Comment by SXX | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SXX | Hacker News Reader

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Personally I don't believe in idea that many people would be able to build successful FOSS projects and communities around them while living off their savings. It's could be a good for the start, but nothing would work without project having viable business model like MatterMost or Discourse have. Or if someone sponsors it be it some corporation or individual.

Reason for this is simple: successful project it's not just the code, but also community around it. Coordinating even small team across different time zones, helping new contributors, reviewing the code and keeping it all together is exhausting daily job and not everyone can handle that. Now projects that you find valuable would require highly skilled programmer to work on them.

So the person it's require to build such software can easily find a job in one of corporations that pay very well or FOSS-related job that might have lesser pay. Why should someone prefer to live off savings or in debt just to build software that don't have business model?

This is the reason I don't think basic income would help here at all. Of course some could be okay in living just above poverty while working on project they believe in, but most would prefer job for some corporation that would have have 3-10 times better pay.

So instead of basic income there should be viable way to fund open source projects and to distribute the pay fairly according to the job done. For individuals and small teams there is already Patreon, but there no simple solution for distributed teams usual open source project have because it's extremely hard to collect and distribute the money without offending someone or contributors lose motivation to work on project when one guy is being paid while they get nothing. Unfortunately I don't even sure if ever will be solution for this.

I agree anyone competent enough to run a good FOSS project from their savings will face a daily temptation of abandoning their precarious existence for a substantial secure income working at a corporate job. And I agree also that it is problematical how to divide donations to a project when there are multiple contributors (especially versus donations to specific developers, but even that is problematic if a multi-person project is involved). I also agree on the need for building a community around a project.

Where we differ regarding the BI and FOSS is possibly in thinking in these areas:

* There are many small but important projects (Mithril, Vue, many others -- even Linux early on) which are initially the work of one developer, eventually supported by a community. A BI would make more such starts possible, and also make contributions more feasible. While it is not quite "if you build it, they will come", certainly there are a lot of cases where a good project, well supported by one person, makes a big difference to a lot of people. Khan Academy in its early years is another great example of this.

* There is an entire gift economy of volunteerism. In some ways, much economic activity in even the USA is voluntary (even if it is ignored in the GDP) when you consider child care, helping neighbors, volunteering at non-profits, conversing with strangers to share knowledge, and so on. So, I know it is possible.

* Regarding "most people" and "some people": If you multiple seven billion people on the planet times even 0.1% of people being civic-minded at any particular time (and the percentage is probably much higher), then you get 7 million people. That is still a lot of people who can put a lot of time into things. And even without a BI, Clay Skirky said, there is a lot of time that could be liberated for improving free software and free content: https://web.archive.org/web/20110102193349/http://www.shirky... "Two hundred billion hours [of TV watching], in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus."

The bottom line is that the way people make a lot of money is by standing between someone and something they want and asking for a toll to access that thing. Almost all venture business models are based on some variation of that (or aspire to that such rent seeking). It's not the only way to make money, but it is the way to make a lot of money. The problem is that tolls have lots of external costs. For tolls at bridges there are delays, health costs of fumes, and increased risks of accidents. For online software, there is the externality of lost privacy (but only one-way, consumer to aggregator) needed to make possible the tolls Google and Facebook charge advertisers as they sell human eyeballs. There is also the externality of risks from central points of failure (whether loss of service or censorship).

Small-scale exchange commerce may make a lot of capitalistic sense at the scale of, say, running a local farm, bagel shop, or plumbing company. But on a large scale, like Facebook, Google, Slack, and so on, the centralization of control of information flows poses enormous risks to democracy.

If there was not so much regulatory capture, we might expect our governments to pour literally trillions of dollars a year into software (and content) for democracy right now given how important that is. Instead we have a proprietary centralized Facebook, Google, Twitter, and even Windows -- and our democracy and culture is at great risk from an imbalance of power. Governments at the behest of content publishers have continually expanded copyright and passed ever more draconian laws about sharing information. And every day we get more funding pouring into the next venture (like Slack) that can figure out how to capture and centralize more information and data mine it for the benefit of the investors.

For a latest example of how Slack continues to invest in data minining alll the secrets of coprorations: https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/starting-up-slack-s-search-le...

As we move into an age of AI, the emphasis on monopolistic business models is even more dangerous. It's bad enough to have a communications system shaped by short-term greed and competition -- it is far, far worse to have autonomous inhuman AIs shaped by short-term greed and competition let loose on the net.

I wrote an essay relate to such funding trends over a decade ago, with a section on automotive intelligence: http://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html#w...

Of course, ultimately, there are lots of moral failures all around. If people had rejected Facebook or Slack from the start, the world online might be a very different place.

But, in the words of Marc Zuckerberg: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

  Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
  Zuck: Just ask
  Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
  [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
  Zuck: People just submitted it.
  Zuck: I don't know why.
  Zuck: They "trust me"
  Zuck: Dumb fucks

Now, we all need to trust other people in this world to have a happy life. But in a democracy, the idea is to spread that trust around as much as is feasible and have checks and balances. There is also the notion of incrementally earned trust -- and also the recall of trust (like impeachment).

But how do we impeach Facebook, Slack, Google, or Equifax? In our society, we can't. The best we can do is create alternatives.

Instead of centralized proprietary services like Facebook or Slack, we could instead have shared standards (e.g. email, IRC, or what comes next) and a variety of implementers of those standards. But if all the techies are being paid by VC to work for Facebook or Slack or the next similar service, that creates a vacuum of developers working on better email or better IRC standards (and implementations).

We may benefit from some hierarchy, but we also benefit from having that mixed with some meshwork (as Manuel De Landa suggests: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm ).

There are several options for moving forward -- a Basic Income is just one of them. Maybe there can be better business models that affirm democracy. And maybe there can be more court rulings protecting democracy. And maybe there can be more collective investment by government and foundations in FOSS. (One other place I suggest that is here, suggesting the intelligence community fund FOSS intelligence tools: http://web.archive.org/web/20160508005451/http://pcast.ideas... ) But we may not get there if we believe a conventional rent-seeking business model is the only way to fund most software and communication services.

While I wish to be as positive as you are about the future there still few points I feel important to make.

* First of all I don't think that important projects started by single developer is right example for benefit that BI could bring because they managed without basic income in past and they don't need it today.

If project don't get enough traction during period when project originator actively work on it that's usually mean that will never happen. But if original developer leave there still chance for someone else who believe in idea to take control or just fork it and continue. Also this rotation seems like one of crucial parts that make open source successful.

So while BI would let someone to work on the same code indefinitely or at least much longer than now I don't think that will greatly increase number of popular and widely used open source projects. And who knows might be it's will even decrease that number.

* Another note about voluntarism. It's great that in developed countries there is endless number of ways for society to participate in all kind of useful activities and I wish it's was even remotely close in country of my origin. Though for the reasons stated before I simply don't believe that crowd-sourcing can be applied to build successful software projects. You might say that community can go promote software instead of helping with development, but today you can't even promote project efficiently using centralized tools we have simply because companies companies like Facebook and others want you to pay for that. Number of communities outside of centralized social networks is dwindle over last 10 years.

So I wish to think positively, but so far all I see is that distributed FOSS projects cannot successfully compete with corporate or VC funded products. With direction where Internet, hardware trends, Internet and society itself going I don't see how we going to get more people involved in open source and not less.

But hopefully someone will come up with idea how to fund truly distributed open source teams so they can at least somewhat compete with VC money burning centralized proprietary alternatives. Without that best we can hope for is that open source will keep positions it's have today.

A basic income makes it possible for, say, 100 software developers to choose to work together on the same project of their own choosing and of their own free will -- as opposed to having to work for someone else on someone else's choice of project just to be able to pay for food and rent. That's the difference a BI would make.

Now, getting 100 software developers top agree to work together on the same project might not be easy ("herding cats"). But it seems doable, as we can point to quite a few projects (including big names like Linux, WordPress, Apache, and Python) where it has happened. And there are even some books out there on how to create and manage FOSS projects.

Granted, those particular big-name projects have also had commercial support eventually -- so we don't know all the details of what might be possible otherwise. But there are plenty of examples of voluntary groups of significant size dedicated to a common purpose (fire companies, sports clubs, historical societies, and so on) so it is not inconceivable the same will continue to happen for software if people have the free time to participate in them.

I just don't buy that even if basic income implemented properly it's would provide enough money so skilled programmers would go work on their dream project instead of getting full-time job with good pay. Being just a bit above poverty with food and rent is simply not enough.

I know many people who would say it's would be great, but I sure that wouldn't looks so great in practice. If average salary of developer is going to be multiple times above BI the only people who going to stay out of full time job would likely be useless due to their poor skills or inability to work in team.

I saying that from my own experience: I almost left doing my boring freelance stuff to learn C++ and work on project I want to see finished. I still keep doing it because I like it, but living without money is not fun. And I'm crazy Russian guy who used to see poverty all around, but I absolutely don't see how people who used to get at least $70,000/year salary in EU / US would go change it to something like $40,000/year BI.

Also I can't say much about Apache or Python, but other two examples are wrong. Linux become actually successful after corporations backed it while WordPress have massive business behind it: Automattic has 500+ employees and way above 1B valuation.

Participating projects in free time might work for some software, but most of time there is group of lead developers who doing most of heavy lifting and projects wouldn't live without them. And there plenty of extremely boring, but very important work that is critical for security and project integrity, but can't be really crowd sourced at all.

PS: Though I should note that I'm proponent of BI and I feel it would work great as replacement for traditional ineffective welfare systems that either useless or too easy to abuse (I seen plenty of it while lived in the UK). And I sure that BI could give indirect benefit for the society in general, but I don't believe it's what's needed to push FOSS forward.

I watched the development and later commercialization of all four of those. I even contributed a bit like by getting Python approved inside IBM Research for internal use around 1999 back when using "Open Source" software was a novel idea to many companies, and I also tried to popularize Linux a bit inside IBM Research at the time.

Linux and WordPress were both started with one or two people, and it was years before a lot of corporate money jumped onboard after they were starting to show success. It took thousands of people who cared about FOSS quietly lobbying for it in the companies they worked for (as I did at IBM Research) and also others to turn that interest into companies like Cygnus and RedHat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress "WordPress was released on May 27, 2003, by its founders, Matt Mullenweg[1] and Mike Little,[9] as a fork of b2/cafelog."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic "Automattic, Inc. is a web development corporation founded in August 2005."

On the commercialization of Linux and how it took coordinated effort to promote it before companies adopted it: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/00/02/03/0039223/commercial... which references: https://web.archive.org/web/20020206225729/http://www.linuxw...

I understand this BI approach may not work for you right now. It may not even work for most software developers right now.

But, as a counter example, there are about eleven million graduate students in the world, many living on about a Basic Income level of funding. That is proof that millions of people are willing to live for years at poverty level wages (or even taking on debt) in order to do something they care about -- even if quite a few could get jobs paying a lot more by pursuing more immediate commercial success. Granted many may aspire to a better paying job as a tenured professor, but any look at the statistics show that is not going to happen for 90%+ of such students. Most of these people in graduate programs are generally not there because they are "useless due to their poor skills or inability to work in [a] team." http://www.richardprice.io/post/12855561694/the-number-of-ac...

See also: "The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet" by Micky Z. From the book blurb: "Mickey Z. considers work a 50-year fugue from which some people awaken to wonder what has become of their lives. In The Murdering of My Years, cabbies, waitresses, clerks, telemarketers, and an array of others tell how they balance activism and artistic production with the daily struggle to make ends meet. Contributors’ essays are at once absurd and poignant; captivating and strange. Collectively, their reflections challenge the myth of the American work ethic and exhort readers to advocate for themselves in the workplace."

=== A tangent on what I want to do, making public intelligence tools for civic sensemaking, and how a BI could help

Here is a different path to a similar place instead of a BI, but it is much less compatible with our current economic system: :-) https://web.archive.org/web/20090219001429/http://whywork.or... "It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other. I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. ..."

As I see it, 99% of commercial programming every year is not needed -- and worse, just makes work for other programmers supporting poorly implemented redundant garbage code. Really, how many accounting systems do we need? How many online shopping systems? How many medical records systems? How many email systems? How many EDI standards? How many programming languages? How many OSs? How many libraries for basic embedded control tasks?

I'm all for diversity and experiment and playfulness and for everyone who wants to learning to code and writing their own applications, languages, and OSes for fun and self-education and even some personal security in knowing for sure what the code they use does because they wrote it. But, at the same time, as I see it, almost all commercial programming done today is completely unneeded (or 100X harder than it should be) compared to if we had a few solid agreed upon standards that were well thought out and implemented in FOSS and maintained in a cooperative way which supported flexible adaptation. (See Alfie Kohn and "The Case Against Competition").

But we have the mess we do because of vast amounts of commercial competition introducing vast inefficiencies into the software development process because programmers were not allowed by their companies to cooperate and coordinate with other programmers in different organizations. For example, Microsoft sabotaged the web and JavaScript for along time via "embrace, extend, and extinguish". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extin...

Are we really that much better off now as software developers than when people were, say, running Rexx under an IBM VM in the 1980? http://www.rexxla.org/rexxlang/mfc/rexxadv.html Or, better even, using Smalltalk? https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08

For example, in my opinion, most application software has gone downhill since Smalltalk-80 and the 1990 version of "Analyst"... :-) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.smalltalk/... "... The Analyst Spreadsheet (which was also sold as a separate package) was simply the best. Cells could contain arbitrary Smalltalk objects, and formula were arbitrary Smalltalk code. When we showed people things like image manipulation within spreadsheet cells or computing inverses of matrices containing fractions and/or complex numbers, they often could not believe what they saw :-) ..."

I'm trying to recreate that sort of thing two decades later in JavaScript as FOSS in my spare time from descriptions... And more, perhaps crossed with HyperCard, Augment, Thunderbird, a Federated Wiki, Diaspora, Matrix.org, MatterMost, SEAS, Angler, IBIS, and a Semantic Desktop. My latest version exploring some ideas (still a long way to go): https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip7

I am doing it for these sorts of reasons: http://web.archive.org/web/20160508005451/http://pcast.ideas... "This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security."

Also related: "Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15261691

I've worked on successful commercial and governmental intelligence systems before so it as not quite as far-fetched a stretch for me to do that as it might seem. But I still need to earn a living, so it has to be a spare time thing right now. With a BI for everyone in my family (so, BI x N), I could have been doing that full time (or at least, a lot more than now) for many years -- rather than my current pattern of earning money working for others to to buy my own free time to do such projects.

So, imagine 100 dedicated programmers willing to live on a BI to make something like that that happen. It might be an organization similar in spirit to, say, Project Vote Smart (but without as much drama or a physical site) which has 40 lowly-paid interns (again showing there are people willing to make that financial tradeoff): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Vote_Smart https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Project-Vote-Smart-Intern-... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Project-Vote-Smart-Salaries...

Sure, maybe you would not want to be part of such an effort yourself today. But with a BI, I feel there might be enough people working on it to make a real difference while having a lot of "hard fun" along the way -- people who choose to participate in civic ventures and who would finally have the time to volunteer since they have a BI. And then maybe the result will be the next Linux/WordPress/Apache/Python/etc.. Of course, odds are any specific such project would fail -- or even if it succeeds, it would be ignored. But if enough people can do the same using the free time a BI provides, eventually one such project will be a success, just like for every Linux there were probably 1000s of people playing around with starting their own OSs that never went anywhere. And if our economic system still exists in its current form then, likely companies will come along to commercialize that success and expand on it, same as with Linux.

Of course, without a BI such a project is still possible, in the way Project Vote Smart is possible (via volunteerism and interns and small grants), or Linux or Python or even the early Web got built in people's spare time until finding organizations that supported the main developer for long-term full-time work, or Mozilla exists (for at least another couple of years), or the Chandler Project existed for a time. It was unfortunate to see Mozilla waste literally hundreds of millions of US dollars that could have gone to a FOSS project like this for organizing information (including web content, search results, and email). And it was also saddening to watch the Chandler Project spend millions on an information organizer with not much to show for it and then dissolve -- but at least their heart was in the right place and with 10X to 100X more time and more funding they might have succeeded after going up some painful learning curves. But sometimes it just takes many failures before a success (part of the theory of Y Combinator, for example).

A good resource by Karl Fogel on: "Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project" http://producingoss.com/

Thanks. Interesting read!

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