The Dark Side of Open Source // What really happened to Faker.js?

the dark side of opensource PolyMC - Alternative minecraft launcher Thorium - Web browser Faker.js - JavaScript package

Honestly, best youtube channel out there. Thanks.

Sadly now days there are a lot of scummy companies (startups) who use open source to get a lot of people to playtest their product, and when they have a decent product they go closed source and you have to pay to keep using it or are left with the option to use the open source version that never gets updated anymore by the core team. And they say stuff like we are still open source look we have this unmaintained demo version for you that is riddled with bugs and will work on nobodies machine unless you recode half of it. I am really disgusted by such companies.

Great that you mentioned Aaron and Ross!

I completely understand the emotions of Faker.js's author. Imagine you create a library that Facebook, Amazon, or Google uses everyday to make billions while you are for example struggling for a decent quality life at home, or you don't even get any recognition! It's like somebody pooping from standing on your shoulders.

I'm really grateful to these developers for making these so much useful projects for us. I see a lot of packages when I install ask for a support in terms of funds, makes me really sad. Unfortunately I'm not in that position when my skills can pay me so that I can do a little contribution towards these awesome guys. May be they should use a filter so that if a company is using the library then it's charged but not for individual users.

The sad reality is - that was clear right from the beginning that it will end up like this. OSS community thought that they could change it by being positive, but reality is - companies will only pay when they need to. Why would they pay for something that is free?

Aaron didn't kill himself.

I was deeply saddened when I found out more about Aaron Swartz. 😔

I work for a pretty big company where we use a lot of open source code for our customers. The way I give back to these projects is by engaging and contributing to the project, I've also tried to make sure we donate and support the ones that want it. I feel that's the least you can do to help the thousands of people spending their free time to make your day easier!

How weird, I was listening to an audiobook about this just last night, then this pops up. What you didn’t mention is that he didn’t actually distribute anything, they went after him for a life sentence for just downloading documents he actually had legal access to. Maybe he would have, which I support (look up where they source this data from, and how restricted it is, nobody wins but corporates), and this is another case of the justice system acting like civil terrorists. Btw, on my open source projects I have my own license that flat out lists companies and governments I don’t like by name and say they can’t use it. Try it. It’s satisfying.

I work for a company as the main dev. We use open source code/libraries. We contribute bug reports and provide our internal fixes whenever possible, it's not uncommon for later updates to include improved fixes. Whatever small package that does not include trade secrets or value added piece of code, we publish opensource. We use licenses (MIT or custom) to segregate code that we let anyone reuse commercially and that we restrict to personal use. Our time invested publishing and communicating with the authors or maintainers of OSS has given us results manifold. Most common example is to have one staff spend ca 2 hours building a replication scenario for an issue, writing a clear and comprehensive bug report, and setting up a hot fix branch/PR, which results in 3-4 maintainers/users looking into the issue for hours, figuring a proper fix, testing the fix and releasing an update, at no additional cost for us. I don't understand why bigger corporations do not see the value in that nor consider providing financial support to libraries upon which they rely.

We need a longer video on this topic

Open source community is like a family of developers they work together, they enjoy together and give product that is beyond the capability of any company while cooperates never miss a chance to steal their work It would really good if someday someone finally stands against it and spread the value of open softwares

This issue is so rampant now that some big vulnerabilities are emerging for fortune 500 companies, because the repo is no longer maintained, and developers have gone cold turkey. Its sad that companies like Microsoft ( all others) who don't batter an eyelid to buy a gaming company for 65 billion never both to pay the these developer anything while using their code. The adge remains true, if you are good at something never do it for free !

I realized this while making a few small projects last year. I had them all under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 instead.

Ulbricht solicited hit men and paid them. He's hardly an angel.

I think about this often. Off the top of my head, the solution is to take the modern freemium model and adapt it. Something like; this is free for the first 1M uses/users, but above that you enter licensing. The openness and prevalence is what shoots it to fame (having community and docs), which is great, but once money (value) is being created, it's time to split that up a little. In an imaginary world, it would be nice if there was just a tariff/tax, where whatever your net profits are get divided up and a portion will always be split amongst all of the software that makes your work possible. That seems most fair, and how we emulate a system like that I'm not sure.

I remember the CEO of a large gaming company once whining that an opensource Clojure library that his whole company depended on went away because the developer stopped contributing so he had to get 200 programmers retrained on a new framework. And I was thinking, how about you pay that dev 1 person's salary to continue working on that project so you don't have to retrain 200 programmers. And this is just ONE company.

Fireship vids are so🔥thanks for the content!