drawohara

You are a blood sucking leech.

Open Source developers themselves shouldn’t ever fund the dissemination of their code onto the disks of every bloody internet start-up in the land. I work for free to provide free software to the world - why shouldn’t you?

“We have expenses!”

Bugger that, so do I! So does Jamis Buck, who provides boatloads of software to the community in between chasing a pack of kids around. So does Zed Shaw, who might be crazy, but who nonetheless belted out Mongrel just when the community needed it most. Should he pay for every Rails’ shop in country to download his software? Should Jamis have to pay for people to download sqlite-ruby? Should I have to pay in order to relent to the dozens of emails asking me to port over 50 libraries from svn to git(hub)?

Yeah, I know there are Open Source git repos. I know I can run my own. But that fact is that you are already the cannoical ruby repo and seem poised to subsume all great ruby projects.

So this is my plea: don’t charge Open Source projects for storage. Don’t live on the backs of the people who vivify the entire Open Source process.

Instead, do something else: charge businesses to download, advertise, sell cookies, whatever. Hell, you really should be able to figure out how to actually give a peice back to OS developers, but maybe that’s asking too much. Just please don’t abuse us like every other component of the software industry - disks are cheap and we all know it.

Sincerely, codeforpeople.com