> 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
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.
The investors sold the company back to the founder for $1. That's as close as it gets to declaring equity as worthless.
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.
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.
> 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.
Perhaps the shift to making the source available has more to do with work culture: https://sahillavingia.com/work
Probably not entirely, but straight from the author.
Teasing a release on X is less bothersome than what Matrix is doing by relicensing from Apache to AGPL and making what was billed as a vendor neutral communication platform not so vendor neutral. The people working at Element certainly don't want to use Matrix/Element under the AGPL, so why should they expect earlier users and members of their community like me to want to use it under the AGPL?
There was a time when saying Open Source meant something by itself. Now you have to include details like the license, what exactly is under the license, and the leadership.
>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.
- 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.
The Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition are structured differently, but pretty obviously map from one to another.
> 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
And possibly 9
> One important way to modify a program is by merging in available free subroutines and modules. If the program's license says that you cannot merge in a suitably licensed existing module—for instance, if it requires you to be the copyright holder of any code you add—then the license is too restrictive to qualify as free.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43581484
The NASA Open Source Agreement is the one I found.
Presumably an online shop with smart analytics.
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).
Depends on the seller. I have a self-published physical magazine I distribute through Gumroad: https://www.glidermag.com/
This license is clearly fails OSD and is not open source by the industry standard; perpetuating a false statement is unhelpful.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
At renewal software provider X might hike license fees for Y to an unreasonable fee, or decide you're not worth the time at all.
I assume you can get a commercial license at any point, not only after you reach X revenue too?
And even if they change their license , we need to fork this with this specific license right now!!
Going to fork it right now
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.
What? Where do you get this from? It's quite the opposite.
I wonder if this can be worked around by setting up an OpenAI-style non-profit arm to use Gumroad.
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
Meta is betting the existence of their Llama models on it.
Luckily it doesn't do that often under normal use
cp -r gumroad not-gumroadusually if the project comes with a big lengthy beautiful readme thats actually a contra indicator that the thing is a production repo
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ....
One is a marketing tactic, the other one is outright misleading.
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.
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.
Awful license on multiple levels.
> 14 years ago, Gumroad launched
> Today, Gumroad goes open-source
They want the marketing benefits without the costs.
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.
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.
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
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
payments:
https://api.paypal.com
https://api.stripe.com
https://api.taxjar.com
https://api.vatstack.com (EU VAT)
https://apiservices.iras.gov.sg
https://api.appstoreconnect.apple.com
https://api.storekit.itunes.apple
https://api.iffy.com (AI content moderation)
https://api.helper.ai (AI support)
https://api.openai.com
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"?)[1] we don't get to see most companies codebases, so this is a good indicator of the amount of integrations
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-department-of-veterans-affa...
----- "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."
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