Monetizing open-source is problematic
Hi all! I'm David, CEO @ Retool. I'm looking in to this right now and will update my comment here with a response in the next two hours.<p>Edit: just did a bit of digging.<p>It looks like we have a Retool template that has some fake data in it (<a href="https://retool.com/api-generator/" rel="nofollow">https://retool.com/api-generator/</a>). This is an app built in Retool, and has a few thousand rows of hard-coded data.<p>Most of this fake data is self-generated, but we used the faker.js library (<a href="https://github.com/marak/Faker.js/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/marak/Faker.js/</a>) to generate three datatypes: IP address, avatar, and industry. This MIT licensed library, when used, creates data that links directly to fakercloud (<a href="https://cdn.fakercloud.com/avatars/" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.fakercloud.com/avatars/</a>). Here is the code itself: <a href="https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/blob/master/lib/internet.js#L15" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/blob/master/lib/internet.j...</a>, and here is a demo that shows the library generating those links: <a href="https://rawgit.com/Marak/faker.js/master/examples/browser/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://rawgit.com/Marak/faker.js/master/examples/browser/in...</a>.<p>I just spoke to the engineers who worked on this project, and we are sorry for including links to fakercloud. This wasn’t intentional, and we just pushed a commit removing all avatars from the template. This is already deployed. I hope you all can understand why we trusted the data generated by the MIT licensed project, and didn’t think it would link to anything proprietary.<p>I myself am an engineer (and avid HN reader, as evinced by how I found this while reading HN on a Sat night), understand Marak’s frustration, and agree that monetizing OSS is hard. While we’ve already contributed around $10k to various libraries we use (<a href="https://opencollective.com/retool" rel="nofollow">https://opencollective.com/retool</a>), including faker.js, Babel, ESLint, and JSON Schema, I’m going to see if there is more we can do. We’ll be writing a blog post about it this week and I will follow up with more next steps. I wonder whether there is a better way of sponsoring OSS, other than just donating dollars every month?  (Maybe we could commit one engineering-day per month for contributing back to OSS libraries we use heavily?) In the meantime, we'll certainly continue sponsoring all the libraries we’re sponsoring already, including faker.js.<p>(Also: I’m sorry to Marak for not responding to his email re. acquiring Faker. More in this child thread: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27252420" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27252420</a>)