To be honest I'm commenting only part with "f.. it I'm not longer working on it", I have ambivalent feelings to "lets change code in such way that builds will go into infinite loop or fail", ambivalent because as it is not nice, but somebody who was a victim of such situation should learn not to add dependencies to newest version, because here was only some small "joke", but it might be something much worse like poisoning whole code with some malicious thing.
Problem is in this that default behavior is "we are not paying for tools", people are looking for free tools to avoid fighting with procurement and everyone seems happy.
Only really big companies are giving something back, most is simply leeching from OpenSource community.
You are mentioning several ways how this guy was able to collect money, yep, but again changing license would mean that somebody else will fork previous version and thats all.
I'm not saying that this action was super, but for me it is result of problem deep in whole idea of "free libraries" and "free tools", often this all base on some poor guy or gal spending weekends on some project, which at the start was cool and funny, but later becomes burden.
> Problem is in this that default behavior is "we are not paying for tools"
The problem is if the person wants to get paid, then they need to use licensing that is more restrictive and sets the expectations for eventual payment. The MIT license is a "do whatever you want with my code as long as you don't sue for inadvertent mistakes" license. No one else is at fault for that license except for Marak. The expectation of doing what you want based on the license is inline with behavior. If he wanted to change behavior, he just has to change the license or don't go open source. You can't have your cake and eat it too ie. you can't have open source's viralness and expect everyone to pay. If you want a near guarantee that people will pay for your work when they use it, don't go open source. Open source is not about getting paid.
> You are mentioning several ways how this guy was able to collect money, yep, but again changing license would mean that somebody else will fork previous version and thats all.
Since we're on this subject, I'm going to remind you that Marak didn't come up with faker on his own. He ported it and maybe even the data from a ruby project that was also called faker. To my knowledge, he hasn't shared any of the monetary contributions to his project with the people maintaining the ruby version of faker.
If his software is so simple that someone can just fork it and gain an audience, then maybe it's too simple to replicate and too much of a commodity; but as I've already pointed out SugarCRM successfully transitioned to closed source and I believe redis has successfully transition to a more restrictive license. Neither of them messed with other people's projects. There's no excuse for the bullshit that Marak pulled. Zero. Changing the license is more simple than adding an infinite loop to waste CPU cycles.
> which at the start was cool and funny, but later becomes burden.
I've already written this, but most people just walk away instead of doing something malicious.
Problem is in this that default behavior is "we are not paying for tools", people are looking for free tools to avoid fighting with procurement and everyone seems happy. Only really big companies are giving something back, most is simply leeching from OpenSource community. You are mentioning several ways how this guy was able to collect money, yep, but again changing license would mean that somebody else will fork previous version and thats all.
I'm not saying that this action was super, but for me it is result of problem deep in whole idea of "free libraries" and "free tools", often this all base on some poor guy or gal spending weekends on some project, which at the start was cool and funny, but later becomes burden.