Pawel Jarczak could consider donating the code to an anonymous random friend who happened to upload it to a chinese code forge where development could continue.
Let me tell you a solution for the "FIX IT NOW" types:
> This is an Open Source project that gets developed at the author's discretion. We provide paid work services for urgent fixes, cost is $500 per day with a minimum of 4 days.
Put that in the README, under a header that can be linked to in bug reports from entitled people. Worst thing that could happen is that the maintainer ends up earning a couple grand.
I was like: "it should be Ctrl+Shift+H, of course, right?"
So different tastes :-)
What you describe later is "Auto-populate the find dialog with current text under cursor". VSCode has a setting for that; I guess Zed will eventually end upnadeing one too.
I'm on Firefox 150.0.1 on Windows, and Ctrl+. consistently opens up the Firefox Multi-Account Containers panel, regardless of hitting that shortcut while focusing this same text box I'm writing on right now, or not.
So this sounds like not working as expected I guess.
So it makes sense that they do not get the emoji picker, as they are in windows. I use macos and I also get the multiacccount container. On macos the emoji system-wide shortcut is ctrl+cmd+space.
Oh, totally yes, missed that they wrote that, thanks! This change from Firefox only applies to Linux, so Windows and macOS users shouldn't notice any difference compared to before in regards to `ctrl + .` as far as I understand.
It is not uncommon at all? A lot of programs have slightly (or majorly) different shortcuts in windows vs linux vs macos. There are usually differences in the keyboard layouts themselves (command key in macos, super key in linux, windows(?) key in windows), as well as in system shortcuts generally.
If in most linux distributions ctrl+. opens the emoji pickers, it is not weird that they implemented it there, and not in other OSes where it would not make sense.
I think it's more that no one tried to align shortcuts across OSes, and it'd also be a huge endeavor and to be honest, sounds like it wouldn't be worth it. Takes a couple of seconds to adjust and orient yourself even if you switch between Linux, Windows and macOS multiple times per day.
Another option on macOS is fn+e which I’ve always found easier to remember. I’m not sure why there’s two shortcuts in the first place, but maybe this information is useful to someone.
Open Source has worked fine here. The author doesn't find financial support for the work, so they just want to change winds and that's a perfectly fine path forward.
If this is really much more than a personal project "for fun, on my leisure time", and it became an actually serious product-level project that provides good value in commercial environments for people, there's clearly an opportunity for a for-profit company to step in and cover that niche. But that'd require that users became customers and actually departed from their money to pay for it :)
I guess most will switch instead to asking who's the next project maintainer to work on it, to whom the new bug reports and complaints can continue to be sent for free. But if there's money to be made by using a tool, there should be money paid for using it too. We "just" need to find the new generation of FOSS Financial Sustainability solutions that actually work! Donations don't make the cut.
The effort to setup donations is almost always more trouble than the donations that result are worth. Better spent looking for a job, or working on a commercial project that will make money. People simply don't donate to open source projects at a level that matters.
I've been working on Open Source software for 30+ years. There's no money in it, if your idea for making money is "accept donations". I don't like it, but it's a fact. If you want to make money, you have to make something that isn't free (and even then, if you give away the most valuable parts, as in "open core" licensing, you probably still won't make enough money to make the development worth it).
When I was young and driven by idealism and optimism, I assumed that with enough users I'd be able to ring the cash register somehow. Turns out not so much. We got the users, the money never came. There are a few outliers, but there probably aren't a lot of opportunities to found a Red Hat today.
Second this. There's no money in donations. Also the target demographics for donations is individuals, who rarely donate and are kind of desensitized to the whole thing at this stage (as everyone and their mother asks for donations).
Companies need to jump through legal and accounting loopholes to donate, they very much prefer a simple purchase, which is nice! But setting up actual purchases is a whole different ordeal with open source, now the question is why is the company paying for something that's free?
Source: my own 5-stars open source project with 500k+ active users that paid for 3 coffees in total over 10+ years. I still get like $2 sometimes after a long while.
The most annoying thing is the people who demand most loudly that you setup donations don't actually donate once you go to the trouble to do so. We had a guy make an issue about it in github, and followed up over and over...we finally did it. Nothing. I guess they think making demands is helping.
I wonder whether the author has considered taking the product to a paid level and what would be necessary for it.
Obviously, all contributors have some form of copyright, which may or may not have been waived depending on whether there was an ACL in place and jurisdiction. So he would need to get permission from the copyright holders, maybe in exchange for a percentage of the profit.
Changing the license of already existing code? You might not be able to do that without permission from other contributors, I agree.
But it's MIT license. We can open a company tomorrow, take that code, and start selling it. Further development and improvements of the code could be trivially done openly or behind closed doors. FWIW the author themselves could do that if they wanted.
If “we” can do it, the original author should also be able to do it. However, I’m not sure whether the MIT license is enough to waive intellectual property in all jurisdictions, meaning that some contributions are still owned by the contributors themselves, especially in certain jurisdictions.
I've been working on a software package I'm hoping to release in a few months... I'm really torn on either split FLOSS with commercial extensions, or just going fully private... I was planning on a pretty generous free tier, but hoping to make a bit on the side from commercial customers.
It's a bit of a niche as it is, so that's going to be rough in any kind of pricing model, as a large part of that niche is either homebrew types and the other commercial industry that will likely require some more integrations and customization.
You could dual license as well, so it’s GPL or AGPL for personal, OSS, or academic use, but requires a paid for commercial license for commercial use.
I suggest GPL or AGPL because their copyleft clauses make them hostile towards platform providers who might otherwise seek to profit from your work without paying.
Yeah, but the copyleft makes anything they build around it a derivative work that they also have to release sources for - especially with AGPL. Most don’t want to do that because that’s where their IP lives.
Not all open source licenses are copyleft licenses (e.g., MIT very much isn’t), but at the very least copyleft licenses make it much harder to exploit open source code commercially without giving back in some way, whether that’s code, or cash for a commercial license.
Not perfect, by any means, but definitely an improvement over more permissive licenses.
I am aware of how much I’m starting to sound a bit like RMS in my old age.
I wholeheartedly agree. Licensing is a complex topic of which I've read a good deal, and even within the Open Source communities there are usually a lot of misconceptions, so I like chiming in with less commonly pointed but very practical effects of it all, in case it helps someone to learn a tiny bit that day.
In this case the provider would of course have to comply with the AGPL and release their modifications as you mention, but it's important to note that No FOSS license protects at all against, for example, just offering the code as a service. It's the exact reason why Mongodb changed licenses and then a stream of commercial products started to change into "Source-Available" licenses in the recent past.
It would be dual license effectively... the base version AGPL and the Commercial version with additional functionality. Though I'd considered BSL and alternatives... and as mentioned, just closed/commercial only.
Here is a simple trick: do accept plenty of open source contributions as-is, without any kind of copyright assignment nor requiring to sign anything that grants power to relicense.
There you go, guaranteed community ownership of the code, best face and "good will" as promised by choosing a FOSS license to begin with, and future rug pulls averted.
Seeing it from the other side of the fence: if you see that all contributors are required to cede controlling power into a single hand (except certain Foundations, yadda yadda), it's not proper Open Source in spirit, only in form; and closeups are just a change of mind away.
Unlike Android indeed, when you maintain a perfectly working phone that happens (by accident or force of nature) to live longer than the official lifetime some executives in a remote office had decided to grant it, the web browser cannot be updated any more. Just the single most security sensitive piece of software of any computer. Who would have guessed people were going to complain!
And neither does Google. The latest version of Chrome requires the version of Android released in 2019. The latest version of iOS supports my iPad released in 2019.
reply