> Subsequently, I discovered that certain individuals had stolen the application and were selling it on various platforms, including the Windows Store, under a different name without crediting me as the original developer... Efforts to reach out to Microsoft Store proved to be largely unfruitful for nearly a year...
Lack of proper curation and human communication are among the major reasons to hate app stores.
Free app stores like in Ubuntu often ship versions not polished enough because nobody has enough spare time to really care without being paid, commercial app stores like of Microsoft and Google just don't care and feel Ok welcoming all sorts of scammers as long as they pay the rent, all they apparently do is nuking accounts of good people for no clear reason.
Note that Captura being MIT-licensed means that the authors would only have had to hide a copy of the license in some "About..." page hidden in some submenu. It's not like they have to credit the author on their front page.
And it's completely legal to resell MIT-licensed code (of course with the attribution).
Sure, yet people like this would often create multiple ad-sponsored, data-stealing and paid clones of some version of the same free app under different brands, give zero fucks about bugs and mentioning the author, buy some 5-star reviews from bot farms and enjoy a steady stream of "passive income" from non-techies clicking without thinking. They hardly ever care to even look what the original license is, it could as well be GPL for the same result. As we can see here, some would even bully the author to force him remove the source code.
> Note that Captura being MIT-licensed means that the authors would only have had to hide a copy of the license in some "About..." page hidden in some submenu. It's not like they have to credit the author on their front page.
I do not think they even have to do that, do they?
All that is required is "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." which sounds like the file with the license text has to be somewhere in the distributed software.
> Despite Captura being licensed under the MIT license, which allows for the application to be sold as long as proper attribution is given, these individuals had removed all license information from the application.
I always saw creating open source code akin to being a plumber or carpenter who applied their hard earned knowledge and worked for free in homes they chose.
A plumber who works for free is a rare thing to see, however in software it seems lots of people _expect_ it to be created like that. Not uncommon at all to see comments in HN saying that "oh well if it's not OSS I won't try this software you're showing off". Try saying to a carpenter that if they don't give away their new chairs for free, you wouldn't even start to think of getting one! :)
But then, if you care about the "right to repair" (so to speak) of your software, well at least use a strong copyleft, not a permissive license that basically grant the permission to "steal".
> A plumber who works for free is a rare thing to see, however in software it seems lots of people _expect_ it to be created like that. Not uncommon at all to see comments in HN saying that "oh well if it's not OSS I won't try this software you're showing off". Try saying to a carpenter that if they don't give away their new chairs for free, you wouldn't even start to think of getting one! :)
A big difference is plumbers use interchangeable parts and you are mostly paying for their time and skill. With closed source software, you are getting a blackbox that you can't extend beyond what the creators allow and the creators will only extend so long as they are in business. After that it might still be usefull but a liability or can be useless.
> Not uncommon at all to see comments in HN saying that "oh well if it's not OSS I won't try this software you're showing off". Try saying to a carpenter that if they don't give away their new chairs for free, you wouldn't even start to think of getting one!
Apples to oranges; if a carpenter tried to sell me a chair that could take actions against my best interests and that could just disappear or stop working one day or that I wasn't allowed to repair myself, I also wouldn't even start to think of getting one. I avoid proprietary software because it has a long history of going out of its way to screw users over; that it often costs $0 is secondary.
The way the Captura author did it sounds like charity indeed. But IMO they did it wrong (and that's unfortunate for them).
You should open source your code if you don't see a benefit in keeping it closed (usually "you won't sell it" is a good reason). Then maybe some people will contribute to it and improve it: bugfixes, new features, etc. That's great! But every single line you merge becomes your responsibility, so you should only merge it if it improves your project in your opinion. Maybe the feature is great but it is complex, and you don't want to maintain that: it's okay, don't merge it and let the author fork!
Do NOT implement feature requests for free, because this is charity. Either you help people contribute it or you clearly tell them that you won't merge that (but that they can implement it in their fork). Unless they are willing to pay for your work, in which case it's not charity anymore. And because you get paid to implement it does not mean you have to support it for 10 years: once it's implement it, they can fork the project with their feature, and you don't owe them anything anymore.
I still think it’s about ego as well. If you happen to release a piece of software that is used massively, then you become a “rock star” (well, at least in the scope of the software engineering world). That means, you may not need to work for others anymore (if you get sponsors), or that you boost your employability by 10x (“Oh, he’s the author of X!”), etc.
So there are many devs out there that want to win the jackpot. I don’t blame them.
> I still think it’s about ego as well. [...] So there are many devs out there that want to win the jackpot. I don’t blame them.
What I understand here is that you don't contribute to open source projects, but you think that you can understand the motivation of those who do. Let me be honest: I think you don't.
There are many reasons to contribute to open source, and those who believe they will get a salary from sponsors or become famous are naive beginners.
Captura is a great piece of software - I've used it for years, and I still use the latest release today.
It is a complete, all-in-one tool - very straightforward UI, lots of formats supported (especially through ffmpeg integration) and very easy to use in terms of window or screen area selection for recording - and more importantly for my use-cases, it's portable (no install, no admin rights needed). Really a great example of what's possible in that space.
I didn't participate in the project, but I've checked out the PRs and issues list every now and then and it's been frustrating seeing the author struggle against the store republishing issues for literal years. The issue tracking that (#405[1]) is not a happy read for sure.
The fact that Captura's MIT licensing gave effectively a "license to steal" to people and that it's so easy to publish something and sell it on the Microsoft store didn't mesh well.
I've however been really disappointed by Microsoft's non-response through all of that republishing debacle. Republishing free software is a difficult topic to get right for edge-cases, sure, but the Captura case was obvious to rule on and Microsoft did nothing for years - it was clear that there was no process for this kind of scenario, and that the solution was to do nothing. It took the author taking down the project for them to react, and even then I'm convinced that's only because whoever handled that case assumed that the republisher was the one taking it down, not the project author.
Years ago, I made a significant piece of money with a game on the Windows Mobile app store. I'm French and, at that time, was unable to get the right documents to receive my money on my bank account. It was as if the Microsoft store was only conceived for US citizens. I kept trying to contact anyone at Microsoft, using various communication channels but received 0 response and the money kept growing.
Fortunately, I won a Microsoft chalenge about apps development. I had the opportunity to go to Seattle and assist to the next Microsoft mobile OS (Windows Phone). At the presentation, I took the opportunity, during a coffee break, to explain my situation to the presenter. He was so sorry and gave me an operational contact. Days later everything was resolved and I finally received my money.
Lesson learned: Microsoft is a huge bureaucracy but you can manage to find real involved and competent people. As a French person, I know how to deal with bureaucracy: avoid it if you can. I switched to other development platform and never go back to Microsoft.
Oh man, sorry to hear about the dev burnout. But what do you expect? We made software worthless by giving away ready products for free. It’s not a library for other devs to use, so we can all „stand on the shoulder of giants”. Stuff like this should be paid from the start.
1) Someone paying for my product means that they now expect support and maintenance for me. When I release my software under a Free license, I release it "AS IS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED", which I think is the best part of Free Software. You are responsible for using my software.
2) As soon as you start accepting compensation for your project, you now have to deal with a whole bunch of legal overhead, taxes etc.
I think the main issue is people releasing their software under a license which they don't necessarily agree with beyond a certain point.
In worst case you give a refund if the software doesn't work as promised for the customer. You're not forced to fix bugs or problems that are beyond your capability or interest.
Taxes are not a big deal and can be ignored until you start making decent money on the business and can afford your accountant. The taxman understands and is not going after people in the starting phase.
> I think the main issue is people releasing their software under a license which they don't necessarily agree with beyond a certain point.
It's a ego thing then. Anybody doing free/open source software should make peace with the fact that their work is given for free. Imagine Linus Torvalds complaining that people are selling his work.
what... No, what should happen is that we should dispense of the expectations that anyone should provide maintenance and support for free.
You solve your problem and share the code for everyone to use. They can fork and change it to solve their own problems, you've finished working on it a while ago.
That's why it's either AGPLv3 or copyrighted all rights reserved. "Permissive" anything is just unconditional transfer of wealth from well meaning developers straight into the pockets of corporations.
The only question seemingly no one has solved is: how?
...especially so that everybody wins - individuals and corporations, benefitting from said software, the maintainers _and_ their collaborators (sidenote: that's something that kinda grinds my gears - sponsored projects receive all the dough, with their various collaborators essentially working for free??) etc. etc.
I think a lot of maintainers just aren't asking for them with any sort of clarity because it's uncomfortable and you're kinda putting yourself out there. It seems pretty common that you kinda have to go look for ways of funding a project, and it's like buried in the back of the website somewhere.
Willingness to donate also seems to really depend on the type of project. It appears easier to get institutional support, or individual "whale" donations, if your ambitions are a bit loftier than if you're building small individual widgets or libraries that do one thing well.
I think people are perhaps more willing to pay for what a thing might become than what it is today, when it's more like an investment than a payment for goods delivered.
I think it shows exactly what kind of people FOSS users are. Big on talking about their freedoms and rights and how they're oppressed and victims of everybody else and everything else. But in reality they just want free stuff.
Small time developers should come over to the Mac side of things, where users are happy to pay a fair price for apps of any size, and especially boutique apps. That's how I as a user respect the developer: by paying for his work.
That said, a lot of open source software faces issues with funding and also developer burnout, or something other reasons for a project just... ceasing. Like there's this lovely piece of backup software called BackupPC, that covered all of my needs, but there hasn't been a new release in forever: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc
In cases where nobody cares enough to make forks and keep it alive it just... fizzles out.
This might sound a bit off, but I sometimes wish there was a feature where you could say: "Hey, I'm willing to pay X$ for the maintainer of the software to address this issue on GitHub or do a release, I've placed the amount of money in escrow and it will be released to the dev upon completion." With enough people pooling resources together, how much the community actually cares would be quite obvious and the devs could actually benefit from OSS. Donations are too unreliable and detached from the units of work done (I've done some donations in the past, but would do more monetary contributions for specific issues). If streamlined enough, it wouldn't be different from buying the developer a beer, or the equivalent of Patreon or Kofi.
Why don’t you contact the develop(s) and see if they’ll add it for $X?I did that once for an open source charting library that I was using. I really wanted a different graph than one of the defaults that was close but not quite what I wanted. I gave him ~$300 and he added it and emailed me later and told me he took his family on a nice day trip/lunch to some museums with the money. It can happen.
If you think money will motivate the dev, why not lead with that in your issue? I don't think offering to pay money is against TOS.
However, there is a large number of FOSS devs that don't give two shits about your money. Oh hey! Isn't that nice? Doing something you love, and something that brings value to your fellow human, without it being tainted by money?
Some people view the need of money as the problem, and the lack of it involved in their project a very conscious decision.
> I don't think offering to pay money is against TOS.
Yeah, that's why I think a bot for aggregating/suggesting financial support would be a good idea. Then again, when npm package maintainers were looking for donations and output that in the console, there was a lot of backlash, so I suspect similar opposition would happen to a bot commenting: "Hey, this project accepts financial support. If you'd like to indicate that this issue matters to you, you can optionally put money in a reward pool for this issue here: some_link. Money in the pool so far: X$."
> However, there is a large number of FOSS devs that don't give two shits about your money.
That's fair, but definitely isn't the situation for many, especially those who don't have cushy day jobs and are either financially struggling or just feeling the pressure of our current economy.
The whole log4j debacle also comes to mind, summed up by this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/
> Some people view the need of money as the problem, and the lack of it involved in their project a very conscious decision.
That is admirable, but you can't eat praise. Either way, that is their choice.
I just feel that if there are a lot of companies extracting money from people with disposable income in the form of mobile games, gacha games and microtransactions wherever you can, as well as if there's a commonplace tipping culture for restaurants in many countries, might as well take the same principles and apply them to get some money in the hands of deserving developers.
I'm not saying that it'd necessarily decrease burnout or solve the other issues about open source, but at the very least it'd give some financial stability. If people aren't urged towards that, very few will donate of their own volition, call it psychology.
Readit News
Lack of proper curation and human communication are among the major reasons to hate app stores.
Free app stores like in Ubuntu often ship versions not polished enough because nobody has enough spare time to really care without being paid, commercial app stores like of Microsoft and Google just don't care and feel Ok welcoming all sorts of scammers as long as they pay the rent, all they apparently do is nuking accounts of good people for no clear reason.
And it's completely legal to resell MIT-licensed code (of course with the attribution).
I do not think they even have to do that, do they?
All that is required is "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." which sounds like the file with the license text has to be somewhere in the distributed software.
> Despite Captura being licensed under the MIT license, which allows for the application to be sold as long as proper attribution is given, these individuals had removed all license information from the application.
Writing code for free is charity.
I always saw creating open source code akin to being a plumber or carpenter who applied their hard earned knowledge and worked for free in homes they chose.
A plumber who works for free is a rare thing to see, however in software it seems lots of people _expect_ it to be created like that. Not uncommon at all to see comments in HN saying that "oh well if it's not OSS I won't try this software you're showing off". Try saying to a carpenter that if they don't give away their new chairs for free, you wouldn't even start to think of getting one! :)
But then, if you care about the "right to repair" (so to speak) of your software, well at least use a strong copyleft, not a permissive license that basically grant the permission to "steal".
A big difference is plumbers use interchangeable parts and you are mostly paying for their time and skill. With closed source software, you are getting a blackbox that you can't extend beyond what the creators allow and the creators will only extend so long as they are in business. After that it might still be usefull but a liability or can be useless.
I don't mind sharing software that I wrote for myself if it's useful to other people.
Apples to oranges; if a carpenter tried to sell me a chair that could take actions against my best interests and that could just disappear or stop working one day or that I wasn't allowed to repair myself, I also wouldn't even start to think of getting one. I avoid proprietary software because it has a long history of going out of its way to screw users over; that it often costs $0 is secondary.
You should open source your code if you don't see a benefit in keeping it closed (usually "you won't sell it" is a good reason). Then maybe some people will contribute to it and improve it: bugfixes, new features, etc. That's great! But every single line you merge becomes your responsibility, so you should only merge it if it improves your project in your opinion. Maybe the feature is great but it is complex, and you don't want to maintain that: it's okay, don't merge it and let the author fork!
Do NOT implement feature requests for free, because this is charity. Either you help people contribute it or you clearly tell them that you won't merge that (but that they can implement it in their fork). Unless they are willing to pay for your work, in which case it's not charity anymore. And because you get paid to implement it does not mean you have to support it for 10 years: once it's implement it, they can fork the project with their feature, and you don't owe them anything anymore.
Your responsibility to whom?
I can see why people would sometimes program for fun.
So there are many devs out there that want to win the jackpot. I don’t blame them.
What I understand here is that you don't contribute to open source projects, but you think that you can understand the motivation of those who do. Let me be honest: I think you don't.
There are many reasons to contribute to open source, and those who believe they will get a salary from sponsors or become famous are naive beginners.
It is a complete, all-in-one tool - very straightforward UI, lots of formats supported (especially through ffmpeg integration) and very easy to use in terms of window or screen area selection for recording - and more importantly for my use-cases, it's portable (no install, no admin rights needed). Really a great example of what's possible in that space.
I didn't participate in the project, but I've checked out the PRs and issues list every now and then and it's been frustrating seeing the author struggle against the store republishing issues for literal years. The issue tracking that (#405[1]) is not a happy read for sure.
The fact that Captura's MIT licensing gave effectively a "license to steal" to people and that it's so easy to publish something and sell it on the Microsoft store didn't mesh well.
I've however been really disappointed by Microsoft's non-response through all of that republishing debacle. Republishing free software is a difficult topic to get right for edge-cases, sure, but the Captura case was obvious to rule on and Microsoft did nothing for years - it was clear that there was no process for this kind of scenario, and that the solution was to do nothing. It took the author taking down the project for them to react, and even then I'm convinced that's only because whoever handled that case assumed that the republisher was the one taking it down, not the project author.
[1] https://github.com/MathewSachin/Captura/issues/405
Fortunately, I won a Microsoft chalenge about apps development. I had the opportunity to go to Seattle and assist to the next Microsoft mobile OS (Windows Phone). At the presentation, I took the opportunity, during a coffee break, to explain my situation to the presenter. He was so sorry and gave me an operational contact. Days later everything was resolved and I finally received my money.
Lesson learned: Microsoft is a huge bureaucracy but you can manage to find real involved and competent people. As a French person, I know how to deal with bureaucracy: avoid it if you can. I switched to other development platform and never go back to Microsoft.
1) Someone paying for my product means that they now expect support and maintenance for me. When I release my software under a Free license, I release it "AS IS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED", which I think is the best part of Free Software. You are responsible for using my software.
2) As soon as you start accepting compensation for your project, you now have to deal with a whole bunch of legal overhead, taxes etc.
I think the main issue is people releasing their software under a license which they don't necessarily agree with beyond a certain point.
In worst case you give a refund if the software doesn't work as promised for the customer. You're not forced to fix bugs or problems that are beyond your capability or interest.
Taxes are not a big deal and can be ignored until you start making decent money on the business and can afford your accountant. The taxman understands and is not going after people in the starting phase.
It's a ego thing then. Anybody doing free/open source software should make peace with the fact that their work is given for free. Imagine Linus Torvalds complaining that people are selling his work.
You solve your problem and share the code for everyone to use. They can fork and change it to solve their own problems, you've finished working on it a while ago.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120620103603/http://zedshaw.co...
> Why I (A/L)GPL
> I want people to appreciate the work I’ve done and the value of what I’ve made.
> Not pass on by waving “sucker” as they drive their fancy cars.
https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/
And yes, being paid should always be an option.
The only question seemingly no one has solved is: how?
...especially so that everybody wins - individuals and corporations, benefitting from said software, the maintainers _and_ their collaborators (sidenote: that's something that kinda grinds my gears - sponsored projects receive all the dough, with their various collaborators essentially working for free??) etc. etc.
Folks are just ignorant of licensing the majority of the time. GPL is why Linux is still around :)
I think a lot of maintainers just aren't asking for them with any sort of clarity because it's uncomfortable and you're kinda putting yourself out there. It seems pretty common that you kinda have to go look for ways of funding a project, and it's like buried in the back of the website somewhere.
Willingness to donate also seems to really depend on the type of project. It appears easier to get institutional support, or individual "whale" donations, if your ambitions are a bit loftier than if you're building small individual widgets or libraries that do one thing well.
I think people are perhaps more willing to pay for what a thing might become than what it is today, when it's more like an investment than a payment for goods delivered.
Small time developers should come over to the Mac side of things, where users are happy to pay a fair price for apps of any size, and especially boutique apps. That's how I as a user respect the developer: by paying for his work.
That said, a lot of open source software faces issues with funding and also developer burnout, or something other reasons for a project just... ceasing. Like there's this lovely piece of backup software called BackupPC, that covered all of my needs, but there hasn't been a new release in forever: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc
What's worse, sometimes the community is just left with no status updates, and don't even know whether a project is abandoned: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/issues/518
In cases where nobody cares enough to make forks and keep it alive it just... fizzles out.
This might sound a bit off, but I sometimes wish there was a feature where you could say: "Hey, I'm willing to pay X$ for the maintainer of the software to address this issue on GitHub or do a release, I've placed the amount of money in escrow and it will be released to the dev upon completion." With enough people pooling resources together, how much the community actually cares would be quite obvious and the devs could actually benefit from OSS. Donations are too unreliable and detached from the units of work done (I've done some donations in the past, but would do more monetary contributions for specific issues). If streamlined enough, it wouldn't be different from buying the developer a beer, or the equivalent of Patreon or Kofi.
However, there is a large number of FOSS devs that don't give two shits about your money. Oh hey! Isn't that nice? Doing something you love, and something that brings value to your fellow human, without it being tainted by money?
Some people view the need of money as the problem, and the lack of it involved in their project a very conscious decision.
Yeah, that's why I think a bot for aggregating/suggesting financial support would be a good idea. Then again, when npm package maintainers were looking for donations and output that in the console, there was a lot of backlash, so I suspect similar opposition would happen to a bot commenting: "Hey, this project accepts financial support. If you'd like to indicate that this issue matters to you, you can optionally put money in a reward pool for this issue here: some_link. Money in the pool so far: X$."
> However, there is a large number of FOSS devs that don't give two shits about your money.
That's fair, but definitely isn't the situation for many, especially those who don't have cushy day jobs and are either financially struggling or just feeling the pressure of our current economy.
Articles like this come to mind: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html
The whole log4j debacle also comes to mind, summed up by this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/
> Some people view the need of money as the problem, and the lack of it involved in their project a very conscious decision.
That is admirable, but you can't eat praise. Either way, that is their choice.
I just feel that if there are a lot of companies extracting money from people with disposable income in the form of mobile games, gacha games and microtransactions wherever you can, as well as if there's a commonplace tipping culture for restaurants in many countries, might as well take the same principles and apply them to get some money in the hands of deserving developers.
I'm not saying that it'd necessarily decrease burnout or solve the other issues about open source, but at the very least it'd give some financial stability. If people aren't urged towards that, very few will donate of their own volition, call it psychology.