Open Source Exploitation and Burnout | Hacker News Reader

Open Source Exploitation and Burnout

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39 pointsjrpt29 comments

This is the beauty of Open Source too.

There is no "social contract" for you to provide "support" for any of your work to individuals you can clearly see are working for companies (just view their profiles).

If you want to chill for 3 weeks and not write any code for your project, go ahead and do so. Any company or coder that depends on you and your code to earn his inflated-SV-salary job (or make millions for their SaaS) will have to deal with his/her boss (or investors) when he/she can't function without depending on you.

The only time a "social obligation" is placed on you is when all these asshole companies rank you by "how much you contribute to Open Source" but if you had to ask many of them how much money they contribute as a percentage of benefits they derive from Open Source, it will probably be in the single-digits.

The guys who wrote tools like "ls", "cd", "ping", "ssh", etc. are not sitting on Github answering questions to the millions of coders who use their tools everyday. StackOverflow is where those questions get answered by another "exploited" class of coders.

It's on us, as individual developers and individual participants in the software industry, to come up with economic models for open source that 1) provide high value, and 2) allow us to capture that value. Companies have a different role in a capitalist system, and though we can have a mutually beneficial relationship, their interests are not perfectly aligned with ours and never will be.

A lot of people have been looking to attack this problem from a legal (via licensing) or economic point of view, but really, I don't see either of these being nearly as effective as a cultural approach.

There are few other industries that consider 80h+ work weeks as a badge of honour, and in ownership of our ongoing work.

Instead, we should continue to encourage:

1) Better management of work/life balance

2) Better delegation of tasks and project ownership - as a side effect, this reduces the bus factor and also likely increases the quality of a project as more ideas are mixed in

3) Make it more acceptable to simply walk away from projects. While some might see this as "selfish", if you want someone to work on it full time, you can always offer to hire them, or pick up the work yourself.

While I'm pleased about many open source projects, SaaS and the rise of big data seem to have shifted it from primarily benefitting the user to benefitting corporate interests significantly more often.

I still believe that open source is worthwhile, but the culture seems very different.

I just read the article. Burnout sucks, but, maybe I'm missing the point of open source.

To me, it's not about 'creating value'; rather, developing open-source software is part of an ideology that believes humanity's knowledge should be available for examination; that all the moving parts are laid bare to see. Open source is more about 'showing' how it's done -- the proof is in the code -- than, y'know, doing it in the first place, which is a rather nice side-effect.

And therefore, I don't subscribe to the notion that if companies take open-source software and don't contribute back, they're exploiting the developer(s). It'd be nice of them if they donated, but by not doing so, they're not being evil. They are instead building on a common bank of shared knowledge, some of which is executable code, just like every single one of us can.

Original oss licences were developed in a world where software was distributed and the licenses were developed based on that model. Business models shifting largely to XaaS wasn't accounted for in the original license mindset and this is being taken advantage of the fullest extent my commercial entities (as they would be smart to do). The differences between the original oss philosophy and the realities of software in the current world seems to be causing some stress on the system as envisioned by oss advocates. Will be interesting to see how this develops.

Funny. When I stopped coding it came to me we may have been a tad mistreated: http://beauty-of-imagination.blogspot.fr/2016/07/moving-out-...

Food for thought: Can we create a license which allows source distribution and collaboration openly and is free to use for individuals and non-profits but companies have to pay if they use it for commercial purpose.

It could solve companies vs open source developers situation and give developers financial support. If current open source developers had means to support themselves without full time job, I think that would solve the problem of burnout and depression.

I mean just complaining that companies are taking full advantage without giving back is not working. So time to think outside box?

> Can we create a license which allows source distribution and collaboration openly and is free to use for individuals and non-profits but companies have to pay if they use it for commercial purpose.

These kinds of licenses have existed for a long time. They're not open source, though.

Could you post some references I could read? I am quite interested why they didn't work.

As far as I see, popular licenses are: 1. Commercial source 2. Open source - copy left eg. GPL 3. Open source - liberal, do whatever you like eg. MIT

which are just handful, when software is eating the world ;)

QT famously had a dual, "non-commercial" and "commercial" licenses, before they switched to LGPL.

From wikipedia / web archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20031005175911/http://www.trollt...

Highcharts.js has a free-for-noncommercial, paid-otherwise license system

https://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts

(Not affiliated, but using highcharts for a project @ a non-profit)

gSOAP has a separate commercial use license. They use a mix of GPLv2 plus a separate license for companies that want to avoid having to relicense their own products under the GPL (as a consequence of the viral nature of GPL vs something like LGPL).

You mean like the GPL?

You don't pay anything to use GPL licensed software. So that's the difference.

Right - usually, you have a GPL for normal users and "call us" for commercial use.

I thought that was pretty standard.

You can't restrict GPL to non-commercial users.

As long as you're willing to relicense your proprietary code as GPL

Just use AGPL and dont bother

Writing open source is voluntary, but when companies take so much without giving anything in return, it should be called exploitation.

I just don't want to keep reading this stories of open source developers burning out.

I'm baffled by this attitude.

A developer chooses to develop something and give it away for free. Why they do that is up to them... perhaps it's ideology? A sense of charity? Community?

Whatever it is, though, they're choosing to release that work to the world. And barring a non-commercial use clause, they're opening up that work for use in for-profit settings.

That's a choice. By definition it cannot be exploitative as there's no coercion involved.

If the developer doesn't like it, relicense the code to bar commercial use (gSOAP is the first example that comes to mind that does something like this), use the GPL to discourage commercial use, or don't release it. These are your choices.

The definition of exploitation doesn't require coercion.

https://www.google.com/search?q=define+exploitation

Exploitation: the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work.

It comes down to whether you think it's fair or not, which is a question of morality.

How are developers being treated "unfairly"?

The work is being released as open source. The developer has already chosen to give up the rights to any profit they might obtain from commercial use of the software. If that isn't desired there's any number of alternative licensing schemes that would require compensation for commercial use.

They aren't being forced to work on the software. They can contribute as much or as little to it as they like.

So what would make it fair, exactly?

Let's say I have a startup. I want to give my customers the most value for their money so I take the most economical path to creating my product... in doing so, I reuse software written by someone else and released by them with a license that allows me to use it without paying anyone... which is one of the major reasons I decide to choose it.

I didn't ask this guy to create the software and I am not asking him to maintain it either. If he abandons it, I will have to reevaluate by business but that is the risk I am willing to take.

So how and where did I exploit anyone? Had I chosen to hire a developer to re-write the same functionality provided by that software and pushed the cost to customers, would that be better? For whom? How? Would it be any different if we were a huge company? Why?

To avoid being exploited and burning out, use the GPL for your projects.

How does using GPL avoid the issue? I'm just curious and trying to learn something new.

A commercial company writing software dependent on your GPL code is obliged to release their modifications/code under GPL. Not neccissisaraly so with other licences. So it's a way to force them to give back if they want to use your code.

This is a common misconception. They don't have to release them under GPL if they don't distribute the modified version. With SaaS, this is in practice true for any server side code that remains private to the company. Affero GPL addresses this but I haven't seen it much in the wild.

Also because of this many SaaS and IaaS companies do not permit the use of OSS where the license requires them to release their source.

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