This idea resonated well:
Writing code for free is charity.
I always saw creating open source code akin to being a plumber or carpenter who applied their hard earned knowledge and worked for free in homes they chose.
A plumber who works for free is a rare thing to see, however in software it seems lots of people _expect_ it to be created like that. Not uncommon at all to see comments in HN saying that "oh well if it's not OSS I won't try this software you're showing off". Try saying to a carpenter that if they don't give away their new chairs for free, you wouldn't even start to think of getting one! :)
But then, if you care about the "right to repair" (so to speak) of your software, well at least use a strong copyleft, not a permissive license that basically grant the permission to "steal".
Captura is a great piece of software - I've used it for years, and I still use the latest release today.
It is a complete, all-in-one tool - very straightforward UI, lots of formats supported (especially through ffmpeg integration) and very easy to use in terms of window or screen area selection for recording - and more importantly for my use-cases, it's portable (no install, no admin rights needed). Really a great example of what's possible in that space.
I didn't participate in the project, but I've checked out the PRs and issues list every now and then and it's been frustrating seeing the author struggle against the store republishing issues for literal years. The issue tracking that (#405[1]) is not a happy read for sure.
The fact that Captura's MIT licensing gave effectively a "license to steal" to people and that it's so easy to publish something and sell it on the Microsoft store didn't mesh well.
I've however been really disappointed by Microsoft's non-response through all of that republishing debacle. Republishing free software is a difficult topic to get right for edge-cases, sure, but the Captura case was obvious to rule on and Microsoft did nothing for years - it was clear that there was no process for this kind of scenario, and that the solution was to do nothing. It took the author taking down the project for them to react, and even then I'm convinced that's only because whoever handled that case assumed that the republisher was the one taking it down, not the project author.
Oh man, sorry to hear about the dev burnout. But what do you expect? We made software worthless by giving away ready products for free. It’s not a library for other devs to use, so we can all „stand on the shoulder of giants”. Stuff like this should be paid from the start.
The list of donations is depressing to watch. So little received for so much delivered value.
Currently I use a tool called ScreenToGif on Windows, which allows making both GIFs as well as render a video out of the captured sequence of frames: https://www.screentogif.com/ (source: https://github.com/NickeManarin/ScreenToGif)
That said, a lot of open source software faces issues with funding and also developer burnout, or something other reasons for a project just... ceasing. Like there's this lovely piece of backup software called BackupPC, that covered all of my needs, but there hasn't been a new release in forever: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc
What's worse, sometimes the community is just left with no status updates, and don't even know whether a project is abandoned: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/issues/518
In cases where nobody cares enough to make forks and keep it alive it just... fizzles out.
This might sound a bit off, but I sometimes wish there was a feature where you could say: "Hey, I'm willing to pay X$ for the maintainer of the software to address this issue on GitHub or do a release, I've placed the amount of money in escrow and it will be released to the dev upon completion." With enough people pooling resources together, how much the community actually cares would be quite obvious and the devs could actually benefit from OSS. Donations are too unreliable and detached from the units of work done (I've done some donations in the past, but would do more monetary contributions for specific issues). If streamlined enough, it wouldn't be different from buying the developer a beer, or the equivalent of Patreon or Kofi.
Good to see the author got over their fear of running ads, if this blog is any indication.
I recently switced to Captura from from ActiveScreen recorded and I love it. Didn’t observe any bugs at all. Great piece of sw.
How often is pride in the way of building a team of maintainers, which could reduce the risk of burnout?
Is this the case here? I don't know.
A bit out of context, but I would really appreciate some explanation/answers here.
Has anyone shared some sort of analysis of external/community contributions to Hashicorp's OSS products, following their licensing change, to then come to a conclusion about some "internal to external" contributions ratio that would justify all the frustration with which that decision has been received?
I mean, people tend to always assume that OpenSource software is the ownership of a world-wide community of contributors, and not the person (or group of people) that had initiated it and decided to share the code; but, I've hardly seen cases outside of these two, when serious problems surface:
1. Indie OSS maintainer that suffering from some burnout, or even struggle to make a living, while their work is being freely used by thousands of people, and even help dozen of companies make money in some way.
2. OSS project that is mainly supported and maintained by some company/corporate, to the point that if they would ever decide to stop doing it, the software would not as actively receive significant fixes/updates (if any). Which basically means: the sofware is freely available (along with its source code), mainly because there are people paid to work on it.
OT: This is the first time I'm seeing a cookie banner on Github pages. :|
People (both developers and users) need to understand the limitations and benefits of open source:
For companies, it is about control. Google did not care about contributing protobuf to the world: a company does not "care", it maximizes profit. Open-sourcing protobuf was most likely not a big cost, and it had benefits for Google (otherwise it would not have been rational to open source it). For instance, Google benefits from external engineers who already know protobuf when they join Google (no need to teach them). Google can benefit from external projects exposing a protobuf API (though I am not sure if that is frequent), and by having protobuf out there, they keep control: the biggest issue of Cap'n Proto is that it does not support all the languages protobuf/gRPC do. If protobuf was not open source, something like Cap'n Proto may take its place, and that's not good for Google. Same goes for Chromium or AOSP.
For individuals, there are two cases: as employees and as "hobbyists" (for a lack of better term):
As an employee, I benefit from my code being open source: I will keep access to it after I leave, and it serves as a portfolio you can show when you look for a new job. I really, really do NOT understand why software developers are NOT systematically pushing very hard to get their code open source. Many times you just need some kind of "yes" from a manager (even if they did not really understand the consequences) and once it's open source, it's done. And many times it does not impact the company at all (and honestly, why should you care?). I have this Marshall home smart speaker that is pretty good hardware, but the software is a piece of crap. Marshall does not benefit from not making it open source: people like me would make their speaker better. Not because I want to help Marshall, but because I want a good speaker and I am ready to work for it. It's just that nobody at Marshall cares/understands.
As a "hobbyist" (again, bad term but I don't have a better one), it is a bit of a philosophy. I like using open source software, because I can compile it for my specific needs, I can debug it, I can tweak it. If I am aligned with the creator, I can even contribute upstream as long as I do benefit from it (mostly because I need it or I enjoy it). The risk is that someone else may resell my code, but let's be honest: if I could sell my code myself, I would not make it open source. Of course it's frustrating when someone else makes money from your work, whether they honor the attribution clause of the MIT license or not. BTW if you don't want to live the frustration of seeing a business make money from your work, a good start is copyleft licenses. They can still make money from it, but at least they contribute back to your project. I just don't understand why hobbyists go for permissive licenses at all.
Now hobbyists (like the maintainer of Captura) need to really understand that they don't owe anyone anything. You work for free, you should work for yourself. If someone wants a feature you don't care about, don't implement it or make them pay for it. If they are being jerks, ignore them. If they fork away, great! And IMHO you should favour contributions to projects that have a copyleft license. If you contribute to permissively-licensed projects (or if you sign a CLA), then you are not allowed to be frustrated when the company makes money from your code without giving anything back.
I understand why he may not want to do it but simply commercializing the software could keep it going, then use that money to help defeat the cooyright infringers. But that is business which he probably never wanted to do. He wanted to code.
Microsoft Store is like App store, except Microsoft doesn't give two shit about quality and you're not locked-in.
It's like they took entirely wrong lessons from App Store.
Windows's Game Bar (Win+G) seems to successfully replace this tool, at least for me.
> Subsequently, I discovered that certain individuals had stolen the application and were selling it on various platforms, including the Windows Store, under a different name without crediting me as the original developer... Efforts to reach out to Microsoft Store proved to be largely unfruitful for nearly a year...
Lack of proper curation and human communication are among the major reasons to hate app stores.
Free app stores like in Ubuntu often ship versions not polished enough because nobody has enough spare time to really care without being paid, commercial app stores like of Microsoft and Google just don't care and feel Ok welcoming all sorts of scammers as long as they pay the rent, all they apparently do is nuking accounts of good people for no clear reason.