Yeah someone on Reddit mentioned it as well. I always use an AdBlocker so I don’t see the ads myself, but with that turned off, it’s horrible. Years ago when I set it up it was just a Google banner before the article, but now it’s all over the place. Not sure why that has changed, but I also don’t actively read the emails Google sends about AdSense. Going to look into it because it’s way too much.
Can’t edit the previous comment with an update, but I’ve changed the settings with AdSense. Some kind of experiment was set up with in page ads, that should be disabled and back to just the banner at the top. A screenshot with screenshot.guru shows me that it seems to work: https://i.postimg.cc/cHBPN77g/4b52g0m-GV-qp8-AAAAASUVORK5-CYII.png
I’m still seeing tons of ads inline. Why not just turn off adsense? Is it really bringing in enough money to justify them inserting ads into your blog?
It brings in about 70 euros per half year, or whatever is the minimum payout term for AdSense. It covers the hosting and domain registration, so it’s worth it. For the amount of unique visitors it seems quite low (10k per weekday, about 8k in weekends or holidays). Which is to say, large part of the visitors have AdBlockers on.
My “eenmanszaak” has received zero physical marketing mailings in almost a year, so don’t worry about that.
Starting January the first I believe that private addresses are going to become invisible on the KVK site (finally!).
I was in a similar position some years ago and decided to dual-license my software AGPL+commercial license.
From personal experience, for a payment processor I can strongly recommend https://paddle.com since that makes the whole “how do I get the money” stuff a no-brainer. For example, they do all the sales tax related stuff for you which is great, especially if you are selling to private persons in the EU (due to the different tax schemes).
Setting up a corp and a business account is probably a good idea, but if you just want to take money and not really have an entity, places like stripe will absolutely deposit to a personal account.
One thing I’d like to read is your thoughts on why you chose the GPL versus BSDL (or another permissive license). Also, one thing I learned (at least, in the US) is that if you are the maintainer/owner of the GPL code, you can still do what you want with it, including keeping it proprietary. That violates the spirit of the GPL, but still follows the letter.
I want all software to be open source under the GPL, meaning source available and everyone required to also open source their modifications. The viral nature some people complain about is my main selling point. For the greater good that is the only viable option, since taking a piece of software and not contributing back but just profiting is only good for “increasing shareholder value”.
The BSD style licenses permit such behaviour. GPL forces companies to contribute back. Theory does not always holds up, see many Chinese router makers or the recent OBS clone by some Chinese firm, but it provides a base to stand on in case of such violations.
With the GPL everyone benefits instead of a few already wealthy folks getting wealthier. I literally live two villages next to the shipyard that is building Bezoss rumoured next yacht, without all the open source code that would not be possible. But the original creators? They probably dont see a penny. (which might be completely fine with them, since they choose a BSD style license anyway, who am I to judge. But, my views differ, and those are the views you asked about).
What we’re seeing in many BSD-licensed projects is that companies do still contribute back. It’s in their best interest to (make an attempt, at least) upstream their non-money-making bits. The FreeBSD project shines as a great example of this. Sony, Netflix, Juniper, Dell EMC Isilon (I think they were acquired), NVIDIA, and many others contribute a large amount of code (and monetary donations) back to the project, even though they don’t have to.
So, from my point of view, today’s use of the BSD license isn’t too much different from the GPL. Just because a company can take BSDL code and completely close it doesn’t mean they will. As mentioned above, they usually don’t.
Instead, the BSDL enables companies to make better use of my work and innovate with it. Contributing their non-money-making bits relieves their own maintenance burden, allowing the wider community to take their work and improve upon it as well. My BSDL code will have a much wider reach and impact than GPL for this very reason.
Juniper learned this lesson in a very hard way. They had hard forked FreeBSD a very long time ago (I think back in the FreeBSD 4 days, but I could be horrifically wrong there.) They didn’t upstream their changes. Then FreeBSD made some HUGE changes over the years, and when they went to upgrade their fork to the latest release, they had a very large amount of work to do. It really hurt them in their engineering efforts.
Now, Juniper contributes back as much as they can. They minimize the number of proprietary patches against FreeBSD. Companies like Netflix have learned from Juniper’s experience. This teaches me that from a pure “contributing back” perspective, the BSDL and the GPL are equal in practice.
Without personally or directly engaging in the pseudo-religious argument this topic occasionally can devolve into, I feel obligated to highlight this referenced statement as demonstrably and objectively incorrect.
I’d say more misguided than incorrect. Making something available does not necessarily make it a contribution.
Moreover, you only need to make it available under certain conditions. If you neither distribute it, nor otherwise expose it to the public, it may very well stay walled off.
Lastly, if the author doesn’t sue, there is no force to speak of. It’s more likely you’ll get public shaming, as with Microsoft’s hiccup lately.
Sorry to be a pedant but this misstating of the GPL is one of my pet peeves. The GPL, by design, does not require anyone to contribute back. The GPL is intended to protect the rights of end users, not to protect the rights of the original creators. It forces them to contribute forwards. The only people who have rights granted by the GPL are the people who receive binary copies of the software. The following are completely allowed by the GPL:
Maintaining an in-house fork of a GPL’d program without sharing the code.
Providing recipients of the binary with a tarball of the source code but not sending it upstream and not providing any revision control history to understand the changes (Apple did this a lot).
Providing a service using the GPL’d code without sharing the code at all (this is not true for the AGPL in the specific case that the service is a hosted instance of the software but in all other cases it is).
From the perspective of a corporation, the question is simple: is it cheaper (counting TCO, including liabilities from licence compliance) to use open source code than to develop something in house? If your code is less than a few person years of effort (i.e. a single person’s hobby project), then the cost of developing it in-house is probably very small. They typically have three choices:
Develop something in house.
Take an open-source project, customise it, and maintain an in-house fork.
Take an open-source project, customise it, and upstream the changes.
For a GPL’d project, there’s a big liability from distributing and so, in my experience, they’re more likely to go with options one or two than option three because the potential liability from GPL’d distribution is greater than the potential saving from reducing their diffs with upstream. For something permissively licensed, the weighting typically goes towards option 3: there’s no point developing something in house if there’s a low-risk public version and there’s little risk from upstreaming changes (the awareness of this has changed a lot over the last 20 years, especially in smaller companies).
In a few cases, I’ve seen companies take a hybrid of options one and three: see that there’s a GPL’d project and pay someone to write a permissively licensed alternative, which they then develop in the open.
Why so many ads?
Yeah someone on Reddit mentioned it as well. I always use an AdBlocker so I don’t see the ads myself, but with that turned off, it’s horrible. Years ago when I set it up it was just a Google banner before the article, but now it’s all over the place. Not sure why that has changed, but I also don’t actively read the emails Google sends about AdSense. Going to look into it because it’s way too much.
Can’t edit the previous comment with an update, but I’ve changed the settings with AdSense. Some kind of experiment was set up with in page ads, that should be disabled and back to just the banner at the top. A screenshot with screenshot.guru shows me that it seems to work: https://i.postimg.cc/cHBPN77g/4b52g0m-GV-qp8-AAAAASUVORK5-CYII.png
I’m still seeing tons of ads inline. Why not just turn off adsense? Is it really bringing in enough money to justify them inserting ads into your blog?
It brings in about 70 euros per half year, or whatever is the minimum payout term for AdSense. It covers the hosting and domain registration, so it’s worth it. For the amount of unique visitors it seems quite low (10k per weekday, about 8k in weekends or holidays). Which is to say, large part of the visitors have AdBlockers on.
My “eenmanszaak” has received zero physical marketing mailings in almost a year, so don’t worry about that. Starting January the first I believe that private addresses are going to become invisible on the KVK site (finally!).
Thanks for writing that up!
I was in a similar position some years ago and decided to dual-license my software AGPL+commercial license.
From personal experience, for a payment processor I can strongly recommend https://paddle.com since that makes the whole “how do I get the money” stuff a no-brainer. For example, they do all the sales tax related stuff for you which is great, especially if you are selling to private persons in the EU (due to the different tax schemes).
Setting up a corp and a business account is probably a good idea, but if you just want to take money and not really have an entity, places like stripe will absolutely deposit to a personal account.
One thing I’d like to read is your thoughts on why you chose the GPL versus BSDL (or another permissive license). Also, one thing I learned (at least, in the US) is that if you are the maintainer/owner of the GPL code, you can still do what you want with it, including keeping it proprietary. That violates the spirit of the GPL, but still follows the letter.
I want all software to be open source under the GPL, meaning source available and everyone required to also open source their modifications. The viral nature some people complain about is my main selling point. For the greater good that is the only viable option, since taking a piece of software and not contributing back but just profiting is only good for “increasing shareholder value”.
The BSD style licenses permit such behaviour. GPL forces companies to contribute back. Theory does not always holds up, see many Chinese router makers or the recent OBS clone by some Chinese firm, but it provides a base to stand on in case of such violations.
With the GPL everyone benefits instead of a few already wealthy folks getting wealthier. I literally live two villages next to the shipyard that is building Bezoss rumoured next yacht, without all the open source code that would not be possible. But the original creators? They probably dont see a penny. (which might be completely fine with them, since they choose a BSD style license anyway, who am I to judge. But, my views differ, and those are the views you asked about).
What we’re seeing in many BSD-licensed projects is that companies do still contribute back. It’s in their best interest to (make an attempt, at least) upstream their non-money-making bits. The FreeBSD project shines as a great example of this. Sony, Netflix, Juniper, Dell EMC Isilon (I think they were acquired), NVIDIA, and many others contribute a large amount of code (and monetary donations) back to the project, even though they don’t have to.
So, from my point of view, today’s use of the BSD license isn’t too much different from the GPL. Just because a company can take BSDL code and completely close it doesn’t mean they will. As mentioned above, they usually don’t.
Instead, the BSDL enables companies to make better use of my work and innovate with it. Contributing their non-money-making bits relieves their own maintenance burden, allowing the wider community to take their work and improve upon it as well. My BSDL code will have a much wider reach and impact than GPL for this very reason.
Juniper learned this lesson in a very hard way. They had hard forked FreeBSD a very long time ago (I think back in the FreeBSD 4 days, but I could be horrifically wrong there.) They didn’t upstream their changes. Then FreeBSD made some HUGE changes over the years, and when they went to upgrade their fork to the latest release, they had a very large amount of work to do. It really hurt them in their engineering efforts.
Now, Juniper contributes back as much as they can. They minimize the number of proprietary patches against FreeBSD. Companies like Netflix have learned from Juniper’s experience. This teaches me that from a pure “contributing back” perspective, the BSDL and the GPL are equal in practice.
Without personally or directly engaging in the pseudo-religious argument this topic occasionally can devolve into, I feel obligated to highlight this referenced statement as demonstrably and objectively incorrect.
I’d say more misguided than incorrect. Making something available does not necessarily make it a contribution.
Moreover, you only need to make it available under certain conditions. If you neither distribute it, nor otherwise expose it to the public, it may very well stay walled off.
Lastly, if the author doesn’t sue, there is no force to speak of. It’s more likely you’ll get public shaming, as with Microsoft’s hiccup lately.
Sorry to be a pedant but this misstating of the GPL is one of my pet peeves. The GPL, by design, does not require anyone to contribute back. The GPL is intended to protect the rights of end users, not to protect the rights of the original creators. It forces them to contribute forwards. The only people who have rights granted by the GPL are the people who receive binary copies of the software. The following are completely allowed by the GPL:
From the perspective of a corporation, the question is simple: is it cheaper (counting TCO, including liabilities from licence compliance) to use open source code than to develop something in house? If your code is less than a few person years of effort (i.e. a single person’s hobby project), then the cost of developing it in-house is probably very small. They typically have three choices:
For a GPL’d project, there’s a big liability from distributing and so, in my experience, they’re more likely to go with options one or two than option three because the potential liability from GPL’d distribution is greater than the potential saving from reducing their diffs with upstream. For something permissively licensed, the weighting typically goes towards option 3: there’s no point developing something in house if there’s a low-risk public version and there’s little risk from upstreaming changes (the awareness of this has changed a lot over the last 20 years, especially in smaller companies).
In a few cases, I’ve seen companies take a hybrid of options one and three: see that there’s a GPL’d project and pay someone to write a permissively licensed alternative, which they then develop in the open.