I once got a kind note once from someone working in the film industry who told me my mtf/bkf tool saved their renders after a particularly nasty blunder involving their cluster and backup servers. I'm sure this probably saved them a quarter-million dollars or more, but none of that savings made it my way.
And outside of that one email, over the last nearly thirty years I've received nothing else but abuse and nit. Forks, sure. Patches, a few. But the overwhelming attitude of the open source community is that I work for free, or fuck you.
Well, fuck you guys right back!
HN isn't unique in believing there's some kind of virtue if you can get one over on your fellow man and make a buck on his or her back. Everyone seems to be like that. And if someone complains about it, it turns personal quick, often attacking the economics as you have: Have I contributed more than I've taken? Has anyone? General criticisms of whataboutism and entitlement notwithstanding, this slippery slope doesn't go anywhere good, and despite how well-meaning your question might have been, the reality is it's never enough. Nobody does anything anymore who hasn't stood on the backs of someone else.
This sucks. It sucks bad that Facebook and Google got me to work for free. And to sell ads, no less. How ashamed am I of that?
Do you, for example, think it's good or bad if others have the freedom to use your software to do things you heartily dislike? Or if users you heartily dislike have the freedom to use your software?
But, no, I don't believe other people should have the Freedom to do things I think are Wrong. I don't think anyone believes that.
What exactly do you want to argue? Nobody is saying Google or Facebook is violating the letter of the law (here), but they are certainly abusing our goodwill. Shame on us for not setting the terms finely enough? Or shame on them for being dicks?
I thank my lucky stars that younger me was smart enough to not associate my name with these projects because that would have only made the situation worse. I was able to make a clean break from the projects I was working on after tying up loose ends.
I would value our contributions back to the community at around $500k annually, based on the comp we dump into the teams working on those tools.
Whether the shift of maintainership from unaffiliated individuals to corps is acceptable, beneficial, or harmful, is an open question.
I guess your employer uses a lot more open source than the tools you spend $500k/y on. So your employer contributes to some development and uses lots more. That's not qualitatively different from what I personally do.
when i think of individual oss projects, my brain automatically goes to the old enlightenment window manager, and e12/e13 in particular. it was cool and not very useful compared to fvwm or afterstep, but i think the libraries rasterman worked on in the process wound up being useful elsewhere.
but it's been a long time and i'm recovering from a migraine, so you know.. don't quote me.
Donating a bit of money can really help motivate some folks who would otherwise lose interest. You can also donate your time and create a few pull requests to help out.
If I had to guess, a few 100 million dollars in developer time and training.
I know it's a cynical view but it's exactly the principle of an app store: 1) one company puts in all the effort to develop a great product that would otherwise go nowhere unless 2) another company gives it the necessary reach without otherwise contributing too much.
Almost all of the contribution: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2016/08/the-top-10-deve...
And almost all of the money: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/
I don't. My employer wants our FOSS core software developed, or wants the bugfix/feature in the FOSS we depend on.
I know people who work for free, but use evidence of that to get well-paid contract work.
Even the guy I know working on a scientific library does that to further his academic career.
I'd be interested to know the situation for significant desktop software (Firefox, Gnome, KDE, a video player, media player, LibreOffice).
Few developers work on FOSS full time for free, at least for very long. However, there is a sizeable group of FOSS developers who do full time or large amounts of part time work for far less than market rate, especially those who are funded primarily through donations. You can go to many smaller projects and see the level of donations they get (e.g. the creators of Godot pay themselves $4400/month, and that is one of the most financially successful small open source projects). I would suspect even for the projects you mentioned above, money is far from the primary motivation of the developers, and they could make more elsewhere.
Successful FOSS businesses usually make money off of selling exceptions, (i.e. selling to non-free software companies) or creating a product with per unit cost (e.g. support).
Essentially, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and so on, have outsourced development to vast amount of unpaid developers; while software focused companies are becoming more and more rare because somewhere, somehow, a bunch of highly skilled engineers think it's a good idea to spend their own time writing something awesome, while at work they complain about how their work is not understood and how management doesn't give a dime about quality engineering. Instead they should deprive these companies of their free labour, group together and build awesome technically written code, and charge money for it.
FOSS projects that tend to be volunteer led, are that way because the developer is scratching their own itch. Maybe I could make money with one of hobbies, but its a risk, and I don't want to spoil something I enjoy so I just develop X in my spare time. I enjoy it, it's something I wouldn't normally get to do and yes as a bonus I can put it on a CV.
Expectations beyond that are unreasonable? You don't have any right to make money from that, any more than a commercial company has a right to make a profit.
And say everyone did what you suggest, its not immediately clear the world would be a better place anyway, maybe google and Facebook only exist because of the existence of Open source....
Perhaps people want to do something that changes the World for the better?
The obvious solution to this is to use the AGPLv3 license for all or most software one writes, which is what I prefer to do, as it's the strongest copyleft license available currently.
We see in many circles that it's not the hip thing to do, to write copyleft software. No, the hip thing to do is write permissively-licensed software and either not care about companies using it as free labor or complaining about a ''social contract'' that wants to be implied, but never explicitly stated as copyleft does.
I believe the trend towards permissive licensing has been pushed mostly by corporate interests and now we see the result. I believe things would be better if every company had to either share its code as copyleft, write everything itself, or actually pay for other proprietary software it could incorporate into its own. That is, I'd rather Grammarly, as an example, have no real option but to purchase an Allegro or Lispworks license, rather than being able to use SBCL and contribute little or nothing.