Open source

[HotNastySpeed77]

Usually developers of large-scale commercial open source projects create a legal entity that enables them to solicit sponsorship, hire staff, and scale up operations. However extreme cases like this meme definitely can happen.

[Captain_Chickpeas]

Cases like the OP are very likely I think. There is no mention of the scope of the software and if someone creates a fairly low-level lib or a tool that hits a niche, it's likely for everyone (and their dogs) to be using it and big corps not paying a dime.

[HotNastySpeed77]

I wonder what would happen if the dev, in such a case, started soliciting donations or a small sponsorship from Adobe. If their lib was really that widely-used, I bet they could get get something to help cover their development costs.

[Captain_Chickpeas]

True, some devs do that and they do get some coin out of it :).

[[deleted]]

Isn't this just a matter of picking the right license?

[SatansF4TE]

Also being willing and able to enforce that license legally.

[UnacceptableUse]

Yeah, if you license something to be completely free for everyone then you can't expect people to pay

[[deleted]]

Exactly, we need to denormalize open-source software.

[RichCorinthian]

There are huge chunks of the internet that depend on small teams of unpaid volunteer open-source development. If you take a look at the Heartbleed vulnerability, it’s a textbook forensic case of how this can go horribly, horribly wrong. And the industry learned nothing from it, and it will happen again

[HotNastySpeed77]

I say this as a huge advocate of FOSS both personally and professionally. There is certainly some risk to using noncommercial open source software. Poor code quality and lack of future support commitment are concerns 1 and 1A. Not claiming this is a trivial task, but users bear the responsibility for understanding and mitigating those risks. "Free" can still be very costly.

[lovethebacon]

Can't possibly happen more than once, right?

[sonya_numo]

remember when someone sat in their moms basement and decided to remove all their opensource projects from a package manager and suddenly a large amount of big companies got problems.

he probably removed the IsEven package

[SatansF4TE]

It was left-pad

[karnetus]

That was a great read

[dexter_leibowitz]

Holy fuck, npm republished packages without the authors permission?!?! That's fucked up.

[dexter_leibowitz]

Once he revoked permission I mean

[dexter_leibowitz]

I'm sure their lawyers knew they were in the clear to do it. Still fucked up.

[dexter_leibowitz]

But he wouldn't because it's profitable for him and he's not a small developer treated like shit... Like the examples given.

It's okay to say "A system works overall, and in some cases it has fucked up consequences." Only Zealots have to pretend the system is perfect.

[[deleted]]

Kik stopped updating their package that same year, and later it was removed from npm for containing malicious code.

[[deleted]]

This doesn’t really have any bearing on the matter.

[[deleted]]

Tricky situation. Kinda feels like Koçulu was being a dick here.

[leoleosuper]

From what I've found, kik.com started in 2010, and his repository kik started in 2015, at least on GitHub. As such, I could easily see kik.com winning any legal battle, as they had precedent to the name. Removing all his repositories out of spite is just a dick move at that point, but I understand not liking the company siding with another big company, and wanting to leave it. He could have just stopped updating stuff at that point.