Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

I’m not a developer and I don’t have a strong opinion on open-source software either way, but I’ve always wondered: does the fact that developers and other technical people have (comparatively) excellent job security affect their attitude toward free labor and products? If developers had a job outlook similar to say, musicians, would open-source be as widely-used and praised as it is now?

Surely some academic economic work has been done on a situation like this?

View on HN

Free labor is distinct from free software and it is misleading to conflate the two. Plenty of people are paid to work on free software, and I'm not talking about Red Hat or SUSE either. See: 90% of the Linux kernel contributors.

As for musicians, plenty of them share their music (or flps, or whatever) all the time. Soundcloud, bandcamp, jamendo, magnatune, soulseek... the list goes on.

1. Right, but I guess I was talking more about the ecosystem itself. If there were no jobs paying people to work on open-source software, would there be as much work done on free software in general?

2. True, but charging money for your music doesn’t get nearly the same negative reaction that paid software often gets.

1. Well, humans produced a lot of music long before anything like a copyright system existed, so maybe that's actually not the example you want to look for.

2. If people charge money for covers[1], the public does tend to exhibit some degree of outrage. I've heard a hypothetical future in which being caught whistling a pop song in public results in an instant fine being held up as a possible dystopia. Even when we are just talking about stringent enforcement of copyright on exact-ish reproductions of music or film, opposition to this propelled politicians into parliaments in the EU and several component countries (the Pirate Parties); I do wonder if Free Software fundamentalism actually ever involved the number of people that must have signed on for that to have been possible.

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/bmi-reminds-ohio-bar-cover-son...

There's nothing wrong with paid software. I'm happy to pay as long as it's free.

This is an interesting double entendre. Do you mean happy to pay as long as it has a permissive/OSS license and comes with source code or that the purchase price is zero, or both?

Genuinely not trying to be pedantic, just curious if you were being clever.

Although I have just meant "free as in freedom" above, it's not uncommon for me to pay non-zero amount for FLOSS with purchase price of zero as well.

Most open source developers are paid for it. There are some people who do some of open source by the evenings as a hobby, but those tend to have jobs too. There are also hobby musicians, or musicians for whom music pays only little, but their reach is smaller.

There are not that many open source projects for non tech users - most and best open source centers in tools for techies.

There is a lot of rhetorics and myth making about open source, but majority of developers does not do open source nor is required to and having open source project is not that much of advantage when looking for job.

Comparing developers with academics is more apt. Mathematicians and other scientists don't charge usage fees for their theorems or discoveries.

Yes, you can pay the author for a book but you can reuse and modify ideas and concepts at will.

Job security is quite relevant in academia: most discoveries in the last 100 years were [in]directly funded by government and researchers were usually not working under time or financial pressure.

I suggest you to read "In the beginning was the command line" paper, it describe an ancient world with many companies, in the USA market, not academia nor URSS, that make big money and give software for free.

As a matter of fact job security is threatened by turbocapitalism in which anyone is a Ford-model replaceable worker...

The substance is that job security in FOSS is based on personal competence, you pay competence, actual work, not evanescent product so a skilled programmer it's always safe, a mediocre one is always in trouble and can't try "managerial career" to mask his/shes low skill...

Developers and musicians cannot be compared directly; there is simply too much money in the (extended) software economy.

Look at the history of free software. It started from an academic environment where sharing was the norm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com