I tried to grep the code for `api.` to get a sense for all the vendors this codebase is using, and which you'd need to have relationships with to run the code. Here's what I found:
payments:
https://api.paypal.com
https://api.stripe.com
https://api.taxjar.com
https://api.vatstack.com (EU VAT)
https://apiservices.iras.gov.sg
https://api.appstoreconnect.apple.com
https://api.storekit.itunes.apple
https://api.iffy.com (AI content moderation)
https://api.helper.ai (AI support)
https://api.openai.com
https://api.easypost.com (shipping labels?)
https://api.sendgrid.com (email)
https://api.pwnedpasswords.com (haveibeenpwned)
https://api.worldbank.org (for purchasing power parity?)
https://api.dropboxapi.com (for "upload from dropbox"?)That's pretty refreshing compared to the average 400 external "partners" your average online t-shirt store has.
Most of those are probably indirect. Same here: Stripe doesn’t issue credit cards or even process transactions itself. It partners with a half-dozen or so credit card networks, and each network partners with thousands of banks around the world.
It launched right here on HN 14 years ago.
Gumroad became my cautionary tale for startup equity for early engineers.
I remember excitedly following the story from start. It was fun to follow along. Then around 2015 things weren’t working well, so they laid off most of the team. Investors sold the company back to the founder at a steep discount. As I recall, a major investor sold their ownership for $1.
Just like that, the founding engineers who worked so hard lost their jobs and saw their equity valued down to nothing.
It happens! However, the strange thing in this case was that the company kept going. They had laid (almost) everyone off and declared their equity worthless, yet the company was still making money and growing. My younger self struggled to understand how the founding engineers could have gone from working so hard on something to being laid off and seeing their equity wiped out while the business itself continued right on working and generating revenue.
A lot has been written to put positive spin on those events. The founder claims to have helped out some of the early engineers in vague ways. However, I’ll never forget being a young, aspiring startup engineer and watching an entire startup team get wiped out of the business they helped create and then the business just kept on trucking for the founder who walked away with ownership of the company.
I was one of them! Joined on August 5, 2012, got 0.5% of equity (I think?), it all went to more-or-less zero monetarily. I don't think most of us really hold any grudges against Sahil here. It was a very fun place to work, and I met some of my closest friends and made some of my strongest professional connections there. It was net-very-positive to my life and career, and I think we were all adults when we were opting-in to the experience.
As for Sahil/Gumroad making money and growing. Meh. He's worked on it for 13 years and showing dedication beyond what I would have for most things. It's fine.
How did lose all their equity? You can’t declare equity is worthless. You can raise new rounds with different valuations and dilute previous investors/employees but they would also dilute themselves.
Even if they don't "lose" their equity, it might just turn essentially worthless. Very often "equity" founding staff receives is in the form of (V)ESOP s = (virtual) employee stock options, or other equity grants that only materialize in the case of an "exit event". Depending on how the exit events are specified in the contract, the founder taking the company private (/ divestment from the investors) might have resulted in an exit event with $1 value of the company.
Google 'drag along rights'.
> You can’t declare equity is worthless. You can raise new rounds with different valuations and dilute previous investors/employees but they would also dilute themselves.
The investors sold the company back to the founder for $1. That's as close as it gets to declaring equity as worthless.
Equity for pre-IPO companies is often tied to an expiration. If there is no qualifying liquidity event before the expiration then your equity disappears unless the company takes action to reissue your equity. That sometimes happens for people who are still employed with the company, but almost never for former employees.
A friend built a startup for years and progress was not looking good. Eventually the entire development team quit and left without equities. The founder was then acquired for millions.
Another case: startup running out of money after a series B or C and a history of questionable expenses. Everybody but a few left. The founders sold their main product for cheap to some private equity firm, focused on a crappy internal tool they built and they used their last money to hire a literal army of sales people.
These sales guys were apparently amazing and somehow managed to sell the tool to a bunch of fortune 500 companies and are now making bank.
The main product they sold? It's still on life support, the original buyer just sold it to another holding.
Original discussion thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614
Interesting discussion on the merits of the initial plan of a paid link shortening service and the opposite approach (easy-to-setup paid access to links).They were discussing adding Bitcoin as a payment method when it was 0.7 cents a pop.
That part made me chuckle.
> At the current ~$0.70 / bitcoin, this means that every American will be able to have ~$0.05 in his or her electronic wallet, once all bitcoins are generated. Assuming that the rest of the world does not participate at all and that bitcoins are evenly distributed.
> Sure, you could imagine an instant dollar-to-bitcoin-to-dollar conversion at the point of payment. Or you could imagine a bitcoin2.org that generates more coins. Or you could hope for a massive surge in the value of the bitcoin.
> I'd put my money on Paypal sticking around, though.
Even back that people pointed out the obvious flaw of Bitcoin remaining at $0.70. But I wonder if any of them believed it would be at $100,000 in 14 years
One day work to start a multi-million project, 13 years ago. That's the real vibing.
Some might not be aware: It wasn't always smooth sailing for Sahil (could have had a much comfortable life if he stayed put at Pinterest). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37059594
didn't he mention that he got fired from Pinterest?
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Related post:
in a chatGPT world, just flip it over to laravel and you're off to the races
I'm reading a lot of complaints here but let's recognize some interesting aspects that Sahil is talking about: 1. It's the 5th largest rails codebase open to AI ingestion. 2. They are offering bounties for issues. Not large bounties but whatever, it's something.
I personally like rails and would love to see AI tools improve with it. No idea if this code base will really help that, and when but it can't hurt. In my experience I can get next apps up in a jiffy but rails is much more of a struggle. If anyone has any tips here, please post.
I'm always curious about how well bounties work especially now in an AI age. I wonder what the arbitrage on AI spend vs. bounty will be for people that take a run at them.
I run a bounties platform (https://algora.io) and I've seen people who create bounties try to use some AI like Devin to solve them (@seveibar livestreamed trying it) just for fun and in all cases AI failed to solve the bounties.
A Rust project that rewarded 300+ bounties ($37k) is now building an AI coding agent with the aim to solve bounties on Algora - it's an interesting benchmark I guess.
Curious myself what the next years might look like, but from everything I've seen so far we're definitely not there yet.
Dear SHL , Please truly open source this. I personally wouldn't mind AGPL but would still much prefer MIT Thanks.
There's no way he's going to do that. The leverage and market advantage would evaporate.
It's in fact the market position (leader) that gives them the advantage here, not the code.
Well. Any suggestions please?
Though technically I don't mind it , its still great he source availabled it
I am probably not going to reach 1 mln $ sales but still man if I do , then I probably want some grace period and I mean ....
It's pretty cool that this license allows you to make up to $1mm revenue, at which point you can pivot and rebuild the stack. This is going to be a game changer for anybody who wants to MVP an app similar to Gumroad. MIT would be ideal, but I prefer this to GPL's force release model.
License is very limiting for Business
Yeah, it's not open source, the licence violates point five of the OSD https://opensource.org/osd
It's also not Free Software, as it also violates the Free Software definition[0].
Of course. Has anyone ever found a case of a license that not one or the other?
The Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition are structured differently, but pretty obviously map from one to another.
There's plenty of OSD licenses that don't fit the FSD, but a free software license is necessarily open source, so the opposite can't happen.
I’d really be interested in an example of such a license. Where is the difference in the two definitions?
Not OP, but I linked to some details here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43581484
The NASA Open Source Agreement is the one I found.
Thank you!
No there cannot be an OSD license that violates the FSD
GNU has a helpful chart where they clearly show that there is a sliver of "nonfree open source" licenses that are available [0].
> The term “open source” software is used by some people to mean more or less the same category as free software. It is not exactly the same class of software: they accept some licenses that we consider too restrictive, and there are free software licenses they have not accepted. However, the differences in extension of the category are small: we know of only a few cases of source code that is open source but not free.
I was able to find one example, the NASA Open Source Agreement, which is accepted by the OSI [1] but rejected by the FSF [2]:
> The NASA Open Source Agreement, version 1.3, is not a free software license because it includes a provision requiring changes to be your “original creation”. Free software development depends on combining code from third parties, and the NASA license doesn't permit this.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html
Guarantee that all "nonfree open source" is different readings. Take the NASA case. If youu read it as strictly as Stallman does then it violates the OSD also. The people at OSI at the time it was submitted read it more like a lawyer and decided it was compliant. Possibly today's OSI would disagree. Possibly tomorrow's FSF would agree. It's not a difference between free software and open source but a difference between how two sets of humans interpreted the text of the license.
Which point of the OSD would be violated by the NASA clause if read the same way that the FSF reads it?
OSD 3
And possibly 9
Eh, OSD 3 just says that derived works must be possible, it doesn't say that you must be able to incorporate third party source code into the derived work. Meanwhile the FSF's definition explicitly calls out this freedom as an essential component of Freedom 1:
> One important way to modify a program is by merging in available free subroutines and modules. If the program's license says that you cannot merge in a suitably licensed existing module—for instance, if it requires you to be the copyright holder of any code you add—then the license is too restrictive to qualify as free.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms
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Yeah, it's more of a "source available" than Open Source in its definition. I'd rather they use AGPL or something like that.
To put it another way they want to call it open source without actually being open source.
I don’t think they actually call it open source themselves – rather, the HN poster made a (probably benign) mistake.
The founder does. See: https://x.com/shl/status/1908090697984426227
Yikes :-(
It's not a mistake because someone doesn't subscribe to the same definition as you. There are 2 widely competing definitions that are both perfectly valid, if you want to be more specific you can say "not OSI approved" to more accurately reflect what you're talking about, if you don't want to do that then you can understand how others feel.
I used to make a bigger deal about this, but now I think that whether something calls itself Open Source is less relevant than if bait and switches are being done.
Teasing a release on X is less bothersome than what Matrix is doing by relicensing from Apache to AGPL and making what was billed as a vendor neutral communication platform not so vendor neutral. The people working at Element certainly don't want to use Matrix/Element under the AGPL, so why should they expect earlier users and members of their community like me to want to use it under the AGPL?
There was a time when saying Open Source meant something by itself. Now you have to include details like the license, what exactly is under the license, and the leadership.
> You may use the software under this license only if (1) your company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total revenue in the prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD (2024) GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-profit organization or government entity. Adjust the revenue threshold for inflation according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics' consumer price index for all urban consumers, U.S. city average, for all items, not seasonally adjusted, 1982–1984=100 reference base.
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Even more so for individuals.
Use the source as inspiration and create something new in a more modern language/framework.
It would be a bad idea to read any of this code if you're working on a competitor based on the license terms.
While limiting, it's not atrocious:
>You may use the software under this license only if (1) your company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total revenue in the prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD (2024) GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-profit organization or government entity.
So if it someone uses this software to build a $10M GMV per annum business, it's completely unclear the pounds of flesh Gumroad et. al will want as their cut.
Yes but before you reach this point you probably have a bit of time to start discussing with them ?
By the time licensing becomes relevant, your business is built around the platform and this gives Gumroad an unreasonable advantage in any negotiations. Imagine what they could say:
- You're now a competitor. Stop using our software (you can still sell on gumroad.com, hint hint)
- Give us 20% for 1 year (next year, who knows...)
- We won't give you a license, but we'll buy you out for next to nothing.
And at that point they can ask for anything because the alternative would be rewriting all your code.
An ecommerce platform designed to allow creators to sell to users.. apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumroad
Which also dropped Android support, so I dropped them.
Web app works fine. I'm an Android user, I sell through Gumroad and it's never occurred to me to download a native app that offers no functionality beyond what's already on the website. Sale notifications go to my email, as they should.
Any idea what the motivation could be?
Gumroad's journey has been interesting: https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting -> Billion dollar journey with VC backing to Kleiner selling back their stake to Gumroad for $1, which enabled Sahil to steer the company in a different direction.
Perhaps the shift to making the source available has more to do with work culture: https://sahillavingia.com/work
https://x.com/shl/status/1908146557708362188
Probably not entirely, but straight from the author.
Can't help but notice he's basically knowingly "donating" the code to multi-billion corporations to train their LLMs on (while in general those same corporations source their training data in ethically questionable ways), while mere mortal human individuals and small businesses are bound by a non-free license. An interesting decision to say the least.
i mean... what would any "mere mortals" use the code for other than to directly compete with Gumroad?
Sahil anticipates AI will significantly commoditize software. Especially following DeepSeek's impact. He has promoted Devin via twitter and likely aims to position Gumroad as the leading creator-focused alternative to traditional Open Source e-commerce platforms.
It's Rails!
i believe Sahil mentioned they’re moving away from Rails soon, as he sees it as technical debt.
Drama creation for marketing?
Technical debt, so hot right now.
I mean that choice of framework has very little to do with technical debt. So you claim something like this to create attention.
What is the use of this opensurce when you have a strict license ?
It's a careless and sloppy marketing job by someone who wants to reframe the definition of open source for the millionth time, unfortunately.
I don’t get the point on going open source aside from a tiny boost in marketing. What is the objective and proposition here? Considering as others have said is not really open source. If I were the founder I would not do that. It’s like if Airbnb went open source or something
The value of AirBNB is not in its code but in its network.
And yet is never gonna be open source
Just calling it source available from the get go would have gotten a much better reception!
What a joke of a license. This is not open source. Why the fuck is everyone in VC land trying to change the true definition of open source?
For what it's worth Gumroad left VC land several years ago.
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Most of the VC open-source projects use open-source as a lead magnet/marketing tactic only, with no intention or desire of wanting people to actually use the software.
There is a distinction between those companies who actually license their stuff under FOSS licenses, but use it to get more marketing/contributors/whatever, and what companies like Meta are doing today, which is calling something "open source" in their marketing material, but if you read the terms and conditions, they call it "proprietary" instead and comes with lots of restrictions that aren't compatible with FOSS.
One is a marketing tactic, the other one is outright misleading.
Yep. Bait & Switch. Which is exactly why you shouldn't contribute to open source projects that require a CLA.
> Why the fuck is everyone in VC land trying to change the true definition of open source?
They want the marketing benefits without the costs.
The licensor grants you a copyright license for the software to do everything you might do with the software that would otherwise infringe the licensor's copyright, but only as long as you meet all the conditions below.
I think they probably meant
The licensor grants you a copyright license for the software to do everything you might do with the software that would otherwise infringe the licensor's copyright [to the software], but only as long as you meet all the conditions below.
Awful license on multiple levels.
No you're not insane, it's much harder to follow than most source available licenses I've seen.
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I think this reaction is misdirected. Yes, the license is restrictive, but Gumroad doesn't seem to be claiming themselves that the code is open source. I think OP made a mistake out of ignorance and said that it was open source.
The founder of Gumroad is claiming that [1].
> 14 years ago, Gumroad launched
> Today, Gumroad goes open-source
Thanks, this is new to me and not something I could infer from OP's link.
I think the original title for this submission also called it open source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43580533
Yes indeed, but OP is not Gumroad.
Which is super bullshit; cause now offering open source solutions many folk see it as a trick!
The definition of open source is itself a corruption of free software which came before it, and was corrupted by the same people.
I haven't followed Gumroad much, but I remember them being very pro freedom and having some interesting hiring practices. IIRC they were all being paid equally (based on position and hours of work) and had no meetings. Now I see a Code of Conduct.
They've also bumped up their fees enormously, it's 10% + processing fee now, previously it was $1 flat + processing.
If someone create a new business on top of this by changing layout and URL routes, how are they able to identify that they used this source code?
If you do it right, no one will know.
Wow, I remember their offices next to Thee Parkside on 17th.
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is this the company where the CEO/ex CEO is trying to rejigger the VA?
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-department-of-veterans-affa...
No, where'd you get that impression?
see article above
----- "These DOGE operatives appear to have no work experience that’s remotely close to the VA in terms of its scale or complexity. The VA administers all the government benefits afforded to veterans and their families for roughly 10 million people, including education, loans, disability payments, and health care. Lavingia is the CEO of Gumroad, a platform that helps creatives sell their work and takes a cut of each sale. More recently, according to his blog, Lavingia launched Flexile, a tool to manage and pay contractors. According to his LinkedIn profile, Lavingia was the second employee at Pinterest, which he left in 2011 to found Gumroad. Lavingia is also an angel investor in other startups via SHL Capital, which backed Clubhouse and Lambda School, among others."
004_constants.rb: =====================
DENYLIST = %w[ ... ladygaga kanye kanyewest randyjackson mariahcarey atrak deadmau5 avicii prettylights justinbieber calvinharris katyperry rihanna shakira barackobama kimkardashian taylorswift taylorswift13 nickiminaj oprah jtimberlake theellenshow ellen selenagomez kaka ....].freeze
the who is who of pop culture
I looked for a blog post announcing this, and couldn't find it. But Antiwork's Github profile mentions:
> Antiwork emerged from Gumroad's mission to automate repetitive tasks. In 2025, we're taking a bold step by open-sourcing our entire suite of tools that helped run and scale Gumroad. We believe in making powerful automation accessible to everyone.
Here I was thinking it was the subreddit
it's basicly free development
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nice work, you forgot to remove your API key tho
bots.rb: =========
BOT_MAP = { "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; cs-CZ) AppleWebKit/526.9+ (KHTML, like Gecko) AdobeAIR/1.5.1" => "Adobe AIR runtime", "BinGet/1.00.A (http://www.bin-co.com/php/scripts/load/)" => "BinGet", "Chilkat/1.0.0 (+http://www.chilkatsoft.com/ChilkatHttpUA.asp)" => "Chilkat HTTP .NET", "curl/7.15.1 (x86_64-suse-linux) libcurl/7.15.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8a zlib/1.2.3 libidn/0.6.0" => "cURL", ...
cool list
Could we please change the title to say : "Gumroad is source available"?
This license is clearly fails OSD and is not open source by the industry standard; perpetuating a false statement is unhelpful.
The license is actually pretty restrictive: you can only use this if you own a small company or work for government / non-profit.
Most average human's (including myself) can't use the source code in any way:
> You may use the software under this license only if (1) your company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total revenue in the prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD (2024) GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-profit organization or government entity.
The way it's been phrased, it seems like if you want to use the code to run a small webshop for some goods, you can use it, but if you're actively trying to run a resale platform, that's when you get in trouble.
I don't think not being open source is that big of a deal in this situation, they aren't the only player in this space anyway. (Woocommerce to my knowledge still dominates the "small business webshop" market and probably always will for as long as the typical shared webhost webstack is still an AMP stack.)
It's risky if you have any chance of ever crossing $1M in company revenue because the license will terminate as soon as you reach that and you'll have to rewrite everything.
> The licensor grants you a copyright license for the software to do everything you might do with the software that would otherwise infringe the licensor's copyright, but only as long as you meet all the conditions below.
> You may use the software under this license only if (1) your company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total revenue in the prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD (2024) GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-profit organization or government entity.
To be fair, getting a platform for free that can potentially bring you to $1M is a very good deal, I'm quite sure you ll figure out a strategy before you get to $1M, and perhaps even get a good deal on the license from them. However I do think they should've been more upfront about the licensing.
1M revenue isn't that high a bar to clear in retail, just takes one popular/meme product. After all the COGS/fixed costs are tallied up, that could leave you with significantly less with which to contemplate custom development or platform changes.
I'm sure if you're lucky to get near 1 million in revenue you can reach out and pay for a license.
You are not required to rewrite everything if you exceed $1million in annual revenue. You are required to get a commercial license from them, which costs money.
That's not the same thing. And quite frankly, if you're making over $1 million in annual revenue you should be able to afford the license fee for the most important part of your company.
There's no guarantee that a commercial license will be available at a reasonable fee, or available at all. You'll have nothing to negotiate with because the alternative is to rewrite or shut down immediately.
Must be awesome to use this software in a country that does not use the US Dollar as its currency :)
let me tell you about currency exchange rates...
License only mentions USD. So as far as you have no USD revenue, you are fine.
The intepretation would be done by a court. Not sure they would agree that the intention was to allow unlimited revenue in other currencies.
Exactly :) Good luck non-US companies! :)
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That's not how it works, of course.
It's your FX-converted revenue, meaning, whatever currency you use converted to USD. The license doesn't bother to state this because they assume basic common sense on the part of the licensee.
If that's not enough, they have the backing of several decades of industry practice[1] and several centuries of law.
[1] For example, take a look at the Steam and Epic creator agreements, which also use USD for financial thresholds even though their stores operate in dozens of countries and accept dozens of currencies.
LMAO. Everybody keep quiet..... Don't let them change their license.
And even if they change their license , we need to fork this with this specific license right now!!
Going to fork it right now
> The license is actually pretty restrictive: you can only use this if you own a small company or work for government / non-profit.
I wonder if this can be worked around by setting up an OpenAI-style non-profit arm to use Gumroad.
They are probably also trying to get free contributions to the codebase. Gumroad is infamous for underpaying and using cheap labor where possible.
> Gumroad is infamous for underpaying and using cheap labor where possible.
What? Where do you get this from? It's quite the opposite.
So true. A very misleading title. This license is far away of any approved OSI or FSF Foss license. Gumroad is a great service, the value is imho not in the software. But in the execution of it’s mission and the very simple way to lower the bar to sell digital goods without upfront costs.
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The thing is, HN is a technical audience, not an average person in this regard.
People here know the difference or are easily able to understand it if they haven't been confronted with it.
>People here know the difference or are easily able to understand it if they haven't been confronted with it.
No. They're trying to force a definition of open-source that does not exist to make it FOSS because FOSS people want everything to be FOSS so try to pressure people into it.
The definition is defined by dictionaries and it's different from what is said on here. Quite simply, they're wrong. They want it to mean one thing however the definition of the word by Oxford and Webster applies to what is done in that repo. It is open-source by the definition of the word by people who define and clarify words and not by FOSS devs who want everything to be FOSS. It is open-source! And the fact, people on here don't know that shows people on here don't know the difference.
People who develop software have to understand what "open source" means (technically, not just some sloppy interpretation), because using a non-open-source package in an otherwise open source project can contaminate the whole thing. License violations can pose high risks, both financial and reputation losses.
Because of that, a lot of effort goes into helping make sure that software stacks are using consistent licenses. There's a whole industry of standards, audit processes, software and companies to help with this; for example, see:
People who develop software have to understand the difference between FOSS and Open-Source. We already have a term for what you want to describe as open-source, it's called FOSS.
Words have meanings they're collected and recorded in dictionaries, these are the source of truth for the definition of words. It's important that we have them so we can all talk and know what we mean. This is at the very core of languages.
This open source has to be FOSS is some straight-up bullshit by people who spend all their time in the FOSS community.
By every definition other than the FOSS community, this is open source. That is a fact.
Btw: FOSS means Free and Open Source Software. Even the FOSS community fundamentally says that open source does not neet to be free.
We all know the difference and the difference here is enormous.
Says it is open source but not FOSS is just silly. You know what the OSS part of FOSS stands for right?
>It is open-source!
No, it's not. Please read number 5, it might enlighten you to what people colloquially consider open source, which didn't have a dictionary definition until technical people started using this definition: https://opensource.org/osd
>And the fact, people on here don't know that shows people on here don't know the difference.
..What? Do you know what OSS vs FOSS is?
OSD is god and gets to prescribe what is and is not open source? Says who?
The whole idea is that we need a definition that everyone agrees With. The OSD is what the software community at large agreed, so any licences that claim to be open-source are compared to that.
This doesn't match the Webster's definition either. If your response to that is "there are no gods anyways" then you've earned yourself a chuckle.
> Dictionaries outrank everything else when it comes what something means.
Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive.
As is the whole field of linguistics, as you will learn in the very first lecture in such a program. If the grammar rules you learned in school disagree with (any!) native speaker, the rules are wrong.
There should be a middleground between "The dictionary is law" and "Any native speaker can redefine a language".
At the very least the direct consequence of
>If the grammar rules you learned in school disagree with (any!) native speaker, the rules are wrong.
is that every language has as many dialects as speakers.
Imo dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive not because it is impossible to have prescriptive definitions or grammar, it is just that dictionaries do not even try; usually they just list common usage of words.
> is that every language has as many dialects as speakers.
This is actually treated as linguistic fact, although we call them "idiolects" when we're talking about that level of granularity.
> not because it is impossible to have prescriptive definitions or grammar, it is just that dictionaries do not even try
They don't try because the field of linguistics has arrived at the conclusion that the role of the linguist is to document what is, not to prescribe what should be. They arrived at that conclusion by studying languages and discovering that they are far, far more messy than prescriptivists had hitherto believed.
The only role that prescriptivism has these days among serious academics is an acknowledgement that while all forms of language are well-structured according to well-defined grammatical rules, cultures assign value judgements to certain forms of speech and so it's valuable to learn your culture's value judgements and learn to speak and write in a way that earns you credibility in your culture.
But even this looks very different than the prescriptivism of old, because what forms of speech and writing get creds vary dramatically from generation to generation, place to place, and even context to context. Learning the grammatical rules taught in traditional schools will not help you fit in on modern social media.
But even knowing all of this, prescriptivism was beaten into many of us growing up, so some internal cringe is unavoidable.
For ex still cringe at people saying “anyways,” even though I know it’s a losing and pointless battle.
Not sure what the biggest driver is - being shamed while growing up, or just latent pedantry.
> If the grammar rules you learned in school disagree with (any!) native speaker, the rules are wrong.
I understand the sentiment of "the language is defined by its speakers", but this statement seems a bit overblown. According to that logic, it is literally impossible for someone to be incorrect about the meaning of a word.
> it is literally impossible for someone to be incorrect about the meaning of a word.
Yeah, it's important to frame it in terms of idiolects and dialects—any given speaker has an idiolect, and that idiolect is worth describing and documenting uncritically. But that speaker also benefits from speaking a shared dialect with other speakers, and it's valuable for that speaker to be on the same page with other speakers of their dialect about definitions.
I think what OP is getting at is that it's not the role of linguistics to assign a value judgement to a given usage—there are merely benefits that speakers can derive from better understanding the dialects that they use in daily life.
> Dictionaries outrank everything else when it comes what something means.
TFA's license doesn't meet the definition you posted. It restricts who can use/redistribute/modify the software.
> open source as the average person would understand it ... and it's quite clear to nearly everyone except pedantic people that you can now go and fetch the Gumroad code and modify, run, etc.
The average person would also assume that "open source" means "I can legally use this for my business", especially given that Gumroad is a tool that only makes sense if you're running some kind of business.
Unfortunately, this is true here only with a very large asterisk that says "as long as you never make more than $1 million in revenue". Anyone who attempts to treat this software as Open Source in the way they would treat, say, Postgres, will find that the instant they cross the $1 million threshold they have to rebuild their entire e-commerce setup or be in violation of copyright.
For some people maybe $1 million in revenue (not profits, revenue) is legitimately not possible and not worth worrying about. But for others it is, and that's why definitions matter.
(There's also the fact that, intentionally or unintentionally, the license assumes that you either have a business with some amount of revenue or are a government entity or nonprofit. Which means technically a strict reading of the license would suggest running the software without a business is not authorized.)
This actually strikes at the heart of the disconnect between open source philosophy and common vernacular.
I've argued for years that "free" does NOT mean "free to use as long as you follow my restrictions". To me the only licenses that meet this criteria are the permissive ones such as MIT, BSD and friends where the only requirement is preservation of the copyright notice. The vast majority have limits of what you can do, or when you have to pay, or some other BS that just complicates everything and IMHO just reeks of "I'm manipulating the FOSS community so I can make a buck" or "I'm pretending to give this software away but actually have a laundry list of rules you have to live by". Basically the opposite of what "free" means!
Similarly, "open source" implies that I can do whatever I want, since it is "open". But most open source licenses - including this one - have restrictions and in many cases pretty strict ones that forbid use for many. This is not open at all.
Either give it away, or lock it up, but PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE stop with the hypocrisy, lying and wordplay so you can make a buck (or satisfy a religious tilt). If you want me to help you with your code then you gotta let me use it how I see fit!
And for the love of all things holy, quit calling restrictive licenses "free". This is a binary state, it is either free or non-free, and "you can only use this if you make less than X" or "only use this with other free software" or "if you make changes you have to share" are NOT FREE.
There. Thanks for reading. Stepping outside to yell at a cloud now. And get off my lawn.
> It's open source as the average person would understand it.
Factually, this is not true. Facts outrank everything else.
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This is not pedantry, this is adhering to the actual definition of open source that is generally accepted in our community:
> Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code
The "OSD" is not the actual definition of open source. The OSI has no special rights to the term open source (despite their failed attempt to trademark the term). The OSI did not coin the term, their founders did not coin the term, the term was in use to refer to non-commercial software with publicly posted source prior to the OSIs existence.
Open source is like any english term, its meaning is defined by its use, not by some special interest group.
The complaint about using open source to refer to non-commercial licenses absolutely is pedantry. But more than that, it's not even objectively correct pedantry. It, like most language, is subjective.
(Which isn't to say that I think this license complies with the common use of the term open source as actually used, but I disagree with your argument for why that's the case).
All true, but language changes. And today, open source in this context is universally understood to mean software released under a license complying with the OSD.
Free software doesn't have to mean "software released under the GPL, MIT, BSD, or other FSF-approved license". And yet, in this context, it universally does.
Opensource.org doesn't get to redefine what words mean to the rest of us. They should have chosen words that weren't already being used with common meanings if they wanted to be the say in what those words meant.
Feel free to make an industry friendly version of the organization then, otherwise it seems like a lot of devs are extremely passionate about open source not just in usage but a movement that literally allowed them to carve out careers from it.
No good deed goes unpunished around here.
I think it's more that bullshit is called when bullshit is seen.
This is just so hyperbolic? It's code for a project you can explore and learn from. License is not permissive? It's a friggin rails app - just look at the model or mechanism you are interested in copying, figure out the approach taken, and recreate that approach. Why is everyone in here with pitchforks?
> Why is everyone in here with pitchforks?
Personally, I get pissed when companies misuse "open source" because without open source, I probably wouldn't be a developer in the first place. Just call things what they are, and leave existing terminology alone. Defending "open source" is defending the opportunity for others who were in the same situation as myself in the past.
Otherwise we'll quickly see more of what already started today, companies calling things "open source" in their marketing material but "proprietary" in their legal agreements, and no one will be better off if that's accepted.
> Personally, I get pissed when companies misuse "open source" because without open source
In this instance, where did Gumroad claim that its code was open source?
In this case it seems like the person who submitted it to HN just used an incorrect title, so not that bad in the grand scheme of things.
My reply was more directed towards the "Why is everyone in here with pitchforks?" in a general sense, as it wouldn't have been the first time I read about someone not understanding why people who do "open source" would like the existing meaning to remain.
It's not hyperbolic. We're in a profession that elevates each other via open source. Saying something that is open source when it's not is no different than snake oil salesmen selling whiskey elixirs in the 1800s as cure alls.
They are lying and need to be called out.
Hard disagree. In the real world, the source of this app is open and therefore it is open source. You guys are behaving like extremists.
Would you prefer nothing at all? Sounds like in this case everyone here is looking past the golden egg in front of you - a successful rails app you can explore and play with - and focusing entirely on the wrong thing.
You're acting as if there aren't already tens of thousands of actual open source projects that exist just fine, some even make enough money to support continued development.
Why are you acting like the alternative is to burn down the system, you realize that there are plenty of people, organizations, and businesses that make actual open source software right? Like today even.
it's not open source - this is clearly "source available." these are terms of art.
just because you can read the English literally and say "the source is open" doesn't mean you've proven anything.
Are you talking about philipjoubert's good deed of linking the Gumroad source and informing HN that it is now source available (albeit misrepresenting its license out of ignorance or otherwise)? Or are you talking about Gumroad's good deed of making its source publicly available?
> The source is open. It can be seen, edited, run yourself.
I can also take and eat food from the supermarket without paying. I just have to pay later in multiples, get jailed, or both. Or not.
The Readme goes right to how to install it, and other than the logo saying "sell your stuff, see what sticks" there is 0 information about what it does. Sure I can Google, but I think it should be right there, at the top of the Readme.
god we are so spoiled. this is a successful, pretty well known commercial project. it's now source available. you have plenty of resources to get context in 2 minutes. lets appreciate the big stuff, have some agency for the rest.
usually if the project comes with a big lengthy beautiful readme thats actually a contra indicator that the thing is a production repo
>god we are so spoiled.
Is it really "spoiled" to say it'd be convenient for maybe a one-liner at the top of the file that's supposed to explain stuff about the project?
>you have plenty of resources to get context in 2 minutes.
I always laugh a little bit at this line of thinking. Whoever wrote the readme can spend 2 minutes to write a line or two about the project, or the potentially thousands of people who want information about the project can spend 2 minutes to look it up. It makes a lot more sense to spend 2 minutes vs. 2000 minutes.
In the end, for me, it's not a big deal to spend the 2 minutes. But sometimes I like to think a little bit bigger than just myself.
Top right of the page it says
> About
> gumroad.com
pretty much sums up the contents of the repo. If someone can't be bothered to check out gumroad.com there's no amount of documentation that will help them.
gumroad.com does not say what it does. It's a list of products being sold. You have to navigate to the About page, then scroll about 1/4 of the way until you can get an idea of what it is.
Is it hard? No, of course not. It's like a minute or two. But it's a minute or two for lots of people vs. a minute or two for one person, once.
But yeah, I totally get it, why would I waste 2 minutes of my time when I can have a bunch of other people waste 2 minutes of their time instead.
I was also wondering what this was about. Should I care and why?
It's not only that I don't want to, but literally can't use extra 2 minutes for _every_ link I open while browsing news sites. And that attention span window is only getting shorter.
It's definitely not the first or last time for github repo not using the best real estate they have in "selling" their product.
> but literally can't use extra 2 minutes for _every_ link I open while browsing news sites
The expectation to open every link may be the real issue. If the title and Readme don't speak to you, just let it be. You will always miss out on most things on the Internet.
“I can’t afford to spend 2 extra minutes for every link I open on news sites” does not mean “I expect to open every link that exists on the news sites I visit”.
I had no idea, and I've been a "Rails guy" for 15 years, and keenly interested in high-profile successful Ruby projects for a long time. Even clicking through to their actual site from the source repo page, I had to surmise what it was.
It's an ecommerce platform.
One might prove one's intent in offering this platform for actual use by others through providing some base level of documentation.
I don't think they do intend that. I think they intend to get free contributions from keen people who think erroneously they're contributing to a public good.
Agreed. Their 'no full time employees' philosophy would be consistent with that: https://sahillavingia.com/work
Did you open a PR or something?
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The license is also not front and center
My exact same thought.
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I love how nothing in the readme tells me what it actually is.
> Sell your stuff. See what sticks.
Presumably an online shop with smart analytics.
I wouldn't really call it a traditional online shop, more like a file shop. They don't sell anything physical, only digital. If you've created a file on your computer that other people want, you can sell it on Gumroad. Depending on what you're trying to sell, there might be a better platform for the purpose (like Bandcamp for music), but Gumroad is the only one I'm aware of that's intentionally generic to fit many purposes (even if imperfectly).
They also don't do shit like putting DRM on ebooks and you can set the minimum price to zero to turn it into a tipping platform (free download, but with an optional payment).
> They don't sell anything physical, only digital.
Depends on the seller. I have a self-published physical magazine I distribute through Gumroad: https://www.glidermag.com/
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I saw this title and thought "the Australian craigslist is open source?" Then I realized I was confusing Gumroad and Gumtree.
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Time to train an "LLM" on it and have it reproduce the source code 1-to-1, so I can use it without a license!
Open sourcing my local AI model that trains on this repo and codes an app based on it:
cp -r gumroad not-gumroadIt's only a copyright issue if I know what the original source code looks like. If I don't know what it looks like, and my autocomplete writes it, how could I possibly know it's stolen?
I think the line b/w derivative work and new work might be different.
I mean if llms are trained on it ... and a lot of other things and then LLM can output the source code from a input ... then wouldn't it be open source / public domain
No
As if any court would accept this. Nice try
And how exactly are you going to prove derivative work?
OpenAI is basically betting the existence of the company on that.
Meta is betting the existence of their Llama models on it.
I don't think that's true. When chatgpt generates something that infringes (even on something not in the training data) it is still infringement and the output cannot be used by the user for anything they couldn't use the original for.
Luckily it doesn't do that often under normal use
But that's the point he tries to make. When you "teach" LLM with some knowledge, you teach it a set of patterns. It won't necessarily drop the code that infringes copyright. Say you load Gumroad code into Gemini Pro context and say something like: "Check this app. Analyze the implementation of feature XY... I need you to help me implement feature XY... but in Go". Then, you can recreate an entire platform that will look nothing like the original but will have the same features and open source it.
Except they have billions of dollars to make that bet.
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