Gumroad’s source is available

Posted by philipjoubert 4/4/2025

Gumroad’s source is available(github.com)

486 points | 205 commentspage 2

psnehanshu 4/4/2025|

It's Rails!

niklasbabel 4/4/2025|

i believe Sahil mentioned they’re moving away from Rails soon, as he sees it as technical debt.

omnimus 4/4/2025||

Drama creation for marketing?

taylorportman 4/4/2025||

Technical debt, so hot right now.

omnimus 4/4/2025||

I mean that choice of framework has very little to do with technical debt. So you claim something like this to create attention.

itsthecourier 4/4/2025||

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

prakashn27 4/4/2025||

What is the use of this opensurce when you have a strict license ?

DetroitThrow 4/4/2025|

It's a careless and sloppy marketing job by someone who wants to reframe the definition of open source for the millionth time, unfortunately.

udev4096 4/4/2025||

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?

cjpearson 4/4/2025||

For what it's worth Gumroad left VC land several years ago.

https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting

XCSme 4/4/2025|||

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.

diggan 4/4/2025|||

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.

preisschild 4/4/2025|||

Yep. Bait & Switch. Which is exactly why you shouldn't contribute to open source projects that require a CLA.

graypegg 4/4/2025|||

    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.

Am I going insane, or is there a reading of this that seems to imply you can use the software, to infringe on ANY work Gumroad has created? "...grants you a copyright license for the software" seems to imply it's talking about this software license only, but the second part mentions "licensor's copyright" which seems to not be defined, nor bounded. There's no mention of a copyright *for the software*... just the copyright license to use the software that allows you to infringe all copyrights from Gumroad.

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.

I wonder if you can just reuse text or images from their corporate website as long as you personally make less than 1M$ a year, use their software and don't infringe their trademarks.

Awful license on multiple levels.

DetroitThrow 4/4/2025||

No you're not insane, it's much harder to follow than most source available licenses I've seen.

pseudalopex 4/4/2025|||

> 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.

jhanschoo 4/4/2025|||

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.

rustc 4/4/2025||

The founder of Gumroad is claiming that [1].

> 14 years ago, Gumroad launched

> Today, Gumroad goes open-source

[1]: https://x.com/shl/status/1908090697984426227

jhanschoo 4/4/2025||

Thanks, this is new to me and not something I could infer from OP's link.

accoil 4/4/2025||

I think the original title for this submission also called it open source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43580533

jhanschoo 4/4/2025||

Yes indeed, but OP is not Gumroad.

michaelcampbell 4/5/2025|||

Money; the same reason everyone in VC land does anything.

openthc 4/4/2025|||

Which is super bullshit; cause now offering open source solutions many folk see it as a trick!

tempfile 4/4/2025||

The definition of open source is itself a corruption of free software which came before it, and was corrupted by the same people.

itsthecourier 4/4/2025||

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

hankchinaski 4/4/2025||

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

insane_dreamer 4/5/2025|

The value of AirBNB is not in its code but in its network.

hankchinaski 4/5/2025||

And yet is never gonna be open source

TylerLives 4/4/2025||

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.

rchaud 4/4/2025|

They've also bumped up their fees enormously, it's 10% + processing fee now, previously it was $1 flat + processing.

quest88 4/4/2025||

Wow, I remember their offices next to Thee Parkside on 17th.

devops000 4/4/2025||

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?

whalesalad 4/4/2025|

If you do it right, no one will know.

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