[HN Gopher] Gumroad's source is available
___________________________________________________________________
Gumroad's source is available
Author : philipjoubert
Score : 418 points
Date : 2025-04-04 09:56 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| psnehanshu wrote:
| It's Rails!
| niklasbabel wrote:
| i believe Sahil mentioned they're moving away from Rails soon,
| as he sees it as technical debt.
| omnimus wrote:
| Drama creation for marketing?
| taylorportman wrote:
| Technical debt, so hot right now.
| omnimus wrote:
| I mean that choice of framework has very little to do
| with technical debt. So you claim something like this to
| create attention.
| rmason wrote:
| It launched right here on HN 14 years ago.
|
| https://x.com/shl/status/1908090697984426227/photo/1
| ihowlatthemoon wrote:
| Original discussion thread here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614
| owebmaster wrote:
| One day work to start a multi-million project, 13 years ago.
| That's the real vibing.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Some might not be aware: It wasn't always smooth sailing
| for Sahil (could have had a much comfortable life if he
| stayed put at Pinterest).
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37059594
| jatins wrote:
| didn't he mention that he got fired from Pinterest?
| occamschainsaw wrote:
| Interesting discussion on the merits of the initial plan of a
| paid link shortening service and the opposite approach (easy-
| to-setup paid access to links).They were discussing adding
| Bitcoin as a payment method when it was 0.7 cents a pop.
| spiderice wrote:
| That part made me chuckle.
|
| > At the current ~$0.70 / bitcoin, this means that every
| American will be able to have ~$0.05 in his or her
| electronic wallet, once all bitcoins are generated.
| Assuming that the rest of the world does not participate at
| all and that bitcoins are evenly distributed.
|
| > Sure, you could imagine an instant dollar-to-bitcoin-to-
| dollar conversion at the point of payment. Or you could
| imagine a bitcoin2.org that generates more coins. Or you
| could hope for a massive surge in the value of the bitcoin.
|
| > I'd put my money on Paypal sticking around, though.
|
| Even back that people pointed out the obvious flaw of
| Bitcoin remaining at $0.70. But I wonder if any of them
| believed it would be at $100,000 in 14 years
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2407998
| Aurornis wrote:
| Gumroad became my cautionary tale for startup equity for early
| engineers.
|
| I remember excitedly following the story from start. It was fun
| to follow along. Then around 2015 things weren't working well,
| so they laid off most of the team. Investors sold the company
| back to the founder at a steep discount. As I recall, a major
| investor sold their ownership for $1.
|
| Just like that, the founding engineers who worked so hard lost
| their jobs and saw their equity valued down to nothing.
|
| It happens! However, the strange thing in this case was that
| the company kept going. They had laid (almost) everyone off and
| declared their equity worthless, yet the company was still
| making money and growing. My younger self struggled to
| understand how the founding engineers could have gone from
| working so hard on something to being laid off and seeing their
| equity wiped out while the business itself continued right on
| working and generating revenue.
|
| A lot has been written to put positive spin on those events.
| The founder claims to have helped out some of the early
| engineers in vague ways. However, I'll never forget being a
| young, aspiring startup engineer and watching an entire startup
| team get wiped out of the business they helped create and then
| the business just kept on trucking for the founder who walked
| away with ownership of the company.
| adrr wrote:
| How did lose all their equity? You can't declare equity is
| worthless. You can raise new rounds with different valuations
| and dilute previous investors/employees but they would also
| dilute themselves.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Google 'drag along rights'.
| hobofan wrote:
| Even if they don't "lose" their equity, it might just turn
| essentially worthless. Very often "equity" founding staff
| receives is in the form of (V)ESOP s = (virtual) employee
| stock options, or other equity grants that only materialize
| in the case of an "exit event". Depending on how the exit
| events are specified in the contract, the founder taking
| the company private (/ divestment from the investors) might
| have resulted in an exit event with $1 value of the
| company.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| A friend built a startup for years and progress was not
| looking good. Eventually the entire development team quit and
| left without equities. The founder was then acquired for
| millions.
|
| Another case: startup running out of money after a series B
| or C and a history of questionable expenses. Everybody but a
| few left. The founders sold their main product for cheap to
| some private equity firm, focused on a crappy internal tool
| they built and they used their last money to hire a literal
| army of sales people.
|
| These sales guys were apparently amazing and somehow managed
| to sell the tool to a bunch of fortune 500 companies and are
| now making bank.
|
| The main product they sold? It's still on life support, the
| original buyer just sold it to another holding.
| tuhins wrote:
| I was one of them! Joined on August 5, 2012, got 0.5% of
| equity (I think?), it all went to more-or-less zero
| monetarily. I don't think most of us really hold any grudges
| against Sahil here. It was a very fun place to work, and I
| met some of my closest friends and made some of my strongest
| professional connections there. It was net-very-positive to
| my life and career, and I think we were all adults when we
| were opting-in to the experience.
|
| As for Sahil/Gumroad making money and growing. Meh. He's
| worked on it for 13 years and showing dedication beyond what
| I would have for most things. It's fine.
| turnsout wrote:
| I looked for a blog post announcing this, and couldn't find it.
| But Antiwork's Github profile mentions: >
| Antiwork emerged from Gumroad's mission to automate repetitive
| tasks. In 2025, we're taking a bold step by open-sourcing our
| entire suite of tools that helped run and scale Gumroad. We
| believe in making powerful automation accessible to everyone.
|
| That's pretty wild! I've always loved Gumroad's simplicity for
| creators and buyers. Now I guess people will have a pretty
| compelling option when searching "Gumroad open source
| alternative"
| Brosper wrote:
| it's basicly free development
| ge96 wrote:
| Here I was thinking it was the subreddit
| noname120 wrote:
| Any idea what the motivation could be?
| verghese wrote:
| Gumroad's journey has been interesting:
| https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting -> Billion dollar journey
| with VC backing to Kleiner selling back their stake to Gumroad
| for $1, which enabled Sahil to steer the company in a different
| direction.
|
| Perhaps the shift to making the source available has more to do
| with work culture: https://sahillavingia.com/work
| jslakro wrote:
| Sahil anticipates AI will significantly commoditize software.
| Especially following DeepSeek's impact. He has promoted Devin
| via twitter and likely aims to position Gumroad as the leading
| creator-focused alternative to traditional Open Source
| e-commerce platforms.
| geenat wrote:
| https://x.com/shl/status/1908146557708362188
|
| Probably not entirely, but straight from the author.
| spiffyk wrote:
| Can't help but notice he's basically knowingly "donating" the
| code to multi-billion corporations to train their LLMs on
| (while in general those same corporations source their
| training data in ethically questionable ways), while mere
| mortal human individuals and small businesses are bound by a
| non-free license. An interesting decision to say the least.
| s17n wrote:
| i mean... what would any "mere mortals" use the code for
| other than to directly compete with Gumroad?
| fbn79 wrote:
| License is very limiting for Business
| arielcostas wrote:
| Yeah, it's more of a "source available" than Open Source in its
| definition. I'd rather they use AGPL or something like that.
| graemep wrote:
| To put it another way they want to call it open source
| without actually being open source.
| notpushkin wrote:
| I don't think they actually call it open source themselves
| - rather, the HN poster made a (probably benign) mistake.
| ecedeno wrote:
| The founder does. See:
| https://x.com/shl/status/1908090697984426227
| notpushkin wrote:
| Yikes :-(
| gcau wrote:
| It's not a mistake because someone doesn't subscribe to
| the same definition as you. There are 2 widely competing
| definitions that are both perfectly valid, if you want to
| be more specific you can say "not OSI approved" to more
| accurately reflect what you're talking about, if you
| don't want to do that then you can understand how others
| feel.
| ZeroTalent wrote:
| Use the source as inspiration and create something new in a
| more modern language/framework.
| rustc wrote:
| It would be a bad idea to read any of this code if you're
| working on a competitor based on the license terms.
| Timshel wrote:
| While limiting, it's not atrocious:
|
| >You may use the software under this license only if (1) your
| company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total revenue in the
| prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD (2024) GMV (Gross
| Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-profit organization or
| government entity.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| So if it someone uses this software to build a $10M GMV per
| annum business, it's completely unclear the pounds of flesh
| Gumroad et. al will want as their cut.
| Timshel wrote:
| Yes but before you reach this point you probably have a bit
| of time to start discussing with them ?
| eemil wrote:
| By the time licensing becomes relevant, your business is
| built around the platform and this gives Gumroad an
| unreasonable advantage in any negotiations. Imagine what
| they could say:
|
| - You're now a competitor. Stop using our software (you
| can still sell on gumroad.com, hint hint)
|
| - Give us 20% for 1 year (next year, who knows...)
|
| - We won't give you a license, but we'll buy you out for
| next to nothing.
| rustc wrote:
| And at that point they can ask for anything because the
| alternative would be rewriting all your code.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Yeah, it's not open source, the licence violates point five of
| the OSD https://opensource.org/osd
| snvzz wrote:
| It's also not Free Software, as it also violates the Free
| Software definition[0].
|
| 0. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
| Tomte wrote:
| Of course. Has anyone ever found a case of a license that
| not one or the other?
|
| The Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition
| are structured differently, but pretty obviously map from
| one to another.
| desdenova wrote:
| There's plenty of OSD licenses that don't fit the FSD,
| but a free software license is necessarily open source,
| so the opposite can't happen.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| No there cannot be an OSD license that violates the FSD
| lolinder wrote:
| GNU has a helpful chart where they clearly show that
| there is a sliver of "nonfree open source" licenses that
| are available [0].
|
| > The term "open source" software is used by some people
| to mean more or less the same category as free software.
| It is not exactly the same class of software: they accept
| some licenses that we consider too restrictive, and there
| are free software licenses they have not accepted.
| However, the differences in extension of the category are
| small: we know of only a few cases of source code that is
| open source but not free.
|
| I was able to find one example, the NASA Open Source
| Agreement, which is accepted by the OSI [1] but rejected
| by the FSF [2]:
|
| > The NASA Open Source Agreement, version 1.3, is not a
| free software license because it includes a provision
| requiring changes to be your "original creation". Free
| software development depends on combining code from third
| parties, and the NASA license doesn't permit this.
|
| [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html
|
| [1] https://opensource.org/license/nasa1-3-php
|
| [2] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#NASA
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Guarantee that all "nonfree open source" is different
| readings. Take the NASA case. If youu read it as strictly
| as Stallman does then it violates the OSD also. The
| people at OSI at the time it was submitted read it more
| like a lawyer and decided it was compliant. Possibly
| today's OSI would disagree. Possibly tomorrow's FSF would
| agree. It's not a difference between free software and
| open source but a difference between how two sets of
| humans interpreted the text of the license.
| lolinder wrote:
| Which point of the OSD would be violated by the NASA
| clause if read the same way that the FSF reads it?
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| OSD 3
|
| And possibly 9
| Tomte wrote:
| I'd really be interested in an example of such a license.
| Where is the difference in the two definitions?
| lolinder wrote:
| Not OP, but I linked to some details here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43581484
|
| The NASA Open Source Agreement is the one I found.
| Tomte wrote:
| Thank you!
| captn3m0 wrote:
| > You may use the software under this license only if (1) your
| company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total revenue in the
| prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD (2024) GMV (Gross
| Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-profit organization or
| government entity. Adjust the revenue threshold for inflation
| according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics'
| consumer price index for all urban consumers, U.S. city
| average, for all items, not seasonally adjusted, 1982-1984=100
| reference base.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Even more so for individuals.
| ErrorNoBrain wrote:
| I love how nothing in the readme tells me what it actually is.
| StrandedKitty wrote:
| > Sell your stuff. See what sticks.
|
| Presumably an online shop with smart analytics.
| input_sh wrote:
| I wouldn't really call it a traditional online shop, more
| like a file shop. They don't sell anything physical, only
| digital. If you've created a file on your computer that other
| people want, you can sell it on Gumroad. Depending on what
| you're trying to sell, there might be a better platform for
| the purpose (like Bandcamp for music), but Gumroad is the
| only one I'm aware of that's intentionally generic to fit
| many purposes (even if imperfectly).
|
| They also don't do shit like putting DRM on ebooks and you
| can set the minimum price to zero to turn it into a tipping
| platform (free download, but with an optional payment).
| rchaud wrote:
| > They don't sell anything physical, only digital.
|
| Depends on the seller. I have a self-published physical
| magazine I distribute through Gumroad:
| https://www.glidermag.com/
| _joel wrote:
| An ecommerce platform designed to allow creators to sell to
| users.. apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumroad
| soco wrote:
| Which also dropped Android support, so I dropped them.
| rchaud wrote:
| Web app works fine. I'm an Android user, I sell through
| Gumroad and it's never occurred to me to download a native
| app that offers no functionality beyond what's already on the
| website. Sale notifications go to my email, as they should.
| clcaev wrote:
| Could we please change the title to say : "Gumroad is source
| available"?
|
| This license is clearly fails OSD and is not open source by the
| industry standard; perpetuating a false statement is unhelpful.
|
| https://opensource.org/osd
| runningmike wrote:
| So true. A very misleading title. This license is far away of
| any approved OSI or FSF Foss license. Gumroad is a great
| service, the value is imho not in the software. But in the
| execution of it's mission and the very simple way to lower the
| bar to sell digital goods without upfront costs.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| The license is actually pretty restrictive: you can only use
| this if you own a small company or work for government / non-
| profit.
|
| Most average human's (including myself) can't use the source
| code in any way:
|
| > You may use the software under this license only if (1) your
| company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total revenue in the
| prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD (2024) GMV (Gross
| Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-profit organization or
| government entity.
| noirscape wrote:
| The way it's been phrased, it seems like if you want to use
| the code to run a small webshop for some goods, you can use
| it, but if you're actively trying to run a resale platform,
| that's when you get in trouble.
|
| I don't think not being open source is that big of a deal in
| this situation, they aren't the only player in this space
| anyway. (Woocommerce to my knowledge still dominates the
| "small business webshop" market and probably always will for
| as long as the typical shared webhost webstack is still an
| AMP stack.)
| rustc wrote:
| It's risky if you have any chance of ever crossing $1M in
| company revenue because the license will terminate as soon
| as you reach that and you'll have to rewrite everything.
|
| > The licensor grants you a copyright license for the
| software to do everything you might do with the software
| that would otherwise infringe the licensor's copyright, but
| only as long as you meet all the conditions below.
|
| > You may use the software under this license only if (1)
| your company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total
| revenue in the prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD
| (2024) GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-
| profit organization or government entity.
| frainfreeze wrote:
| To be fair, getting a platform for free that can
| potentially bring you to $1M is a very good deal, I'm
| quite sure you ll figure out a strategy before you get to
| $1M, and perhaps even get a good deal on the license from
| them. However I do think they should've been more upfront
| about the licensing.
| tyzoid wrote:
| 1M revenue isn't that high a bar to clear in retail, just
| takes one popular/meme product. After all the COGS/fixed
| costs are tallied up, that could leave you with
| significantly less with which to contemplate custom
| development or platform changes.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I'm sure if you're lucky to get near 1 million in revenue
| you can reach out and pay for a license.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| You are not required to rewrite everything if you exceed
| $1million in annual revenue. You are required to get a
| commercial license from them, which costs money.
|
| That's not the same thing. And quite frankly, if you're
| making over $1 million in annual revenue you should be
| able to afford the license fee for the most important
| part of your company.
| rustc wrote:
| There's no guarantee that a commercial license will be
| available at a reasonable fee, or available at all.
| You'll have nothing to negotiate with because the
| alternative is to rewrite or shut down immediately.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Must be awesome to use this software in a country that does
| not use the US Dollar as its currency :)
| krzrak wrote:
| let me tell you about currency exchange rates...
| snadal wrote:
| License only mentions USD. So as far as you have no USD
| revenue, you are fine.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Exactly :) Good luck non-US companies! :)
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| The intepretation would be done by a court. Not sure they
| would agree that the intention was to allow unlimited
| revenue in other currencies.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| LMAO. Everybody keep quiet..... Don't let them change their
| license.
|
| And even if they change their license , we need to fork
| this with this specific license right now!!
|
| Going to fork it right now
| gamblor956 wrote:
| That's not how it works, of course.
|
| It's your FX-converted revenue, meaning, whatever currency
| you use converted to USD. The license doesn't bother to
| state this because they assume basic common sense on the
| part of the licensee.
|
| If that's not enough, they have the backing of several
| decades of industry practice[1] and several centuries of
| law.
|
| [1] For example, take a look at the Steam and Epic creator
| agreements, which also use USD for financial thresholds
| even though their stores operate in dozens of countries and
| accept dozens of currencies.
| Onavo wrote:
| They are probably also trying to get free contributions to
| the codebase. Gumroad is infamous for underpaying and using
| cheap labor where possible.
| dgrcode wrote:
| > Gumroad is infamous for underpaying and using cheap labor
| where possible.
|
| What? Where do you get this from? It's quite the opposite.
| reisse wrote:
| > The license is actually pretty restrictive: you can only
| use this if you own a small company or work for government /
| non-profit.
|
| I wonder if this can be worked around by setting up an
| OpenAI-style non-profit arm to use Gumroad.
| lionkor wrote:
| Time to train an "LLM" on it and have it reproduce the source
| code 1-to-1, so I can use it without a license!
| noname120 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I think the line b/w derivative work and new work might be
| different.
|
| I mean if llms are trained on it ... and a lot of other
| things and then LLM can output the source code from a input
| ... then wouldn't it be open source / public domain
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| No
| lionkor wrote:
| It's only a copyright issue if I know what the original
| source code looks like. If I don't know what it looks like,
| and my autocomplete writes it, how could I possibly know it's
| stolen?
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| As if any court would accept this. Nice try
| yencabulator wrote:
| OpenAI is basically betting the existence of the company on
| that.
|
| Meta is betting the existence of their Llama models on it.
| foxygen wrote:
| Except they have billions of dollars to make that bet.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| I don't think that's true. When chatgpt generates something
| that infringes (even on something not in the training data)
| it is still infringement and the output cannot be used by
| the user for anything they couldn't use the original for.
|
| Luckily it doesn't do that often under normal use
| hbn wrote:
| Open sourcing my local AI model that trains on this repo and
| codes an app based on it: cp -r gumroad not-
| gumroad
| TylerLives wrote:
| I haven't followed Gumroad much, but I remember them being very
| pro freedom and having some interesting hiring practices. IIRC
| they were all being paid equally (based on position and hours of
| work) and had no meetings. Now I see a Code of Conduct.
| rchaud wrote:
| They've also bumped up their fees enormously, it's 10% +
| processing fee now, previously it was $1 flat + processing.
| teekert wrote:
| The Readme goes right to how to install it, and other than the
| logo saying "sell your stuff, see what sticks" there is 0
| information about what it does. Sure I can Google, but I think it
| should be right there, at the top of the Readme.
| kwanbix wrote:
| My exact same thought.
| rchaud wrote:
| It's an ecommerce platform.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| One might prove one's intent in offering this platform for
| actual use by others through providing some base level of
| documentation.
| tempfile wrote:
| I don't think they do intend that. I think they intend to
| get free contributions from keen people who think
| erroneously they're contributing to a public good.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Agreed. Their 'no full time employees' philosophy would
| be consistent with that: https://sahillavingia.com/work
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I had no idea, and I've been a "Rails guy" for 15 years, and
| keenly interested in high-profile successful Ruby projects for
| a long time. Even clicking through to their actual site from
| the source repo page, I had to surmise what it was.
| joelhaasnoot wrote:
| The license is also not front and center
| swyx wrote:
| god we are so spoiled. this is a successful, pretty well known
| commercial project. it's now source available. you have plenty
| of resources to get context in 2 minutes. lets appreciate the
| big stuff, have some agency for the rest.
|
| usually if the project comes with a big lengthy beautiful
| readme thats actually a contra indicator that the thing is a
| production repo
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _god we are so spoiled._
|
| Is it really "spoiled" to say it'd be convenient for maybe a
| one-liner at the top of the file that's supposed to explain
| stuff about the project?
|
| > _you have plenty of resources to get context in 2 minutes._
|
| I always laugh a little bit at this line of thinking. Whoever
| wrote the readme can spend 2 minutes to write a line or two
| about the project, or the potentially thousands of people who
| want information about the project can spend 2 minutes to
| look it up. It makes a lot more sense to spend 2 minutes vs.
| 2000 minutes.
|
| In the end, for me, it's not a big deal to spend the 2
| minutes. But sometimes I like to think a little bit bigger
| than just myself.
| wutwutwat wrote:
| Top right of the page it says
|
| > About
|
| > gumroad.com
|
| pretty much sums up the contents of the repo. If someone
| can't be bothered to check out gumroad.com there's no
| amount of documentation that will help them.
| ziddoap wrote:
| gumroad.com does not say what it does. It's a list of
| products being sold. You have to navigate to the About
| page, then scroll about 1/4 of the way until you can get
| an idea of what it is.
|
| Is it hard? No, of course not. It's like a minute or two.
| But it's a minute or two _for lots of people_ vs. a
| minute or two _for one person, once_.
|
| But yeah, I totally get it, why would I waste 2 minutes
| of my time when I can have a bunch of other people waste
| 2 minutes of their time instead.
| taikahessu wrote:
| I was also wondering what this was about. Should I care and
| why?
|
| It's not only that I don't want to, but literally can't use
| extra 2 minutes for _every_ link I open while browsing news
| sites. And that attention span window is only getting
| shorter.
|
| It's definitely not the first or last time for github repo
| not using the best real estate they have in "selling" their
| product.
| Tomte wrote:
| > but literally can't use extra 2 minutes for _every_ link
| I open while browsing news sites
|
| The expectation to open every link may be the real issue.
| If the title and Readme don't speak to you, just let it be.
| You will always miss out on most things on the Internet.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| "I can't afford to spend 2 extra minutes for every link I
| open on news sites" does not mean "I expect to open every
| link that exists on the news sites I visit".
| foxygen wrote:
| Did you open a PR or something?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Dear SHL , Please truly open source this. I personally wouldn't
| mind AGPL but would still much prefer MIT Thanks.
| echelon wrote:
| There's no way he's going to do that. The leverage and market
| advantage would evaporate.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Well. Any suggestions please?
|
| Though technically I don't mind it , its still great he
| source availabled it
|
| I am probably not going to reach 1 mln $ sales but still man
| if I do , then I probably want some grace period and I mean
| ....
| deanc wrote:
| It's in fact the market position (leader) that gives them the
| advantage here, not the code.
| prakashn27 wrote:
| What is the use of this opensurce when you have a strict license
| ?
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| It's a careless and sloppy marketing job by someone who wants
| to reframe the definition of open source for the millionth
| time, unfortunately.
| udev4096 wrote:
| What a joke of a license. This is not open source. Why the fuck
| is everyone in VC land trying to change the true definition of
| open source?
| cjpearson wrote:
| For what it's worth Gumroad left VC land several years ago.
|
| https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting
| tempfile wrote:
| The definition of open source is itself a corruption of free
| software which came before it, and was corrupted by the same
| people.
| XCSme wrote:
| Most of the VC open-source projects use open-source as a lead
| magnet/marketing tactic only, with no intention or desire of
| wanting people to actually use the software.
| diggan wrote:
| There is a distinction between those companies who actually
| license their stuff under FOSS licenses, but use it to get
| more marketing/contributors/whatever, and what companies like
| Meta are doing today, which is calling something "open
| source" in their marketing material, but if you read the
| terms and conditions, they call it "proprietary" instead and
| comes with lots of restrictions that aren't compatible with
| FOSS.
|
| One is a marketing tactic, the other one is outright
| misleading.
| preisschild wrote:
| Yep. Bait & Switch. Which is exactly why you shouldn't
| contribute to open source projects that require a CLA.
| openthc wrote:
| Which is super bullshit; cause now offering open source
| solutions many folk see it as a trick!
| graypegg wrote:
| The licensor grants you a copyright license for the software to
| do everything you might do with the software that would
| otherwise infringe the licensor's copyright, but only as long
| as you meet all the conditions below.
|
| Am I going insane, or is there a reading of this that seems to
| imply you can use the software, to infringe on ANY work Gumroad
| has created? "...grants you a copyright license for the
| software" seems to imply it's talking about this software
| license only, but the second part mentions "licensor's
| copyright" which seems to not be defined, nor bounded. There's
| no mention of a copyright *for the software*... just the
| copyright license to use the software that allows you to
| infringe all copyrights from Gumroad.
|
| I think they probably meant The licensor
| grants you a copyright license for the software to do
| everything you might do with the software that would otherwise
| infringe the licensor's copyright [to the software], but only
| as long as you meet all the conditions below.
|
| I wonder if you can just reuse text or images from their
| corporate website as long as you personally make less than 1M$
| a year, use their software and don't infringe their trademarks.
|
| Awful license on multiple levels.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| No you're not insane, it's much harder to follow than most
| source available licenses I've seen.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| I think this reaction is misdirected. Yes, the license is
| restrictive, but Gumroad doesn't seem to be claiming themselves
| that the code is open source. I think OP made a mistake out of
| ignorance and said that it was open source.
| rustc wrote:
| The founder of Gumroad _is_ claiming that [1].
|
| > 14 years ago, Gumroad launched
|
| > Today, Gumroad goes open-source
|
| [1]: https://x.com/shl/status/1908090697984426227
| jhanschoo wrote:
| Thanks, this is new to me and not something I could infer
| from OP's link.
| accoil wrote:
| I think the original title for this submission also
| called it open source:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43580533
| jhanschoo wrote:
| Yes indeed, but OP is not Gumroad.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > Why the fuck is everyone in VC land trying to change the true
| definition of open source?
|
| They want the marketing benefits without the costs.
| quest88 wrote:
| Wow, I remember their offices next to Thee Parkside on 17th.
| ingen0s wrote:
| nice work, you forgot to remove your API key tho
| nticompass wrote:
| I saw this title and thought "the Australian craigslist is open
| source?" Then I realized I was confusing Gumroad and Gumtree.
| Multiplayer wrote:
| I'm reading a lot of complaints here but let's recognize some
| interesting aspects that Sahil is talking about: 1. It's the 5th
| largest rails codebase open to AI ingestion. 2. They are offering
| bounties for issues. Not large bounties but whatever, it's
| something.
|
| I personally like rails and would love to see AI tools improve
| with it. No idea if this code base will really help that, and
| when but it can't hurt. In my experience I can get next apps up
| in a jiffy but rails is much more of a struggle. If anyone has
| any tips here, please post.
|
| I'm always curious about how well bounties work especially now in
| an AI age. I wonder what the arbitrage on AI spend vs. bounty
| will be for people that take a run at them.
| irf1 wrote:
| I run a bounties platform (https://algora.io) and I've seen
| people who create bounties try to use some AI like Devin to
| solve them (@seveibar livestreamed trying it) just for fun and
| in all cases AI failed to solve the bounties.
|
| A Rust project that rewarded 300+ bounties ($37k) is now
| building an AI coding agent with the aim to solve bounties on
| Algora - it's an interesting benchmark I guess.
|
| Curious myself what the next years might look like, but from
| everything I've seen so far we're definitely not there yet.
| devops000 wrote:
| If someone create a new business on top of this by changing
| layout and URL routes, how are they able to identify that they
| used this source code?
| whalesalad wrote:
| If you do it right, no one will know.
| shipscode wrote:
| It's pretty cool that this license allows you to make up to $1mm
| revenue, at which point you can pivot and rebuild the stack. This
| is going to be a game changer for anybody who wants to MVP an app
| similar to Gumroad. MIT would be ideal, but I prefer this to
| GPL's force release model.
| itsthecourier wrote:
| 004_constants.rb: =====================
|
| DENYLIST = %w[ ... ladygaga kanye kanyewest randyjackson
| mariahcarey atrak deadmau5 avicii prettylights justinbieber
| calvinharris katyperry rihanna shakira barackobama kimkardashian
| taylorswift taylorswift13 nickiminaj oprah jtimberlake
| theellenshow ellen selenagomez kaka ....].freeze
|
| the who is who of pop culture
| itsthecourier wrote:
| bots.rb: =========
|
| BOT_MAP = { "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; cs-CZ) AppleWebKit/526.9+
| (KHTML, like Gecko) AdobeAIR/1.5.1" => "Adobe AIR runtime",
| "BinGet/1.00.A (http://www.bin-co.com/php/scripts/load/)" =>
| "BinGet", "Chilkat/1.0.0
| (+http://www.chilkatsoft.com/ChilkatHttpUA.asp)" => "Chilkat HTTP
| .NET", "curl/7.15.1 (x86_64-suse-linux) libcurl/7.15.1
| OpenSSL/0.9.8a zlib/1.2.3 libidn/0.6.0" => "cURL", ...
|
| cool list
| tomhow wrote:
| Related post:
|
| https://danb.me/blog/gumroad-is-not-open-source/
| jvns wrote:
| I tried to grep the code for `api.` to get a sense for all the
| vendors this codebase is using, and which you'd need to have
| relationships with to run the code. Here's what I found:
|
| payments: https://api.paypal.com
| https://api.stripe.com
|
| tax stuff: https://api.taxjar.com
| https://api.vatstack.com (EU VAT)
| https://apiservices.iras.gov.sg
|
| for iOS app (?):
| https://api.appstoreconnect.apple.com
| https://api.storekit.itunes.apple
|
| AI stuff: https://api.iffy.com (AI content
| moderation) https://api.helper.ai (AI support)
| https://api.openai.com
|
| other: https://api.easypost.com (shipping
| labels?) https://api.sendgrid.com (email)
| https://api.pwnedpasswords.com (haveibeenpwned)
| https://api.worldbank.org (for purchasing power parity?)
| https://api.dropboxapi.com (for "upload from dropbox"?)
| ricardobeat wrote:
| That's pretty refreshing compared to the average 400 external
| "partners" your average online t-shirt store has.
| rafram wrote:
| Most of those are probably indirect. Same here: Stripe
| doesn't issue credit cards or even process transactions
| itself. It partners with a half-dozen or so credit card
| networks, and each network partners with thousands of banks
| around the world.
| caycep wrote:
| is this the company where the CEO/ex CEO is trying to rejigger
| the VA?
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/doge-department-of-veterans-affa...
| solarmist wrote:
| No, where'd you get that impression?
| caycep wrote:
| see article above
|
| ----- "These DOGE operatives appear to have no work
| experience that's remotely close to the VA in terms of its
| scale or complexity. The VA administers all the government
| benefits afforded to veterans and their families for roughly
| 10 million people, including education, loans, disability
| payments, and health care. Lavingia is the CEO of Gumroad, a
| platform that helps creatives sell their work and takes a cut
| of each sale. More recently, according to his blog, Lavingia
| launched Flexile, a tool to manage and pay contractors.
| According to his LinkedIn profile, Lavingia was the second
| employee at Pinterest, which he left in 2011 to found
| Gumroad. Lavingia is also an angel investor in other startups
| via SHL Capital, which backed Clubhouse and Lambda School,
| among others."
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-04 23:00 UTC)