Joined 19 years ago
Repo: https://github.com/mhuebert/maria
ClojureD talk introducing Maria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUBHrS4ZzO4
Description of 2022 grant work: http://blog.maria.cloud/2022/09/30/Maria-and-Clojurists-Toge...
I'll be posting updates to twitter, @mhuebert.
Happy to answer any questions / hear ideas for improvement & extension.
I want to _sustainably_ write software, not for donations but by having people who want to use it, pay for it. If I have to go closed-source to do so, then that's what I'll do. I don't have a big company behind me paying a salary.
But I would prefer to make things in the open, sharing my process; I'd like to allow students and other individuals to benefit from my work, either freely or very affordably; and I'd like to charge for-profit companies a fair price for what they receive.
The open source community tried to trademark the 'open source' label, and failed¹, precisely because it is _too descriptive_: it sounds like a generic way of describing source code that isn't private, not a specialized term with specific ethical and legal implications. But nevertheless the 'Open Source Definition' campaign has been rather effective in limiting use of the term. So I'm not even sure what to call what I want to do: maybe "open-source-ish"?
Some of my work belongs under OSI-approved licenses, but not all of it, and I appreciate that people like Kyle are working, creatively, on alternatives.
1. https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...
The first license I can remember paying for was Metafizzy's 'Isotope', a jQuery layout plugin. Great documentation and performance. I can't remember the price at the time, maybe $40 (now it ranges from $25 - $320). It was totally worth it, I was making money and clients were happy.
If we had a nice repertoire of flexible licenses available to play with, developers could experiment and try all sorts of ideas, including what you describe.
Non-FOSS-licensed software isn't going to play the same role in the ecosystem as FOSS software, but it doesn't have to. Plenty of room for different kinds of people/companies/software to co-exist.
Why should a developer be accused of greed for publishing code openly, but with paid licenses for commercial use? How is this not better, in absolute terms, than remaining closed source?
> I figured that if devs don't want software used by companies, they could use the CC-NC licenses.
From what I can see, this is exactly what L0 provides, with the added _option_ that if a company _does_ want to use the software for commercial purposes, they can pay for a license with a credit card.
> Customers who want permission for commercial or non-Open Source uses can identify, price, and buy licenses for all License Zero dependencies of their Node.js projects, in one checkout transaction, using a free command-line tool
I built this because I was totally new to writing parsers, and I liked Instaparse but wanted a faster feedback cycle. I was also excited to use CodeMirror with ClojureScript, two of my favorite tools. More broadly, I'm interested in the future of browser-based coding - I think there's a bright future in small, problem-specific coding environments in which the language, editor, and UX are carefully mapped to a particular problem.
Just as Excel is primarily graphical but allows power users to write formulas, with CodeMirror and Instaparse one can imagine designing a small language and mini-editor to expose advanced functionality within an app. (Here I expose options as an editable Clojure map instead of with a GUI.)
