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.Edit: just did a bit of digging.It looks like we have a Retool template that has some fake data in it (https://retool.com/api-generator/). This is an app built in Retool, and has a few thousand rows of hard-coded data.Most of this fake data is self-generated, but we used the faker.js library (https://github.com/marak/Faker.js/) to generate three datatypes: IP address, avatar, and industry. This MIT licensed library, when used, creates data that links directly to fakercloud (https://cdn.fakercloud.com/avatars/). Here is the code itself: https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/blob/master/lib/internet.j..., and here is a demo that shows the library generating those links: https://rawgit.com/Marak/faker.js/master/examples/browser/in....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.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 (https://opencollective.com/retool), 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.(Also: I’m sorry to Marak for not responding to his email re. acquiring Faker. More in this child thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27252420)