This is the exact thing I was hoping would happen when I posted this

I don’t see why having the CEO of a company justify themselves, and bear the burden of proof, for using an MIT library would be a desired outcome.

Put another way, he forgot to get back to the guy whose project/hosting space his company was using, for a whole month, and he came back with a classy response and decent amount of detail. Everybody wins. Except the people who think there's a court in session here and are worried us plebians are putting _CEOs of companies_ on trial

Atleast put some effort into reading all the material if you want to shame somebody.

1) Initial email was sales pitch that did not touch the problem at all. Which retool responded to by the way.

2) CDN is hardcoded into the JS library. Why would you even do that and then shame people? If it’s against the ToS then you need people point to the ToS first. It’s the author’s fault here.

3) MIT license. How many times do we have to go through this. Retool could just fuck off but even before this witch hunt began, they were already donating.

4) Some human communication explaining the problem wouldn’t hurt. Personally I’m more likely to turn down using faker.js now.

> CDN is hardcoded into the JS library. Why would you even do that and then shame people?

It’s worth noting that before the fakercloud.com URLs were hard-coded into the library, the library was hard-coding a different service’s S3 URLs (uifaces.co) and only stopped when they became inaccessible:

https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/commit/e45648439ff5dd9adbe...

https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/issues/1055

So it seems a little unfair to complain that Retool are embedding URLs to your CDN when this library was doing the same thing to UI Faces a few months ago.

Oh damn really? What a sleazy hypocritical thing to do.

This is a very good overview of the situation. It's sad how Retool's name was dragged through the mud for daring to use an MIT licensed open source project.

They still need to be dragged a bit for copying someone's project. There is nothing against it in the license, but it is still pretty crappy to copy someone's offering and offer it up for free. Especially when you built your free offering on the back of the product you are killing.

I disagree. If you don't want anyone just come by, copy your product and offer it for free, don't release it under MIT. There is no "bro code" when it comes to software licenses.

By its very nature, the "bro code" refers to a "code" that doesn't actually exist, which makes your comment quite ironic. On measures of aptness, that makes it a comparison that's not apposite at all, but instead opposite.

It's generally considered bad form to privatize OSS for your own gain, whether there's a price tag on it on day 1 or not. Ex. VLCs issues over the years

"dragged through the mud"? :X

people way overreact online

Is there some reason that, at least 13 hours later, the blog post hasn’t been replaced with a mea culpa for accusing these folks of something that ended up being a problem in your own library?

What power do you think the person you're responding to has over the content of the linked blog post? They're the link submitter, not the post author.

Oh, damn. I thought I’d read further down the thread that they were one and the same but I see he specifically says otherwise. I guess it’s me that owes the mea culpa.

They still copied the fakercloud site, did they not?

My understanding is they used faker.js to generate urls, and those urls referenced fakercloud. So the open source project faker.js ends up pointing you at fakercloud without realizing it.

David you're probably just getting nonstop flak for this and as the CEO of the "big bad" here just let me say that I feel genuinely bad for you. Whatever conversation you have to have behind the scenes is a truly stupid thing to have to do in this situation. The CDN thing is dumb and maybe arguably not how this should have been done but your team and their work doesn't deserve to be villified for doing basically nothing wrong other than a very simple email miscommunication.

Good luck with this all.

“Maybe we could commit one engineering-day per month for contributing back to OSS libraries we use heavily”

This could be more disruptive than helpful as very few engineers would contribute much one day a month. Would you hire a developer for 1 day per month? They would more likely burden the experienced developers with questions and poor code submissions that need to be reviewed and then forget what they learned a month before.

You're right, but how about this case: If the company has about 30 devs, so 1 dev can spend 1 month for this library, no one else needed?

They voluntarily donated $2000 to faker.js as I can see from opencollective link. It definitely looks like they love supporting open-source and not trying to rip-off small devs.

It's a bit odd that if they hadn't done that, faker.js wouldn't have found out that they were using it that much, and couldn't have sent them the sales pitch in the first place.

In an a bit odd way, this time, donating to OSS, resulted in "bad press" at least for a while.

I hope things will end in a good way, somehow, for everyone

Hey David,

I don't think your company did anything wrong. The CDN is hard codes into the library as far as I can tell.

Ultimately there are two separate issues.

1. The CDN thing, of course.

2. The open source monetization never ending problem.

The first can be fixed with a simple change to the library. The second your company is already trying to help in part. Ultimately open source is not easily monetizable...

Hey David, I really feel for you. These PR-esque situations are never fun, but I think you’ve done an excellent job of handling this.

I believe there is a bias people have of viewing (somewhat ironically) things in terms of a “David vs. Goliath” lens. Everyone loves rooting for the little guy, even when the little guy is objectively incorrect.

Hope your weekend goes better than it has been so far! Retool is an excellent product by the way :)

I mean the thing is this is more like David vs. a sergeant in the Philistine army than Goliath, Goliath would have to be Amazon level.

Looking forward to your response. Hopefully it was just a misunderstanding.

Yay for dialogue

If it’s rectified upon the CEO finding out about it and he makes a true apology, and implements policy to prevent it from happening again, that’s better than just not saying anything and not doing anything to rectify the situation; however, most people here would agree that doing so doesn’t excuse the fact that he let it happen in the first place.

Ooo

>Hi Marak, this is interesting! Give me a day to work on this; I will reach back out soon!

You promised this last time. Why is a post on Hacker News any different than a private email?

The email he ignored was a random sales pitch. Nowhere did the author mention his actual problem.

When Marak sent me the email, I read it as a "Hi, I built Faker, might you be interested in acquiring it?". I responded with a "yes, that could be interesting, give me a day to work on this". In the end, we decided that acquiring Faker didn't make sense, and I'm sorry to Marak for not sending a follow-up email telling him we weren't interested. In this case, the content is different (i.e. we are potentially abusing OSS), which is why I’m responding to this.

(FWIW, I typically receive 50 - 100 sales emails every day. I do try and reply to the ones that look interesting, but I do forget to follow-up sometimes if we're not interested! This does not excuse my behavior in this particular case, and I’m sorry to Marak for not following up.)

I wasn't convinced by this reply either, then I went back and read the actual email. It doesn't mention the problem at all, it's a straightforward sales pitch. Even I ignore tons of those regularly, it's kind of dishonest on the part of the developer to say "oh they caused me a problem, I emailed them and they didn't reply" without mentioning that he didn't mention the problem in the email at all!

Frankly the author of Faker seems like he went into this project with the clear intention of profit, but by releasing it for free, and then pressuring people into giving him money. It's almost predatory.

Especially since Faker.js doesn't do anything that much useful which can't be replicated in trivial time. You use it because it's available, like we all do with MIT licensed libraries.

Uh, but he followed up with you a week later and you again decided not to reply.

Yes, people cold emailing you to sell you things often follow up.

His explanation was that he “forgot” to reply. Just be honest then and say he put him on ignore after evaluating.

> I do try and reply to the ones that look interesting, but I do forget to follow-up sometimes if we're not interested!

Chances would be that I would recognize the sender and then immediately archive the email and not even read it...

This really doesn't sound convincing at all.

For a counterpoint of equivalent value - I'm fairly convinced.

He promised to look into the possibility of buying faker. The initial email said nothing about the gripes in this article. In fact, the author of the article did absolutely nothing to resolve this problem before writing the article itself.

C'mon, give the guy a break - people get busy.

Is there even any duty to respond to unsolicited sales pitches? I would assume it is fine to ignore those.

Not at all since no one owes "you" anything. It's "your" duty to pursue it (e.g. endless follow ups, get connected through others)

Because now it’s public he failed to respond