wanted to impress, you'd improve the visibility of your practices for each individual developer, by providing a dashboard that fully discloses revenue-over-time, along with proactive notifications when your terms change. The MVP here would be a single email sent when the 2% term changes.
This business model where the providing party retains the right to change terms arbitrarily has always concerned me, in the same way something like an indentured servitude contract would, and yet they are all too common. But its everywhere, and no self-interested business would take steps to reduce it's power against the counter-party. There is a whole set of problems here that neo-liberal capitalism not only cannot solve, but actually seem to make worse. It's easy to point the finger at a single dev, or a small team, and say "you're unethical!" but in truth I think the statement is more informed by the ability to identify the actor than the action itself, which is endemic. (To take two examples: variable rate mortgages, and credit card debt, neither of which are modeled by consumers and both of which are certainly gamed by the counter-party.)
Yea, he is not the first to discover this. I ran into this exact issue (same github repo and software package), back in ~2013. In my case, this revenue sharing was quietly introduced during the plugin update.
So I just forked an older version of their code and ran from that. I also made a post telling the guy it was kinda shady, they didn't seem to care.
The software license is MIT, but there's a page on their wiki that vaguely says they take a cut of your earnings over 1000$. It definitely does not mention 30% however:
> If you have used this plugin for FREE but monetized more than $1000, you are also required to get a license, or share us some Ad traffic as stated in win-win partnership model below
> Ship our code with yours to end-user, no need paying a cent at all, instead, share 2 percent ad traffic, so that we can both benefit and cover our cost to maintain and enhance this project.
MIT license does not disallow monetization or rev share. It does allow you to fork this plugin and remove the code responsible for rev share, etc. This is all above board.
A technical reading of the license suggests that the licensee can choose one of three options, the first of which is "Free and Open Source, no support", which fits the OP needs and is also the one offered in the LICENSE.txt of the repository. Nothing in that license offer requires them to pick the second - "commercial" - option for commercial use as the other two options don't prohibit commercial use, and if other offers (e.g. that MIT license in the LICENSE.txt) are made.
So I there's no reason for the licensor to assume that the commercial offer was chosen and that the licensee agreed to that 2% withholding, much less a 30% one.
Which I think it's clear that's not what happened here, the blog author was using AdMob Pro and thus unable to qualify for "Free and Open Source, no support".
Ha, caveat emptor. Oh, wait, OP isn’t even a buyer and paid nothing for the code and blindly built it into the app. No reading, no understanding, just copying.
OG plug-in author has a problem with people abusing license key system, builds in code to detect it. Disclaims it vaguely, OP gets bitten and has the gall to call it stealing. Author offers to help OP out, OP puts him on blast.
There is a huge divide between "oh hey you didn't read the license and missed the fact that this OS addon takes 2%" and "the license said 2%, but it's actually 30%, oops my friend!"
I see zero difference. There is an explicit mention that bad things will happen if you subvert the license system.
A license is $20, OP is just too lazy to read the terms of code he blindly incorporates.
Op called 2% stealing, 30% is for basically triggering the anti cheat. OP should have paid paid the license and read the rules.
I'm confused, where in the license does it give them the permission to randomly assign an ad-share percentage? This seems highly suspect, and probably illegal in most jurisdictions. In fact, reading the actual license agreement here https://github.com/floatinghotpot/cordova-admob-pro/wiki/Lic... seems to suggest that they will stop serving ads, not randomly start increasing ad share.
Yeah I'm not seeing it either. It's even weirder that the code itself is distributed with an MIT license, which suggests you're free to download and modify the code to disable the revenue sharing. This conflicts with some of their other statements though. In the readme they do outline the option to use it with a open source license (without any support), but they seem to contradict this in the following sentence in their readme:
>If use in commercial project, please get a license, or, you have monetized more than $1000 using this plugin, you are also required to either get a commercial license ($20). As a commercial customer, you will be supported with high priority, via private email or even Skype chat.
Which is nigh illegible.
Does anyone know what happens when someone publishes conflicting licenses?
Since the Wiki part isn't a license itself, I would think there isn't legal relevance to it, but given that the author doesn't seem to be a native English speaker, a generous interpretation might be that a commercial user could still fork this; it's 'required' in the sense that you have to pay for the convenience of having it available on NPM, which the author disallows you from making trivial changes to and republishing on there.
That's unlikely to be legally enforceable on NPM, but they might honour takedowns anyway.
You were free to give author money the moment you used his code, why are you worrying about the license - you can copy, modify and maintain a version that pays you.
“Kindly reminder, do not use a fake license key or a license key from others, do not share your license key with others. Abuse of the license key may cause negative impact.”
I feel there is a bigger issue here that I don't see anyone having brought up.
Blogging dev was too cheap to just pay $20 for a license for code that would generate him money. THAT is really the bigger issue here, regardless of everything else, including the fact that he was in violation of the agreement, i.e., >$1,000 MRR.
Here's a little pro tip for everyone, don't cheap out on paying someone $20 for the work they do, when it will be generating you significantly more income.
Frankly, regardless of whether or not the plugin dev is sketchy or not, the blogger dev violated the terms of the agreement and seems rather ungrateful that he was given back what he should not have even gotten back.
“No one thinks anyone else deserves payment for creating good work, unless they’re the one who could be getting paid, in which case it’s a travesty that they’re not” is an ethical standpoint that’s widespread in Silicon Valley. For example, it’s why Facebook users don’t receive dividend payments for the investment of their harvested data. “We realized that we could profit from inattention|opensource, so of course that’s ethical, because Finders Keepers rules” is a bad look for both parties in this post — the plug-in author who takes a revenue share without providing a financial statement, and the site operator who can’t be bothered to pay $20 for a core revenue stream of their site.
How anyone can defend this type of behaviour is beyond me.
It is theft, the hidden cost in the licence agreement* states 2%, taking that up to %30 for no reason and with no warning based on some arbitrary 'black list' is theft.
At least the plugin guy was reasonable-ish. That does sounds like a really odd experience. It does pay to always check all of the dependencies you are using and their terms. When I was younger I got hit by limits when using a free tier of a service, but they just throttled us which lost us users.
The plugin guy can afford to be reasonable-ish. It reduces the likelihood of the scam being publicly disclosed, and I'd wager that 99% of people never notice the plugin is doing this.
Oh come on, it's not a scam and he's not stealing anything. It's clearly mentioned on the license and it's up to the users to go through it (like any other open-source plugin or software they use). At the end of the day the plugin creator was polite, understanding and returned money back even though he was not obliged to do so. It's a win-win situation as they clearly describe it, but the OP wasn't satisfied with the high (30%) percentage.
It looks to me that the plugin author isn't only trying to get the money he's owed from people who are trying to scam him. Which still isn't a great thing, especially since it can happen mistakenly, but it's at least a little more understandable.
In any scam there's a part where you cool off the mark so as to not have them go squealing to the cops. Maybe you give 'em some money back, maybe you teach them the lesson of how to bounce back after a loss. Google "cooling the mark out" to read some academic research on this.
Based on the comments I should make a left-pad and put in a random file 'if you use this, you need to give me you house and first born child'. Because appearantly whatever you put down is legal and enforceable.. shm..
Taking reveneu without a contract smells like fraud to me.
Readit News
I think it's clear the plugin author was/is happy to let the 2-30% stipulation fly under the radar and sit back and collect which doesn't sit great with me but also I kind of get it. I mean if you are going to take OS work and use it for your own gain (something I'm plenty guilty of myself I'll admit) then don't be surprised if not reading the license bites you in the butt.
In a perfect world OS devs wouldn't need to these methods to make it worth their time but we don't live in a such a world, people rarely donate to OS projects and expect issues/features to be added quickly and for free. People need money to exist and they don't owe you anything. Honestly if this plugin author had called out the 30% in their license I would say this blog author has no leg to stand on. As-is I'm glad the app developer got their money back and the plugin author should either stop charging more than 2% or update their license accordingly. But "stealing"? Too harsh, especially since you got your money back.
I don't think this is entirely kosher for a bunch of reasons, but I'm willing to believe that it was a naïve person doing something naïve after being burned by someone cheating him out of his cut, or something along those lines.
At any rate, since the author of this article was unaware of the 2%, it doesn't really matter if the 30% would have been mentioned or not. That they took any cut could have been clearer, perhaps – I don't know how it looked like before on that Ionic plugin site, but it's plenty clear now so that's a solved issue (if it was an issue to start with). That this was added after this exchange (and before it was published) without any pressure further demonstrates the plugin author is essentially acting in good faith.
Mistakes happen, but in this case, it's a conscious decision by the plugin author; I think stealing is the right word, especially when it turns out you've done it with thousands of apps
Either learn to read licenses, or have a list of approved licenses (MIT, GPL, etc.) and only use software thus licensed.
EDIT: What I mean above is the 2% which is specified in the “Licence Agreement” page – the article author is clearly considering this, too, to be “stealing”. Regarding the increase from 2% to 30%, that is way more questionable, and I do not defend it.
I don't think taking 2% is theft. Maybe it's a dark pattern, but it's definitely not theft. In the article, I say that I calmed down after explaining with 2%, which means my agreement with the situation.
The way the increase to 30% is made and the number of users with such a percentage says that the author deliberately increases the percentage without warning the user, which is theft
That said, if you really wanted to impress, you'd improve the visibility of your practices for each individual developer, by providing a dashboard that fully discloses revenue-over-time, along with proactive notifications when your terms change. The MVP here would be a single email sent when the 2% term changes.
This business model where the providing party retains the right to change terms arbitrarily has always concerned me, in the same way something like an indentured servitude contract would, and yet they are all too common. But its everywhere, and no self-interested business would take steps to reduce it's power against the counter-party. There is a whole set of problems here that neo-liberal capitalism not only cannot solve, but actually seem to make worse. It's easy to point the finger at a single dev, or a small team, and say "you're unethical!" but in truth I think the statement is more informed by the ability to identify the actor than the action itself, which is endemic. (To take two examples: variable rate mortgages, and credit card debt, neither of which are modeled by consumers and both of which are certainly gamed by the counter-party.)
So I just forked an older version of their code and ran from that. I also made a post telling the guy it was kinda shady, they didn't seem to care.
Deleted Comment
> If you have used this plugin for FREE but monetized more than $1000, you are also required to get a license, or share us some Ad traffic as stated in win-win partnership model below
> Ship our code with yours to end-user, no need paying a cent at all, instead, share 2 percent ad traffic, so that we can both benefit and cover our cost to maintain and enhance this project.
A page titled “License Agreement”, clearly linked from the home page.
(Regarding the 30%, I agree – this was questionable at best.)
So I there's no reason for the licensor to assume that the commercial offer was chosen and that the licensee agreed to that 2% withholding, much less a 30% one.
> Fork the source code and maintain it yourself (bug fix, any future changes on Cordova and SDK, integration support, etc.); see the open source project here: https://github.com/floatinghotpot/cordova-plugin-admob
Which I think it's clear that's not what happened here, the blog author was using AdMob Pro and thus unable to qualify for "Free and Open Source, no support".
OG plug-in author has a problem with people abusing license key system, builds in code to detect it. Disclaims it vaguely, OP gets bitten and has the gall to call it stealing. Author offers to help OP out, OP puts him on blast.
Zero sympathy, even at 30%.
Op called 2% stealing, 30% is for basically triggering the anti cheat. OP should have paid paid the license and read the rules.
>If use in commercial project, please get a license, or, you have monetized more than $1000 using this plugin, you are also required to either get a commercial license ($20). As a commercial customer, you will be supported with high priority, via private email or even Skype chat.
Which is nigh illegible.
Does anyone know what happens when someone publishes conflicting licenses?
That's unlikely to be legally enforceable on NPM, but they might honour takedowns anyway.
You just have to, you know, work
“Kindly reminder, do not use a fake license key or a license key from others, do not share your license key with others. Abuse of the license key may cause negative impact.”
Blogging dev was too cheap to just pay $20 for a license for code that would generate him money. THAT is really the bigger issue here, regardless of everything else, including the fact that he was in violation of the agreement, i.e., >$1,000 MRR.
Here's a little pro tip for everyone, don't cheap out on paying someone $20 for the work they do, when it will be generating you significantly more income.
Frankly, regardless of whether or not the plugin dev is sketchy or not, the blogger dev violated the terms of the agreement and seems rather ungrateful that he was given back what he should not have even gotten back.
It is theft, the hidden cost in the licence agreement* states 2%, taking that up to %30 for no reason and with no warning based on some arbitrary 'black list' is theft.
* as shady as that is
How anyone can think they're entitled to assume how it should run is ignorance sufficient to shred what remains of my humanity.
He didn't demand you give him money, he said if you ran his code, it will act as he intended.
You ran his code. It worked as intended.
Deleted Comment
I did not...
> He didn't demand you give him money, he said if you ran his code, it will act as he intended.
He did not...
He said it would act one way, then it secretly acted another against the contract that was entered in to
> It worked as intended.
It did not...
Even their staff admit they never intended to charge him 30%
EDIT: The percentage increase from 2% to 30% was not posted; I withdraw my opinion on that.
Taking reveneu without a contract smells like fraud to me.
Yeah, anon is the enemy for wanting to get paid