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Man pages maintenance suspended

From: Alejandro Colomar <alx-AT-kernel.org>

Hi all,

As you know, I’ve been maintaining the Linux man-pages project for the last 4 years as a voluntary. I’ve been doing it in my free time, and no company has sponsored that work at all. At the moment, I cannot sustain this work economically any more, and will temporarily and indefinitely stop working on this project. If any company has interests in the future of the project, I’d welcome an offer to sponsor my work here; if so, please let me know.

Have a lovely day! Alex

thingsiplay , (edited )

I think its this site? www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/

I don’t see any option to give money. So he does not accept donations from users like you and me and only asks for sponsorship?

An alternate website can be found here: linux.die.net/man/ However, I don’t know how much they differ.

Edit: What I don’t like with both of these sites is, that they are powered by Google. I would like to see an alternative engine, at least an option to set it up. That’s probably a reason why I never used it and actually wouldn’t want to support it.

IsoKiero ,

You do realize that man pages don’t live on the internet? The kernel.org one is the offical project website, as far as I know, but the project itself is very much not for the web presense, but for the vastly useful documentation included on your distribution.

thingsiplay ,

You do realize that man pages don’t live on the internet?

What part of my reply is this an answer to? I know we have our man pages offline. But the website here is online and they use Google as a search machine. My critique is using Google and not providing an alternative search machine setup.

IsoKiero ,

I mean that the product made in here is not the website and I can well understand that the developer has no interest of spending time for it as it’s not beneficial to the actual project he’s been working with. And I can also understand that he doesn’t want to receive donations from individuals as that would bring in even more work to manage which is time spent off the project. A single sponsor with clearly agreed boundaries is far more simple to manage.

thingsiplay ,

I see, it was a reply to me why he isn’t accepting donations from individuals. The given reason here makes sense.

JackbyDev ,

It’s still useful though because you might hit it from a search engine while searching other stuff and you can also provide links to it when answering questions for people.

lemann ,

The few times I’ve needed to man [app name] on a system without internet access or on an obscure utility, I’ve always been able to find what I need in the included docs

I hope the dev eventually gets sponsored, this is one of those utilities that you don’t think you need until –help doesn’t cut it

IsoKiero ,

Back in the day with dial-up internet man pages, readmes and other included documentation was pretty much the only way to learn anything as www was in it’s very early stages. And still ‘man <whatever>’ is way faster than trying to search the same information over the web. Today at the work I needed man page for setfacl (since I still don’t remember every command parameters) and I found out that WSL2 Debian on my office workstation does not have command ‘man’ out of the box and I was more than midly annoyed that I had to search for that.

Of course today it was just a alt+tab to browser, a new tab and a few seconds for results, which most likely consumed enough bandwidth that on dialup it would’ve taken several hours to download, but it was annoying enough that I’ll spend some time at monday to fix this on my laptop.

Findmysec ,

Everything needs to be slapped with the AGPL. Fuck corporate America

QuazarOmega ,

AGPL on documentation? What would that do?

matcha_addict ,

AGPL doesn’t help. AGPL authors are explicitly pro-corporate use

Findmysec ,

I thought AGPL was the more restrictive version of GPL? Which license should we use so that corporates need to pay?

matcha_addict ,

Unfortunately it is still not enough. There have been many instances of people using these licenses and still corporations using their software without giving back, and developers being upset about it.

And unfortunately there are no popular licenses that limit that. I’ve seen a few here and there, but doesn’t seem to be a standard.

CosmicTurtle0 ,

Creative Commons-BY-NC would be better.

Findmysec ,

Alright we should use that then

corsicanguppy ,

My old employer used to have people on staff just for technical writing. Some of that writing became the man pages you know, and some of it was ‘just’ documentation for commercial products - ID management and the like.

Then we sued IBM for breach of contract, and if you ask anyone about it they’ll parrot the IBM PR themes exactly, as their PR work was brutal. People in Usenet and Forums were very mean, and the company decided to stop offering much of the stuff that it was for free. It was very ‘f this’.

If man pages needed a volunteer to maintain, I know why ours tapered off.

vk6flab ,
@vk6flab@lemmy.radio avatar

In my opinion it’s criminal just how often this happens. Big business making obscene profit off the back of volunteer work like yours and many others across the OSS community.

GammaGames ,

Definitely agree, maybe it’s time to share Paul Ramsey’s talk on the subject again

vk6flab ,
@vk6flab@lemmy.radio avatar

Bruce Perens is currently working on a new licensing model called Post Open requiring that business with sufficient revenue to pay up.

postopen.org

GammaGames ,

I hope it catches on!

khorovodoved ,

I doubt it. It is basically equivalent to buying a proprietary software license for 1% of a revenue. I doubt any large business would be willing to spend that much on a single piece of software. And it would always be only one piece of software at a time.

nichtburningturtle ,
@nichtburningturtle@feddit.org avatar

Still better than being exploited

matcha_addict ,

Why only “with sufficient revenue”? All commercial use should pay. Adding “with sufficient revenue” only makes it more difficult to enforce and introduces loopholes.

JackbyDev ,

I’ve looked into this very briefly before and I think part of the reason is that tons of things we wouldn’t necessarily call commercial usage are considered commercial usage. This was in relation to favoring the non non-commercial usage Creative Commons licenses though. (The ones they call free culture licenses.)

Ledivin ,

It’s criminal to let someone do the thing he actively volunteers to do? It’s criminal to use software that someone intentionally puts out into the world as free?

If you’re willing yo do something for free, people are going to let you 🤷‍♂️

matcha_addict ,

It’s criminal the propaganda that lead people like this developer to believe they should do the work for free, and not worry, because the corporate world always gives back :)

leisesprecher ,

Germany has a Sovereign Tech Fund for exactly this, and while it’s not perfect, it’s one of the better uses of my tax euros.

propter_hog ,
@propter_hog@hexbear.net avatar

That’s why the current state of open source licenses doesn’t work. Commercial use should be forbidden for free users. You could dual license the work, with a single, main license applying to everyone, and a second addendum license that just contains the clause for that specific use, be it personal or corporate. Corporate use of any kind requires supporting the project financially.

Telorand ,

I hope we see an evolution of licensing. Giant companies shouldn’t get a free pass if they’re just going to treat the original devs like a commodity to be used up.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org avatar

I'm a single dude who sells custom electronics with open source software on them. I sell maybe two PCBs a month. It just about covers my hobby, I'm not even living off of it. I can't afford commercial licenses. There has to be tiers.

In return, I've made every schematic, gerber file, and bill of material to my stuff freely available.

lattrommi ,
@lattrommi@lemmy.ml avatar

One way to allow for this would be a license that says if you sell them through an LLC or corporate entity of some kind, that should require financial support but if it’s you selling them in your own name or as a single owner business, with your reputation and liability on the line, then you should not be required to provide support. The other thought to include in a license is actual money earned from sales. Once a company earns, for example let’s say $1,000 or 1,000€ a month in profits, that’s when the financial support license kicks in and requires payments to the open source authors. Of course, that would require high earners to report their earnings accurately which is a different can of worms.

fossphi ,

I agree, but this is mostly an issue with permissive licenses like MIT. GPL and its variants have enough teeth in them to deal with shit like this. I’m scared of the rising popularity of these permissive licenses. A lot of indie devs have somehow been convinced by corpos that they should avoid the GPL and go with MIT and alike

propter_hog ,
@propter_hog@hexbear.net avatar

Oh I definitely agree with you there. I just think GPL is close but not close enough.

theshatterstone54 ,

Things like this make me wish I was a tech CEO. I’d totally be the guy ensuring we give back to projects if I was.

cubism_pitta ,

Nah, the investors don’t see it as a benefit to your growth to pay people you don’t have to

theshatterstone54 ,

10k for a company making millions annually is nothing, 1% or less. But split between some of these projects, especially the less appreciated or funded ones, can be life changing.

But you’re unfortunately right

davel ,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

The 10k can pay dividends in PR alone, and will attract more developers to apply for job openings.

matcha_addict ,

That is part of why you’re not a tech CEO. You’re not supposed to have compassion! No investor would want that.

P.S. This is an attack on CEOs and investors, not on you :)

troyunrau ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

This sounds like the sort of infrastructure project the Linux Foundation should be supporting.

nichtburningturtle ,
@nichtburningturtle@feddit.org avatar

He absolutely deserves it.

IsoKiero ,

image

xkcd.com/2347/

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