On Twitter, he claims that he was recently made homeless due to an apartment fire, and asks the community to send funds to help him avoid homelessness, which seems reasonable enough. He later goes on to describe "fake news written by the NY Post." I searched for this, and found an article that might be the article he describes (timing fits) [0]
Pretty crazy story, all in all!
He seems to be in some pretty dire straits, and is reacting to the perceived grievance of others profiting off of his work. All in all, I don't think this is the best way to handle the situation, although building some kind of SaaS API is probably not really possible for something that can be trivially implemented and operated locally. However, many other SaaS APIs have seemed equally trivial in the past and have been extremely successful, so it still might be a useful avenue to explore if he can sort out his legal troubles...
If the police would ransack my family home after a fire you could probably write the same article. Charred RPi's and lots of computer parts, enough wiring for a new house, lots of chemicals (cleaners, fertilizers, other chemical agents with regular gardening use cases), ultimate survival guide and related parts ("This guy was prepping for something!"). The naming of suspects is just adding insult to injury. If he's in good faith... Anyone could lose it after a house fire plus being named a 'unabomber' by your neighbours.
Emotional distress seems pretty normal after your house burns down and there's plenty of people in our community with hobbies that would be considered odd. Naming suspects in these cases seems so weird from a non-US perspective, there's not even been a court case.
This is terrible. All the news are based on speculation, but they plastered his very-Googlable-name everywhere, only making it harder for him to get a job now.
I honestly can't see anything positive about those articles existing before there's a proper court case.
I never understood the need to name suspects - address and all - in this country.
In my home country suspects that are (or are about to be) charged and convicted with a crime have their last name abbreviated (e.g. Paul S.), which seems completely reasonable to me. You're innocent until proven guilty, for one. But even if you're guilty and convicted, your punishment should be limited to whatever the judge rules it should be.
I don't see the need for public shaming beyond whatever punishment they get in court should they be convicted. When someone is released after a prison sentence they have a right to resume their life. They did their time, after all.
Sorry if I sound like I'm rambling a bit, English is not my native language.
It's about retribution and the idea that lawyers can influence the justice system and let "bad guys" go free. A lot of the states with lax laws around naming people accused of crimes are the same ones still dishing out the death penalty.
>Naming suspects in these cases seems so weird from a non-US perspective, there's not even been a court case.
As I understand it, the original reason for this is to prevent the police from simply making people disappear. It's a public check on what the police and government do to people.
That police should not make people disappear from their families without proper noticing, it would be a starter. I'm not from the USA but I think I can already guess who usually suddenly go missing because the police got them.
I agree it's terrible that the papers named him so early, and I do think we should give him the benefit of the doubt, but given the information out there right now, there is a reasonable chance he actually was making a bomb. It seems to me like people are willing to jump to the opposite conclusion simply because he's "one of us". Let the investigation play its course.
> It seems to me like people are willing to jump to the opposite conclusion simply because he's "one of us".
Because many of us have our own collection of weird oddities. I literally have cannon fuse sitting on the shelf behind me, that I got to make my own smoke bombs/devices (just sugar and potassium nitrate, nothing insane or dangerous). I would take a hard look at the worst thing someone could accuse you of building using the materials you have in your house. If you have any metal piping sitting around, and a nail or screw, that could be turned into a primitive gun. If you have metal piping and anything that burns very quickly like gunpowder, that's a pipe bomb (or pressure cooker). If you have a propane grill and a gun (or anything that could be used as a detonator), that propane tank could cause some serious damage.
I'll grant you, ammonium nitrate isn't a terribly common substance to have around an apartment. I still don't think it's very compelling evidence that he was building a bomb, and weaker evidence that if he was building a bomb, it was to hurt people. Maybe he was just trying to make his own fireworks. He shouldn't be doing that in an apartment, cuz risk of accidental explosions, but it seems hasty to start painting him as a domestic terrorist.
The reason why presumption of innocence is so important is, you don't need a smoke bomb making materials to get the public to think someone is a bomb maker.
Are we forgetting the time a splayed out alarm clock became a national scandal?
You could go into someone's home, pull out a Raspberry PI and some loose jumpers and hold up something that the average citizen thinks of as proof this person is some sort of mainframe hacking nutjob anarchist.
(And more importantly, there are police out there right now who would jump to the same conclusions. See a simple hobbyist electronics bench and take it as something nefarious.)
That's why you don't go around presuming people are guilty of things.
You've made the point about the clock several times, but it's kind of dishonest. Anyone who actually takes a look at the photos of what the "clock" looks like will immediately think it looks like a bomb. Now imagine ANYone, literally anyone, doesn't matter what race or what skin color, taking that around school and showing it off to teachers or other random people who won't know any better when they see it and get spooked, and for good reason. It could've been the last thing they ever see. They are lucky it was just some kid's joke clock this time.
You're clearly missing the point, if you've read so many of my comments then you've seen my point about the raspberry pi...
The point is laypeople don't know what bombs or basic electronics look like. And why should they when there are pictures of TV shows using CPU coolers to represent bombs and computer power supplies to represent hard drives?
> Anyone who actually takes a look at the photos of what the "clock" looks like will immediately think it looks like a bomb
Kind of makes my point. You realize the thing was in a pencil box, not some full size briefcase? The most common image used:
doesn't actually convey the actual scale of it, the thing was barely larger than the original alarm and maybe an inch thick.
If you found this in a train unattended it'd be one thing, but the student says it's an alarm clock, anyone with a modicum of electronics knowledge would immediately look at it and say "yes that's an alarm clock". Which is exactly what both teachers did.
No one ever thought it was an actual bomb, the confusion was the intent behind it since Texas has a law about hoax bombs that treats them seriously based on intent not just appearance.
-
And more generally I bring it up because it should show, laypeople are easy to convince of guilt if your standards are literally adding "allegedly" to every claim.
People in general are vastly overestimate their own reliability and underestimate their suggestibility. It takes a few weasel words to fool people into creating alternate realities so far and away from reality they almost seem absurd compared to the truth, yet they're absolutely convicted about them.
See, here's the thing. If I make comments implicitly about going to shoot up the neighborhood school, even though I didn't do it yet, do you presume me innocent and leave me alone? No, it's going to be investigated and I'll likely get a nice greeting from some men in black soon after.
This wasn't some genius, novel clock that kid invented. He put the internals of a clock into a very specific kind of pencil case to bring around school to show people until it was confiscated by a teacher due to the very fact that it looked like a bomb. So don't tell me that no one thought it was an actual bomb. That doesn't matter. It's not the best example for what you want to say about presumption of innocence - which I agree with you on by the way.
> If I make comments implicitly about going to shoot up the neighborhood school, even though I didn't do it yet, do you presume me innocent and leave me alone?
If you don't make those comments to me, and a news story is making the call that your comments were about shooting up a school, I'll presume you're innocent.
That's literally what this is about. You're not an investigator, you're not sitting on the case files for every story you see. No one is expecting you to have the same standards as a court for what guilty is, but you should still internalize some concept of innocent until proven guilty
Because the news can, and will, and does paint people as criminals when they did nothing wrong. Now a days literally all it takes is saying "so and so person was arrested for allegedly committing so and so crime".
That's it.
People don't need any more proof than that, and the fact that this entire conversation is happening when the investigation into the materials was almost 2 months ago by an NYPD Counterterrorism unit and the FBI, yet this guy is still walking around is pretty damn strong evidence that nothing more came of it, should be proof.
Tour standard of guilty should be much more than a simple news story.
A news story mentioning saltpeter and prepper books is nothing. The kind of people who experiment with saltpeter are exactly the kinds of people to read those books out of interest, not some sort of malicious plan to commit crimes.
-
Also this is an aside but...
> So don't tell me that no one thought it was an actual bomb. That doesn't matter.
That's literally the crux of the matter. That's literally all that matters. That no one thought it was an actual bomb, and he didn't act like it was an actual bomb.
If both teachers immediately realized it wasn't a bomb, how are you claiming it looked like a bomb?
It didn't look like a bomb. It looked like an electronic thing splayed out, they asked what it was, he said alarm clock.
The second teacher knew it didn't look like a bomb, what happened is they presumed that he was trying to make it appear like a bomb. No one thought it was a bomb because it didn't look like one.
>His English teacher thought the device resembled a bomb, confiscated it, and reported him to the school's principal. The local police were called, and they questioned him for an hour and a half.
I misremembered the case and forgot it was the police who realized it wasn't a bomb but were trying to prove intent by interrogating him due to Texas's hoax bomb laws...
but exactly like I said above that's an aside, and the entire story just shows how little people understand of the appearance of these things if anything.
If all it takes to convince laypeople to call police on a child is a splayed out alarm clock, how many electronics hobbyists have more than enough contraptions for someone to go on record as saying "I saw a bunch of really suspicious stuff on his desk" after a fire?
I agree, it's pretty bad. But I don't think it's on the laypeople. The English teacher did the right thing. Could they live with themself knowing they could've stopped a real bombing that killed people? The problem isn't that people will call the police based on some suspicions they have in order to protect others in their community or cooperating with law enforcement and telling them what they know and have observed. What else to do?
If the teacher thought it was a real bomb do you think they would have waited until after class and walked it down to the principal's office? The school would have been evacuated before the police got to interrogating him.
The teachers said it looked like a bomb, but even they did not think it was a bomb, again the trouble came down to the hoax law, not someone thinking he had an actual bomb
> I'll grant you, ammonium nitrate isn't a terribly common substance to have around an apartment. I still don't think it's very compelling evidence that he was building a bomb, and weaker evidence that if he was building a bomb, it was to hurt people. Maybe he was just trying to make his own fireworks. He shouldn't be doing that in an apartment, cuz risk of accidental explosions, but it seems hasty to start painting him as a domestic terrorist.
For what it's worth, I fully agree with this. All I'm saying is, we shouldn't outright dismiss the possibility that he was building a bomb, simply because he's an open source developer.
You realize the concept of innocent until proven guilty is not a unique concept to HN readers right?
That presumption of innocence is not "act like maybe he was making bombs until proven guilty"?
It sounds like you've let the media erode your understanding of a very basic human right, but do not try and cast it on others as some sort of tribalism.
He is innocent until proven guilty.
Not "reasonable chance" according to your random opinion, but a judge and jury and various council go through a legal case and legally find him guilty.
> He is innocent until proven guilty ... Not "reasonable chance" according to your random opinion, but a judge and jury and various council go through a legal case and legally find him guilty.
If someone is running towards you with a knife shouting religious scripture, are you going to stand still and think to yourself "I'm going to assume this person is innocent until they are convicted of my murder in a court of law"? No, you're going to consider the possibility that they actually might intend to murder you, and you'll take appropriate precautions.
Innocent until proven guilty is a concept for the court of law, not for the court of public opinion. People are allowed to hold opinions and thoughts regarding how dangerous other people are.
Is the court of public opinion what makes you run away from someone coming at you with a knife?! Is a compelling article using stinging quotes what makes you think a knife coming at you is going to be a bad thing?
They're completely non-comparable concepts. It's such an embarrassingly lazy strawman I can't believe you bothered to waste words on it, and it's silly I should have to respond to it.
Innocent until proven guilty is not a concept born for the sake of legal rigor... it's born of the fact that "court of public opinion" is easily swayed by nonsense. It's largely seen as detracting from the proper functioning of an actual impartial justice system which is why we go to such great lengths to isolate jurors in major cases and why some countries don't even publish people's information this easily.
-
So many comments are replying trying to say "there's nothing that legally requires me to assume people are innocent!!!"
That's not a clever argument, there's no legal requirement to be a free-thinking person.
But as I pointed out before, the same way a literal alarm clock splayed out in a box became a national scandal, the burden of proof for the media to sensationalize anything is embarrassing low.
Someone could have a picture taken of a simple hobbyist electronics bench and most people would see it as some sort of mad scientist's electronics lab.
Use your brain cells of a second and think of the context. Someone running at you with a knife? Where the hell does public opinion come into it?
Someone asking for money for thousands of hours of free work that they've done after their apartment burns down and they're left homeless?
And you want to protest that because the Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism of the entire NYPD found some unmixed materials and some reading materials and felt:
> the totality of the circumstances that raised our concern to a level where we're going to need more investigation
Really?
If a deputy commissioner of counterterrorism is saying "we're just worried enough to look into it" almost 2 months ago and the guy is still out here on the street, you really think you have a leg to stand on protesting the guy getting some money to not be homeless?
This honestly feels like inverse-concern baiting. The man is asking for money and about to go homeless after spending a good chunk of his life doing free work used by multi billion dollar corporations.
Trying to go "oooOOooOo he might be a terrorist!!!" over this weak of an indictment is the height of something so insulting, the words to describe it escape me.
> Someone running at you with a knife? Where the hell does public opinion come into it?
Look, you decided to build your entire argument on this extreme form of innocent-until-proven-guilty-nonsense. So I took an extreme example to demonstrate to you that your position was too strong. Let me try to explain in more detail: if you must assume that "everyone is innocent" until they are proven guilty in a court of law, then clearly you would assume that the man charging at you with a knife has no intention of committing a crime, right? Since you assume that they are entirely innocent, then there is no risk of being murdered, so you would not try to run away, right? Can you see how that doesn't make sense? Clearly you would try to run away from someone running at you with a knife, and that's because you have no obligation (legal or otherwise) to assume that everyone is innocent. It's okay to assign probabilities to different events, including crimes that people may or may not commit.
If you didn't take the extreme position to begin with, we wouldn't have to go over extreme examples to demonstrate why your extreme position was wrong. Anyway, I'm going to assume that we both now agree that there is no obligation to assume people are innocent until proven guilty. If you still disagree, please explain how this obligation should work out in the context of the knifeman attack.
> ...the same way a literal alarm clock splayed out in a box became a national scandal...
...but this was not an alarm clock. This was ammonium nitrate (among other stuff). Ammonium nitrate is used for fertilizer and explosives. Was he a farmer? No. So either he was intending to use it for explosives, or he was running some chemistry experiments or something. Can you see how this is different from the possession of an alarm clock?
For what it's worth, I think the most likely explanation for the stuff found is that he was geeking out some harmless experiments. I think the second most likely explanation is that he was going to build bombs and blow stuff up in the forest for fun. I don't think it's likely that he intended to hurt people in bombs, because it's extremely rare for people outside warzones to hurt other people with bombs. But it's definitely within the realm of possibility, and it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
> Someone asking for money for thousands of hours of free work that they've done after their apartment burns down and they're left homeless?
I'm not calling for any fundraisers to be shut down, and I'm not admonishing people for donating money. Even if he intended to hurt people with bombs (which he probably didn't), I think the world is going to be a better place if people donate money and help him get on his feet. Let's hope that the investigation can clear him innocent of any suspicions, and that this doesn't loom over his job search in the future.
> Look, you decided to build your entire argument on this extreme form of innocent-until-proven-guilty-nonsense.
This is complete and utter nonsense. In your own damn comment you're saying:
"For what it's worth, I think the most likely explanation for the stuff found is that he was geeking out some harmless experiments."
In your own goddamn comment you're saying your primary thought is this was innocent experimentation.
When someone is running at you with a knife is the thought "this person is going to harm me" a tertiary thought?
You realize it's not illegal to own any of the materials he had or to experiment with them? The reckless endangerment charge is not just for having them but for having a box catch fire after storing it near a stove?
Your entire comment is essentially "I have no objection to anything you actually said I said but I still want to build a strawman to tear down"
I mean
> This was ammonium nitrate (among other stuff). Ammonium nitrate is used for fertilizer and explosives.
Where the HELL did you see him have Ammonium Nitrate? Don't tell me you read POTASSIUM Nitrate... literally saltpeter you can order of Amazon right now with next day shipping... and thought it was AN. It'd just drive home how precious little you know of the topic and hand and how your serious of comments literally is just concern-baiting that we're jumping way too quickly to treat an innocent person as innocent...
> Your entire comment is essentially "I have no objection to anything you actually said I said but I still want to build a strawman to tear down"
I laid out very specific objections to very specific claims made by you. In particular, I used the knife attack example to demonstrate that - contrary to what you claimed - "innocent until proven guilty" is not an obligation that people must apply to their thoughts and opinions. And I very specifically asked "If you still disagree, please explain how this obligation should work out in the context of the knifeman attack." Based on your tone I get the impression you're still holding on to your extreme belief about "innocent until proven guilty", but you're not willing to reconcile it with this example. Instead, you're trying to weasel out with vague claims about strawmanning. You know, if someone actually was strawmanning, you would be able to point out how the strawman is different from the actual argument presented. In this case you don't even attempt to do that, because there is no strawman, you were very clear that people have an obligation to assume everyone is innocent until proven guilty (in their thoughts and opinions, at all times).
Since you're not willing to address the claim you made in the context of my example which clearly demonstrates that your claim was nonsensical, there's no point in continuing this conversation beyond this.
Obligatory Reddit-type response: "Sir, this is a Wendy's drive-thru. Not a court of law."
HN response: Of course, everyone is free to say what they wish. First amendment. Freedom of speech. Freedom of thought. Freedom is the basic human right.
Wikipedia says, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 11, states: "Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defense."
Notice that this covers the rights of someone "who has been charged with an offence" in "a public trial".
There's not actually a "human right" preventing people from having or expressing opinions.
Precious little about your comment makes sense from that first sentence to the rest of it.
> Of course, everyone is free to say what they wish. First amendment. Freedom of speech. Freedom of thought. Freedom is the basic human right.
I'm not even going to bother falling into the tangential tarpit of acting like someone is a bomb maker without them having gone to trial is a "1st amendment right". After all, if your best defense of a statement is "I'm legally allowed to say it", it's probably not worth much consideration.
> Notice that this covers the rights of someone "who has been charged with an offence" in "a public trial".
No it doesn't. It covers the rights of a person. Period. That's literally the point of a universal declaration of human rights
You're trying to play word sashimi to make a point that isn't made. The definition of guilt is specific to a public trial exactly because a "trial" of public opinions is so easy to manipulate.
Sure it can't force the general public to be decent people and understand that people should be presumed innocent until proven guilty... but it's also not endorsing the public not do so. It's not limiting presumption of innocence to trials.
I think it's reasonable for police & even FBI to investigate after a fire in a home with lots of chemicals, including 40lbs of potassium nitrate, after also finding bomb-making information. However it does seem like they made a rush to judgment in arresting him rather than simply letting the hospital hold him until medically cleared, after which the police could hold him for 48 hours without charging, all while they investigate things more thoroughly like any writing/internet posts etc that could indicate any actual intent to use the stuff, rather than simply a (very dangerous) lack of care in how he conducts his hobbies.
Yikes, what you describe could easily be a decent portion of HN people’s homes. Don’t forget the anti-social, unpopular with the neighbors bit either. And of course the NYPost appears to thrive on drumming up scandal.
I second that. The ammount of microcontrollers, arduino/RPI boards, gsm modules, 400 Mhz radio transcievers and such would most likely "make me available" for "interviews".
Just a few years back when moved to a diff city for the job we had a visit to check if "we're ok" because our electricity bill was way above the average for the area. The silver lining: My wife was ok with me upgrading everything in the rack with new, low(er) power equipment.
Also, never forget how these intitial police investigations are wrong all the time. How do they know this is potassium nitrate? Was it labeled? Does it look like it? Smell like it? Taste like it?
Do you have any ammonium nitrate though? I mean, chances are he was just some pyro and not actually interested in bombing/killing people. But it's dumb to do that in a flat.
>Cops said FDNY fire marshals are combing through Squire’s charred, first-floor apartment to determine the cause of the blaze, an FDNY spokesperson said.
The fact that his apartment is 'charred' suggests he was doing stuff in it.
Could be he took the materials with him as he was trying to escape out the back window, or that's just where he was storing them so they wouldn't be found if a search was conducted.
I think it's useful that this was reported on, because it could make people more wary of shelling out money to a guy who was recklessly endangering others even if there were no nefarious motives.
> The fact that his apartment is 'charred' suggests he was doing stuff in it.
Or, it suggests that there was a fire, which is not really up for debate.
> Could be he took the materials with him as he was trying to escape out the back window
You are making up a hypothesis to make someone sound guilty with no evidence.
> I think it's useful that this was reported on, because it could make people more wary of shelling out money to a guy who was recklessly endangering others even if there were no nefarious motives.
This is a poor opinion. First, he has not been found guilty of "reckless endangement", and you are just assuming he's guilty. Do you also expect to see reporting every time someone recklessly endangers others by driving at high speeds through a school zone, or accidently runs through a stop sign?
Publishing accusations of someone (especially a very easily google-able person) being a terrorist is not something that should be done lightly without proof.
Hell, right now I'm pretty sure I have both bleach and ammonia in my apartment as regular cleaning supplies. When combined, these ingredients are dangerous, but that sure as shit doesn't mean I'm endangering others just by possessing them.
I have a garden of about 400 m2. So yes, there are different 20kg bags of fertilizer in the shed. Ammonium nitrate being NPK 34-0-0 (wiki), I think I can get pretty close to that with boosting fertilizer (like 25-5-5 or something). The point is that one could write a hit piece with only "true" information about me. I even have both "rightwing" and "leftwing" extremist propaganda in my house! (Say, Nozick and Solzjenitsyn. Or Nietzsche and Orwell.)
There is no reason to implicitly trust what a police officer tells a reporter or says at a press conference during the initial investigation of a crime.
Fair enough, but would you take all of the most suspicious-looking items in your house that could possibly implicate you in a crime and put them all into one crate, including printed material and books that explain how to perform said crime?
For all those people in this thread praising his work, now's the time to put your money where the mouth is. If you have used his work, push your companies to sponsor/donate. Asking irrelevant questions like whether he has a job does not help the situation. The community's response to events like this is what determines the future of open source. People like to complain about copyleft vs libre licenses. But if you have benefitted much from open source software and are hesitant about contributing back financially, you are part of the problem. This is not just about Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Fortune 500s. If you are a tech startup with revenue or funding and uses his software in your products, consider a 5 to 6 figures contract, or at the very least a significant one time donation.
I use his work, but for me the situation is more complicated my prior experiences with the author.
He's been making similar complaints about his lack of renumeration for quite a while. In an older GitHub where he requested contributions, I pointed out that he had barely worked on the project for many months (at that time), and not published a new version to npm in years[1], despite making a $600 withdrawal from his Open Collective fund in June 2018 with the explicit purpose of releasing v5[2].
In the thread, I suggested that I and others might be willing to contribute, but I wanted more certainty on what exactly my contribution would be paying for. As I saw it, at that point he had a number of regular donors who were essentially paying him to do nothing.
He responded very angrily, saying nobody had any right to question his actions or to expect anything from him, even if they were paying him. He then deleted my comment entirely and banned me from commenting further. This interaction didn't exactly leave me with a strong desire to contribute. I think he's a rather volatile individual and the community would indeed be better off forking this project than indulging his sense of grievance.
You might see that as “volatile”, but I think I can see what he’s getting at. A charitable reading of his whole stance:
• We can enter into a formal contract where I actually do owe you work-on-this-project in exchange for pay;
• but without such a contract, donations to me are just that — donations — and don’t influence my work;
• but this is an open-source project, so you’re free to put whatever work you like into it, and keep/use/share the results (in your own space, that I don’t have to referee.)
• I’ll just be over here, doing what I want, unless/until someone makes a contract with me to do what they want. (Which, of course, they’re not obligated to do; they could just as well hire someone else to fork and maintain the project, rather than hiring me. That’s their choice.)
• So, in short, you’re not the boss of me; unless you’re literally my boss. (A patron is not a boss.)
Yeah, bringing money into free software equation complicates things.
It comes down to donors expecting something back for their donation, while authors expect something back for all the effort they put so far into the project that is obviously useful to other people.
For my open source project I made a hard decision not take any money. This curbs expectations and puts users at disadvantage, but lets me take as much time off as I want and I sleep better.
I've participated in a project using Bountysource some years ago; in total I received something on the order of 1500-2000 $. Which is nice. I assume a lot of people did a lot more work than I did back then and never saw any money for it. So I probably have no right to complain or lament about these transactions in any way. But, in a way, it is very hard to not think about dollar per time, especially with Bountysource being attached to solving specific issues. I believe this contributed to my mentality souring over time, because in the back of my head I never got rid of the idea that I'm sort-of at work here, but at about 2 $/hr average wage. I stopped contributing to that project completely after about just two years or so.
For most people, the funding mechanisms on the Internet pretty much all carry an expectation that they're to support ongoing work that will be used to either explicitly deliver a product, as with Kickstarter, or is to fund an artist's/coder's/etc. ongoing work. Not many people are making donations based on past effort.
I sold a (non-open source) shareware product way back when. Money definitely provided the incentive to put more work into it than I otherwise would have. On the other hand, it made me treat it as a business, albeit a part-time one.
This feels like a semantic non-sequitur. Maybe that's actually a great example of core of the problem at hand!
You're trying to argue a conclusion based on the specific word "donor", but many of these "donors" (or in this thread's case potential "donor") don't see themselves that way; they are not interested in "donating" with no strings, it seems like they are more interested in "patronage" or some sort of "sponsoring", where their money is not no-strings, but instead conditional on some specific threshold of level/quality of support/service.
Perhaps we just need a bit richer vocabulary for these discussions; if the project author is only interested in unconditional donations, that's their prerogative, and you're free to fork or fund accordingly. But also recognize that at the margin, "donate with no strings" is a much tougher sell for enterprises than "patronage will buy you X quality of service".
So if you're actually making an effort to turn an open-source project into revenue, I think you'll probably need to listen to your potential customers/patrons a bit more and give them the assurances they are looking for. Again, any open source author is free to do as they please! But as the GP notes, bringing money into the situation complicates things, and I don't think it's reasonable or rational to expect companies to start throwing donations your way without listening to what they want to get in return.
By my understanding, in the US, if you solicit donations and say you will do something specific with them (e.g., use them to pay yourself to work on a project), then those aren't really donations. They're payment for a service. You may not think that you entered into a contract with the "donors" by accepting the "donations," but you did. You made an offer to perform an action in exchange for money and someone accepted that offer by paying you. That's a contract and anyone who donated could take you to court to get the money back.
I do not think he 'deserves' to get paid. It is nice if he gets paid, but I dont even see a moral obligation (not speaking of legal). I mean the idea of gpl2 (at least from linus and my perspective) is nicely laid out here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU
Paraphrasing:'I give you my sourcecode and if you change it and give the software away, please give me the changes'.
For MIT license (which Marak choose) (this is not in the video link), it is more like: 'please use this for whichever cause you like, I dont even expect software changes back'.
Everyone deserves to get paid (in the sense of moral desert; i.e. people "deserve" human rights.) You don't have a personal obligation to pay them, though.
Solving that discrepancy isn't going to be done in an HN comment; it's the Great Work of capitalist statecraft.
I agree he deserves to get paid like everybody else, but not because of this work he did. Unfortunately not all societies do that, so uually the common route to get paid is to get (a) work (contract), somebody is willing to pay for.
I believe prison laborers deserve to be paid minimum wage, despite their convictions and despite their inability to negotiate. Additionally minimum wage should be raised to a living wage.
You’re taking an overly reductionist view, incompatible with things like “equal pay for equal work.” He definitely deserves to get paid for his work, and it’s obviously a matter of by whom, and he’s fed up with giant corporations using his stuff despite being able to pay him, and he’s totally in the right even if he’s insert-some-undesirable-here.
I agree with the other commenter that "deserves" is a strong word.
If you want to sell something for money, you put a price on it. And people decide to buy it or not.
If you give it away for free, going back after the fact and asking for a donation is fine. But I don't think it's required. And it doesn't make people who choose not to donate bad in any way.
He should probably figure out his next business and get to working on that. Start a business, sell a thing, profit.
Having been on both sides of that pay discrepancy, I have come to the conclusion that most of our economic theory about the nature of business and competition is bullshit. I now see corporations as social organizations which exist to keep educated people fed and controlled, everything else is secondary. The sums are big because the money has to get divvied up amongst everyone, even if the work involved is just changing a hex value by the lowest paid and probably most technically skilled person in the network.
Yep, that money has to pay for not only the developer "doing the work", but all the overhead: the product managers, QA, release/deployment... then redo of work because someone used the wrong shade of blue.
He was co founder of Nodejitsu, the company who raised kickstarter funding for NPM, the same time NPM raised money from investors . There was a legal conflict about who owns NPM, they didnt refund or make a statement the money they raised for a project they don't own. That Kickstarter campaign was a scam and they got away with it.
I feel for him being in his tough spot, but let's be clear on what faker.js is. I suspect many companies (like mine) use it to create "decent"-looking data for tests. But we could trivially do without it, and basically just used it because it was there. I contrast this with some other open source projects we use that we specifically contribute to (using GitHub donations) because they are central libraries to our code base.
How often have you implemented a trivial feature and, after adding tests, debugging, doing code review, etc, you find it’s taken a nontrivial amount of time. And it’ll likely take maintenance too as you learn what you need (easier when you’ve seen it done already).
Most of these trivial things probably take nontrivial time, and if you add all of them together for all the trivial projects you use, it’s probably saved a really serious chunk of time.
The ocean is made of “trivial” drops of water, yada yada.
I think the point is that generating pretty fake data as opposed to bland fake data is a "nice to have" rather than a "must have" for 98% of companies. And by the time you get up to AirBnb and FB, etc., they have their own internal testing data and standards based on years of real-world false negatives and false positives.
It's really a content library, which is useful, but it's not in the mission-critical category where developers can get a rubber stamp budget approval from their boss. It's a great project to get your name out there as an open source developer, rather than a viable business model IMO.
Let's be clear, this is the difference between your test user being called Tom Smith with email tom@smith.com and Joseph Baker with email jbaker@bigcorp.com versus being called Foo Bar and Foo Bar2 with emails foo@example.com and foo2@example.com
"Let's be clear, action developer actually took versus action developer didn't take but in my opinion isn't that different, as someone who didn't take any actions at all" is a bad hill to die on.
Likewise, the trivial or novel that you borrow for free isn’t really free when you need to use it suddenly in ways that the license doesn’t permit or it is just technically inconvenient. It is sort of like leasing vs buying, but not really a good analogy.
That's going to be true to some extent of every library your company uses, but for every library someone writes and offers as FOSS, you don't have to spend the cycles designing, developing, and maintaining your own, nor training new hires on using it. You're fundamentally misunderstanding the value of having good quality tools developed by someone else.
And I'm not even going to _start_ on what I think of your attitude towards test tooling vs "central libraries" other than to note that if you don't consider test tools central to your development process, I think you have bigger problems.
You're completely mischaracterizing my post. My point is that if faker were anything slightly above free, we really wouldn't have used it, and our code quality wouldn't suffer from not having it. It was more of a "ooh, that's kinda nice" thing when we used it.
> And I'm not even going to _start_ on what I think of your attitude towards test tooling vs "central libraries" other than to note that if you don't consider test tools central to your development process, I think you have bigger problems.
That's not my attitude at all and is a bullshit strawman. I actually do donate to libraries that are fundamental to our test framework. Faker is just definitely not one of them.
Yeah but it is also hilarious when the contributors of free open source software rage quit when they realize others can use their work for free while the contributors forget to make money.
Software developers, man!
For a bi-weekly hilarious rage quit, check out Andre Conje on twitter!
I'm not sure that's the case here. It sounds like their apartment caught fire and now they are homeless. In my opinion, this sounds more like a desperation move than anger; this developer really needs money ASAP in order to keep a roof over their head.
And this other time I saw a hardware company be “in the spirit of open source” and then saw another company use their code in cheaper hardware sold for less and then the first company went on a rage tirade and tried to edit their commit history to change the license, tarnishing themselves in their whole community and customer’s eyes at the time.
That’s horrible. If you produce something for free, and someone uses it to reduce effort and expenses, at least throw some money their way! Doesn’t even have to be much.
I wonder if npm packages should operate in a similar way YouTube does. Why can’t people sell a license via npm? That would be a nice way to browse packages, pay a buck or two for Faker.js for commercial projects. Plenty of us have budgets that $50 dollars could get you some solid pro versions of a lot of software.
> If you have used his work, push your companies to sponsor/donate.
That's not how any of this works. Most people work for companies that do not just donate to random software developers. If you want companies to send you money, you need to have something on an invoice. You don't actually have to make the commercial edition different than your community edition, especially if you're charging a low amount, finance isn't going to grill you about why you aren't using the free version. But you need to align how you expect to get paid with how companies are set up to pay people. Charge for stuff!
Honestly, he should have used the GPL and allowed other licensing options for commercial entities. Frankly I wouldn't use MIT license for personal open-source projects.
Debian (for example) has 51,000 free software packages. How do we decide which ones to fund and how much they get? Do you earn money for being the maintainer. LOC you commit? Bugs you report or fix? What about people that write documentation or packaging?
This looks like a pretty popular project, so I assume he's decently talented. How does he not have a day job? Passion projects are great and all, but they're not known for paying the bills. Especially for solo maintainers, it's almost like playing a gig at a coffee shop for tips. Want to make a career out of it? You need talent, marketability, and be ready to compromise on your vision.
This is wrong. If someone works a day job, they won't have time to work on their OS projects. Corporation should pay contribution to the OS projects they use to make billions/year. We should have license that requires only high income companies to pay for usage.
> As everybody knows, every OSS maintainer doesn't have a day job.
We could still have many more if it was viable to do it without being forced to have a day job. Especially when your software is used by many succesfull companies.
> "OS project"
It stands for open source project. I don't get your quotes here.
> Impossible to accomplish, because "OS project" is not a legal entity to whom one could pay.
You talk about law, I talk about ethics.
> We have such licenses, but they don't have anything to do with Free Software or Open Source Software. Such licenses are called "commerical licenses".
Using "commerical licenses" hurts every use cases that is not profit based. Having mixed licenses adds a lot of complication for the mantainers on top of the already difficult volontary development.
I suggest you do some research. It is perfectly fine to have “mixed” licenses. Redis operates like this and has no problem making money, as do many others.
“adds a lot of difficulty” is a terribly weak argument - you want to make it your job and get paid for it, of course it will take some effort. Nobody owes you anything.
As a developer, I want my job to be about producing software. Handling the nitty gritty of commercial licensing is something I will happily leave to people who studied to do it.
I also reject the notion that everything should be commercialized, OSS is the antithesis of it.
I thought you were proposing a form of hybrid paid-OSS as many seem to want now. If you want to make a living, make it a business (yes, someone will have to deal with the business stuff).
And that's true, but then we circle back to the OP (original problem), if you can't make a living out of OSS you're generally very limited in how much you can achieve, which then stiffles innovation in all other sectors that depend on OSS.
So the question stands, how do we allow OSS maintainers to contribute without forcing them to find ways to monetize their project, which would be against the very nature of OSS?
And I'm loving this discussion, because then why can't you apply it to other fields, like arts? In fact similar discussions are already happening in most creative fields. I know where this is going, and it's great.
>how do we allow OSS maintainers to contribute without forcing them to find ways to monetize their project
The most common way--which is pretty widespread--is to work for a company that is monetizing the project or otherwise depends on it as they're often interested in hiring someone with particular familiarity with the code base.
> Using "commerical licenses" hurts every use cases that is not profit based.
At the end of the day, people still have to eat.
The direct consequence of releasing you work under a copyleft license is that you have to figure out an alternate source of income in order to sustain yourself.
You could do that by providing paid consultancy, or by selling a product. It's perfectly valid to have a full time day job as an employee to sustain yourself, and do related or totally unrelated open source on the side. It's valid to start your own business providing consultancy based on your own open source project. Or maybe own a business on something entirely unrelated. To put it even to the extreme: you could be homesteading in the outback, living on cans of beans and rice while writing open source code on a dingy laptop powered by a generator and a satellite uplink each night.
My point is that covering your primary needs by making an income should come before any considerations to provide free labour.
In fact, this principle extends beyond open source code and to any creative endeavour. For instance, many famous writers didn't write full time. Kurt Vonnegut managed a Saab car dealership and J.D. Salinger was an entertainment director aboard a cruise ship at one point.
Copyleft isn't a business model. And one should interpret "business model" in the broadest sense of the word here: figuring out your personal finances and how you make an income is privy to the notion.
Copyleft protects the creator exactly because it isn't a business model in itself. Copyleft doesn't guarantee any support or continued maintainership towards users. It is not an SLA. There's zero obligation on your part, as a creator, to maintain anything you release on account of what users might want. You're entirely free to walk away.
As far as users are concerned, if they decide to rely on open source, they also accept the risks that comes with using third party code which doesn't get maintained or even gets abandoned. That's not a problem of the creator, that's entirely the problem of those who rely on open source code. Copyleft protects users to the extent that they are entirely free to fork your code and do whatever they want with it as long as they use the same copyleft terms if they decide to publish their modifications.
The perceived robustness of Linux by users actually translates into a due sense of trust in an emerging collective behaviour: that there will always be a wide community of maintainers working on the codebase either being paid or voluntary. But that trust isn't a formal, legal SLA at any given point.
Those are the consequences that come with deciding to maintain or use open source software.
Yes, it's true that there are several companies who have leveraged open source to unrivalled financial and business success. And it's also true that there are plenty of maintainers who barely see a tuppence for their long hours at night herding issue queues and reviewing pull requests.
Pitting them against each other isn't the way forward. If Amazon or Facebook are using open source software in order to sell their services to the tune of billions of dollars, then that's not solely because of Torvalds' decision to put Linux out there under the GPL license. It's equally because they understood and managed other aspects such as legal compliance, financial / asset management, human resources management, sales, marketing, acquiring and mergers,...
The problem there isn't the apparent 'abuse' of copyleft tools in it's own right. It's a far more complex set of economic, political, financial, cultural, ideological,... variables that created a unique context that allowed those companies to emerge.
The biggest fallacy open source maintainers face is that they are somehow obliged to boundlessly cater to the wishes, desires and needs of communities that emerge around their projects for next to nothing. Even when those communities attract developer teams from Fortune 500 companies.
They are not, that's the whole premise of both copyleft AND copyright.
If you want to give your work away unrestricted and free while pouring in endless amounts of hours, days and weeks, that's totally fine. Just don't be surprised that doing that full time without further consideration won't make you rent at the end of the month. At the end of the day, there simply isn't such thing as a free lunch.
After 20 years, I can tell you that neither closed or open source are better in absolute terms. They both have their drawbacks and their advantages. I've ran into specific business cases where closed source solution clearly was the better option; and vice versa as well.
Maybe because he’s banned from a bunch of open source communities for threatening comments and being an asshole. Oh and also was arrested in September for having bomb making materials.
> Making the world a better place by allowing big corporations to generate solid fake test data for their QA flows.
--- Random Guy in a random Silicon Valley episode
Not compromising your vision? Not to belittle Marak's work here, it's certainly valuable, but it doesn't sound like something that one does to make the world better, but like something that is useful (nearly) only in a corporate context and should be done for a decent salary.
I think regardless of the repository, participation in the FOSS ecosystem strengthens it and encourages more people to join. The very act of doing so makes the world a better place, indirectly.
It's not the same as boots-on-ground charity work, no. But it's something.
Yes, I don't want to say I disagree with their work, not at all!
And while I thought this is classic corporate-centric coding, some people [1] seem to have a strong relationship with this:
> Faker is love. Faker is life. I applaud this move. Someone sponsor this man!
I can't edit the GP anymore, but it really seems to be a beloved tool. I guess we love the tools we use, even if they ultimately benefit someone else. :)
Then it’s pretty easy to stop playing for tips or perhaps stop hanging out a sign that says “feel free to sample without paying me or even referencing me.”
If I’m playing for tips, have thousands of listeners, and making an amount of money that doesn’t make me happy then that’s a good sign to stop doing that because people don’t value my music as much as I do.
It’s really hard to understand what makes an album #1 as there’s so many factors. I think that’s why it’s so important to set up licenses beforehand. I don’t think it’s reasonable that I’m entitled to any percentage of a #1 album just because they sampled my CC-commercial licensed music.
Be interested to know which part of it is fake news eh.
The culmination of the recent tweets and actions presents this as having more of a personal tone than a grand indictment of big companies relationship with open source.
> building some kind of SaaS API is probably not really possible for something that can be trivially implemented and operated locally
A SaaS that allows you to deploy APIs and handles Auth/Billing/Customer Support/Usage Metrics etc would be a viable service. There are plenty of 1 man APIs that could be built by an engineer if the heavy business aspects were taken care of.
I dunno, there's websites like placeholder kittens and the like which are "mock data as a service"; faker.js could be offered as a service as well in that regard. I can't see much opportunities for making money, but it's something at least.
I mean if we're sharing stories: "I started a project to learn javascript and node.js through rap," Nodejitsu co- founder and New York expat Marak Squires"
I think he is terrible at being frugal, spent all his money, and is now begging for handouts.
Starting a company doesn't make one rich. There's no evidence he had any significant money to spend. In fact, it's likely the founders got nothing after the VCs were paid off.
He's reported as being an early bitcoin investor too, so your point might stand ignoring every opportunity this guy had, and every privilege. Ask your average inhabitant of Queens how much their last startup sold for, or how much they made off of Bitcoin. Otherwise not so much.
Pretty crazy story, all in all!
He seems to be in some pretty dire straits, and is reacting to the perceived grievance of others profiting off of his work. All in all, I don't think this is the best way to handle the situation, although building some kind of SaaS API is probably not really possible for something that can be trivially implemented and operated locally. However, many other SaaS APIs have seemed equally trivial in the past and have been extremely successful, so it still might be a useful avenue to explore if he can sort out his legal troubles...
[0] https://nypost.com/2020/09/16/resident-of-nyc-home-with-susp...