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Comment by gervu | Hacker News Reader

The longer I've been around open source, the less it's seemed like some ideological adventure where we extend human knowledge and capabilities for its own sake, while looking more and more like a set of intentionally confusing layers of abstraction and indirection around companies with plenty of money to spend on more engineering hours contriving to buy those hours well at below minimum wage by selling people on the above ideological vision.

Also, I'm going to guess that's something like five active contributors signed up, not five full-time engineers, meaning the actual number once you do the math for availability and such is probably closer to half an engineer. Could be five, but Heartbleed kinda put paid to reasoning like "pip is important, surely it has the funding for dedicated contributors who aren't distracted by something else being their real job."

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I would guess most open source contributions are motivated by the author’s business need, not ideology.

For me it's both. I'm not going to work on a project for the sake of open source, but ideology is a big part of why I choose to release my code under an open source license. In fact, if I need something that I think would be useful to the community (or myself on other projects), I'll build it on my own time and then do bugfixes and whatnot on company time.

People are all over the spectrum, with people like Stallman and developers at the FSF working mostly on ideological grounds and companies like Oracle only contributing when it would clearly be beneficial to the bottom line.

I used to think I would love to work on OSS if I didn't need money, but I've found that I just like working on stuff, and OSS isn't as much of a priority anymore.

What solution do you propose then ?

Money is always decoupled from value ( Warren Buffet paraphrased ).

Sometimes people who add negative value like the oil men in the Permian basin get paid 100x then your pip developer.

Screw that, large amount of the surplus generated by technology companies ends up in the hand of land owners instead of stockholders ! let alone the engineers building it - who might be riding on the work of open source volunteers. Its turtle all the way down.

If you are a volunteer, you are forgoing payment and are subjecting yourself to exploitation by others by definition.

Unless you have a mechanism for enforcement you are shit out of luck.

Isn't this the point of "copyleft"? Create a valuable product, require that when someone builds on it, that what they create also be free to use.

Open source software fails like this even if it's valuable because fixes and improvements don't necessarily make it out into the open, whereas Free/libre software, if it's valuable, gets stronger over time because fixes and improvements must be available to everyone.

Adding "fixes and improvements" to software haphazardly does not, in general, make it stronger. Quite often it can be the opposite.

Software projects need someone to maintain its course, make sure changes match the purpose of the software, and most importantly, reject changes that create a burden on the project.

Not only that, but onboarding yourself into a new project/codebase can take a significant amount of effort.

The point of copyleft is more ideological; it prevents others from using your software to restrict user freedoms, thereby limiting the spread of harmful, nonfree software. Copyleft is primarily intended to protect users.

Hold the phone. When you say “oil men” are you referring to the entrepreneurs or the workers? 100x s/w engineer salary sounds like a big deal..

"pip developer" probably means relative to the specific funding for pip development - very little - and not a full-time software engineering position.

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