That’s a fine perspective, but the whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes. The license could easily say “if you make more than $500M, you must pay me $1M”. Why is that not an acceptable solution here?
That’s a fine perspective, but the whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes. The license could easily say “if you make more than $500M, you must pay me $1M”. Why is that not an acceptable solution here?
An interesting approach is the dual GPL and commercial license. This is used for example by the CGAL geometry library [1]. In this case, a user of the library has the choice of either paying for the library, or open sourcing the code of their software.
[1]: https://doc.cgal.org/latest/Manual/license.html
Have you ever taken part in a legal dispute? The "whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes" sounds like someone who has not.
The easiest, most "acceptable solution" is to obviously throw the oss maintainer who made your hundreds of millions possible a bone. It's not that complicated. Why you find this such an odd notion I find rather strange.
I find it strange you’re arguing for something beyond the licensing terms. Imagine if companies were run that way. "Hey, we did an especially good job mowing your lawn, so please pay us double. You have a rich house, you can afford it. Oh and if you don’t pay us, you’re a bad person and should feel bad."
This is exactly the same argument: you’re saying the open source maintainer who knowingly released their code as open source (and got famous for it being open source) should be paid way more than they asked for ($0) based on vibes. Society doesn’t work that way. Companies don’t work that way. And it’s baffling people are saying open source should work that way. He already got the fame and free publicity from being the maker of Box2D, which he wouldn’t have gotten unless he released it for free. You can’t get the major benefits of that and then ask for a million dollars because "kindness".
If you want to be professional, keep it professional. Otherwise everyone here saying that the company should feel bad are fooling themselves. You’re owed what you ask for.
Tipping culture has obscured this somewhat. You’re supposed to give more money if they do a really good job. But it’s that way so that the business can pay employees less money. Tipping, like identity theft, is one of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time: you’re considered a bad person if you don’t tip, and that it’s your fault if your bank fails to verify your identity. Both of these are bogus.
I tip, because 15% is the normalized rate. But it shouldn’t be our problem. It’s the company’s problem to pay their employees. And it shouldn’t be the business’s problem that they made a lot of money using something that was knowingly given away for $0.
You sound cheap and a little scroogey. I’d buy you a drink if we were at a bar, help you relax a bit :)
He didn’t ask for it, as far as I can tell. It looks like a Rovio customer asked how they treat downstream partners. I think that’s allowed under capitalism.
Be that as it may, plenty of engineers don’t understand the full ramifications of their open source license choice. Undoubtedly some, if not many, regret it afterwards. Companies change the terms or revoke licenses all the time. But, the dumb, naive engineer that gave their work away didn’t pay a lawyer to advise how to best give their work away, so screw ‘em.
If I made a boatload of money on the back of someone else’s work, I’d reward them. You wouldn’t. Neither one of us is legally required to. I’m not fond of taking advantage of people that don’t realize their worth. And I think the whole open source thing works best giving and taking, whether that’s code, money, or time.
But, this cutthroat approach to open source also hasn’t always been the societal norm. IBM and others made sizable donations to groups like the Apache Software Foundation back in the 90s and 00s and were more or less expected to do so. It seemed to me more a case of both sides agreeing a bunch of money could be spent on lawyers to iron out whatever terms or we could keep the licensing simple and have a gentlemen’s agreement on how to conduct ourselves. I’ve never heard of the Box2D guy so I hope that fame was worth something. It sounds a lot like being paid in exposure.
To your point, I don’t know how to codify a “leave a penny, take a penny” approach to open source and really don’t have the inclination to spend either the time or the money on a lawyer to figure that out. So, nowadays I just don’t release open source code anymore or, if I do, it’s AGPL just so I can protect my interests. I don’t think I’m alone in this. The camaraderie aspect of it has been supplanted by maximum value extraction and I don’t think that’s really sustainable. But between LLMs and an endless source of naive optimists, maybe this is fine.
> Imagine if companies were run that way
oh no, won't someone think of the companies
"Society doesn't work that way" from the guy who says "the whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes".
Ok buddy. Why is tipping the analogous model? Do the economics fit at all? Why is it tipping that is teaching us about the economics of oss? I also don't give the grocery store extra money just for "kindness". Why not go with that one? You think an oss maintainer reflecting on someone making hundreds of millions with their work is analogous to a server waiting to see what you write down on the check? Is that it? Who is the business (not) paying the server in this case? The oss maintainer is both the emotionally manipulative server and the benefiting business owner? Because "exposure"? Or are you saying they are stupid for not acting more like a business in the first place, meaning the two should become the one? Why are you putting a human in front of me and making me come to some sort of pseudo-moral judgement? What does my contract say? Is that your point?
I just have to level with you and say your argument is deeply unimpressive. You also repeat maxims like "you're owed what you ask for" as if this is self evident. Then you call other people fools and say what other people can and can't do, all from this position of supposed hard-nosed knowledge of the the real world and how things work when it's pretty clear you have no idea what you're talking about. Trying to go from grandstanding about tipping culture (go off) to some self evident law about how humans should share rewards in something like oss is not obvious, despite your brilliant legal and economic insights.
And feeling bad is not something you can legalize your way out of. Another comment already touched on this. You don't seem to understand the point being made. No one is claiming there is a legal obligation or there was some company to company transaction. You know not everything in life is a contract, right? Morals and law are not the same. Your inability to acknowledge this basic fact feels pretty antisocial to me. I'm not really impressed by your shallow attempt at diagnosing society, or whatever your move from tipping to identity theft was supposed to prove... it seems to me underlying your replies is a resistance to feeling guilt. Not to psychoanalyze you but frankly, the degree to which you don't seem to understand how simple this is and instead seem to think this is some kind of emotional scam (why are you making me feel bad about giving you pennies on the dollar when the contract said it was free) makes me, at the risk of violating the HN equivalent of the Goldwater rule, simply wonder who hurt you.