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"?)[1] we don't get to see most companies codebases, so this is a good indicator of the amount of integrations
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.
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.
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.
The investors sold the company back to the founder for $1. That's as close as it gets to declaring equity as worthless.
> 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
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.
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.
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 ....
The Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition are structured differently, but pretty obviously map from one to another.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43581484
The NASA Open Source Agreement is the one I found.
> 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
And possibly 9
> 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
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.
- 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.
Perhaps the shift to making the source available has more to do with work culture: https://sahillavingia.com/work
Probably not entirely, but straight from the author.
> 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.
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
One is a marketing tactic, the other one is outright misleading.
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.
They want the marketing benefits without the costs.
> 14 years ago, Gumroad launched
> Today, Gumroad goes open-source
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
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-department-of-veterans-affa...
----- "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."
This license is clearly fails OSD and is not open source by the industry standard; perpetuating a false statement is unhelpful.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
At renewal software provider X might hike license fees for Y to an unreasonable fee, or decide you're not worth the time at all.
I assume you can get a commercial license at any point, not only after you reach X revenue too?
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.
And even if they change their license , we need to fork this with this specific license right now!!
Going to fork it right now
What? Where do you get this from? It's quite the opposite.
I wonder if this can be worked around by setting up an OpenAI-style non-profit arm to use Gumroad.
> Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code
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).
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.
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.
In this instance, where did Gumroad claim that its code was open source?
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.
They are lying and need to be called out.
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.
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.
just because you can read the English literally and say "the source is open" doesn't mean you've proven anything.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
My issue is with the claim that there is no sense in which a native speaker can make a grammar error. Maybe we should call them "idiolect incongrueces" I do not care.
In my language there is a verb tense that is often misused, I often misuse it and I can hear the resulting sentence I say feel wrong. That is a grammar mistake the same way missing a note in a song is a mistake.
If linguists want to work towards reducing the stigma issues of standardized grammars I commend them and wish them good luck. But that is different from saying that grammar mistake do no exist.
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.
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.
TFA's license doesn't meet the definition you posted. It restricts who can use/redistribute/modify the software.
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.)
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.
Factually, this is not true. Facts outrank everything else.
usually if the project comes with a big lengthy beautiful readme thats actually a contra indicator that the thing is a production repo
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Presumably an online shop with smart analytics.
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).
Depends on the seller. I have a self-published physical magazine I distribute through Gumroad: https://www.glidermag.com/
cp -r gumroad not-gumroadI 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
Meta is betting the existence of their Llama models on it.
Luckily it doesn't do that often under normal use