Posted by philipjoubert 1 day ago
> 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.
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cool list
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.
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
I wonder if this can be worked around by setting up an OpenAI-style non-profit arm to use Gumroad.
What? Where do you get this from? It's quite the opposite.
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.
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.
> 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.
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