The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
onezero.medium.com
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I now am starting to rethink this sentiment because the vast majority of the benefit of open source contributions on github, be they to languages, runtimes, application frameworks, databases, etc, go towards increasing the bottom line of for-profit companies, not to developers. And the vast majority of the beneficiaries of open source will never support the project even when they are fortune 50 companies saving millions of dollars by using the work of one volunteer.
There is also the idea that contributing will be great for your career development. I have found that not to be the case at all, I think that no potential or current employer has ever given a rat's ass about open source contributions, and do not consider that work as valuable when making hiring decisions. The work you are paid to do is the only thing anyone cares about. I'm not saying that that shouldn't be the case, but just that that is the case.
Given then, that there's very little upside to doing open source, and most/all the benefits go to profit-making corporations, it is puzzling why do we even push for greater involvement in open source at all? It seems we shouldn't be, we should be warning people who want to contribute to Open Source that they should probably spend their time doing their own studying and personal/skill development which will allow them to succeed in the roles that they have with their current role or a role they'd like to obtain one day, for money.
you can sort of see evidence of this within repositories filled with smug comments within the issues or pull requests
i would honestly rather it all be backed by corps and people get paid for it without any hints of "benevolent dictators"
Well don't use opensource software then, go buy it... It's your choice...
Just like it's the choice of a developer to give away something they made for free...
On the other hand, software maintenance is a category of work that tends to be poorly compensated even in the case of proprietary corporate software. So it is no shock that OSS maintenance also is poorly compensated either monetarily or non-monetarily.
Once you see something that you have built, running at thousands of operations a second for years, once it’s running smoothly and all the bugs and edge cases have been smoothed out. Watching the machine dance, visualising the data structures in your mind - and algorithms running on them. Thinking about state changes, loops and execution, and watching it all running in a beautiful symphony of logic : there’s really no other feeling of joy and appreciation of beauty. I love being a programmer, and I suspect the majority of open source contributors are like this.
The snide comments and unhelpful github messages are the minority in my experience, especially with more mature products (kernel development, sys ops tools etc)
Firstly, the reason I open-source most of my libraries is because, when I was a kid and learning to code, I couldn't afford or convince my parents to buy the expensive proprietary software I wanted to play with. Open source let me have access to this technology ( and to inspect how it worked ) without having to buy anything.
This is simple stuff like having GCC to compile C programs, rather than buying the intel or MS compiler.
Those early experiences got me where I am today. I contribute open-source software so that other, more junior developers have the same opportunities I did.
> There is also the idea that contributing will be great for your career development. I have found that not to be the case at all, I think that no potential or current employer has ever given a rat's ass about open source contributions, and do not consider that work as valuable when making hiring decisions. The work you are paid to do is the only thing anyone cares about. I'm not saying that that shouldn't be the case, but just that that is the case.
Again, I've never experienced this. I got my first programming job right out of high school, and my resume was filled only with various (small) open-source contributions. Without those I'm not sure what inspectable experience I would have had.
> Given then, that there's very little upside to doing open source, and most/all the benefits go to profit-making corporations, it is puzzling why do we even push for greater involvement in open source at all? It seems we shouldn't be, we should be warning people who want to contribute to Open Source that they should probably spend their time doing their own studying and personal/skill development which will allow them to succeed in the roles that they have with their current role or a role they'd like to obtain one day, for money.
Again.... the exact opposite experience. I released a moderately popular library, built a community around it, and this has opened up career opportunities for me. In the niche I work in, several interviewers had actually heard of me before I even interviewed. The scalability of open-source to distribute a positive first impression to potential employers should not be understated.
I do agree with you here:
> And the vast majority of the beneficiaries of open source will never support the project even when they are fortune 50 companies saving millions of dollars by using the work of one volunteer.
Lastly, I think the reason most people find open-source to not live up to its promises is that they do not take on leadership roles in open source organizations. Frankly, as a more senior developer now, simply being a casual contributor to a project would not add to my resume. However, being a project lead, or component lead, would. You need to target your open-source contributions to things your employers would find useful. For example, I work on mainly backend, low-level things in my current career. As much as I would like to contribute to GNOME or GTK or whatever (and I have the skills to do it), there is not enough reward to doing so, so I don't. Instead I contribute to projects that I know will ingratiate myself to future employers. Perhaps that's why our experiences are so different.
Just saying, software can be free without getting open sourced.
I agree that OSS gives raw access to technology, but in larger projects, I would prioritize a good documentation/reference book over source code to understand it in a complete manner.
The response to that was that these contributions lead to jobs. But, that idea seems to have largely disappeared. There was a period where people were claiming your github account is your resume, but I haven't heard that sentiment in several years.
Then the startup boom started again and a new round of devs came into the profession looking to make money and needed to prove themselves. They heard "good devs have great github profiles!" so they started creating github profiles and flooding them with code to get hired.
Now we're in the new wave of cargo cult white boarding/code challenges. You may hate them but at least the early FAANG challenges were interesting and challenging. But since every company has to have them you have devs that couldn't pass a google white board challenge trying to create their own version... which usually means they are poorly thought out.
If this culture is stifled the name of depriving corporations 'free labor' through OSS, the creative hacker community isn't elevated - everyone is brought down. IMHO anyone seeking to build financial value for developers or pad their resume is better off working on a side project/startup.
I understand why somebody would be scared of that. They're big and important to the tune of many many billions of dollars, while you or I are not. But you shouldn't let that get to you. You should make a conscious effort to not let that get to you. If they want you to take their problems personally, let them hire you. If they can be broken by you but are unwilling to pay you, then fuck them. Put them lower in your priority queue than private individuals.
https://invidio.us/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U
(Fuck you, pay me.)
> It’s still not clear that companies would be interested in such a contract. When Stenberg asked the company that needed him to fly to a different country to troubleshoot their problem to pay for one, they refused.
That, on its own, is fine. It brings you satisfaction rather than financial support. What starts being fishy is when companies like Amazon who can readily afford to offer financial support instead rely on and exploit that sense of obligation to get work done for free.
I realise this sounds whiny and that's not the point. The point is that by withholding FOSS contributors financial support, these companies are creating an environment in which the best and most dedicated contributors run the risk of burning themselves out, making everyone worse for it.
Really? If Amazon filed a bug on one of my repos I'd probably see dollar signs flashing.
- start a company around providing enterprise support services;
- ask for the large companies to provide some resources such as a part (or all) of an employee's time to work on the project, for the parts that are more dear to that company.
If a company is unwilling to pay, either in the form of a support contract or employee's time, it should look at another solution. Not just because they are being disrespectful/annoying/distracting to the maintainers of the OSS project but also because it means they don't have a good contingency plan for when things go wrong.
For a larger business, the value of using OSS is not to save money, it's to get the right level of customization for specific needs.
There's also a multitude of businesses selling support licenses for plugins/modules that extend OSS applications.
You know it's gone when you're ready to send them a cost estimate at twice your hourly rate.
Anyway, the developer does not need to stress out too much about Amazon employees having problems with their code...
But selflessness? That's the lie we tell ourselves when the true driver is something else, like narcissism.
It's not a bad lie. The outcome is pretty much the same while it lasts. But altruism is not a reliable motivator, and certainly not a requirement for volunteer work. A requirement is to have basic human needs met with some minimal security. Like, not having to judge everything you do by how much money it will earn you.
edit: Also, all of the open source I do or that I know of my peers doing is 100% for the love of programming and open source culture, without a bunch of hidden motives. Open source was definitely key to me becoming a programmer when I was a kid - without it I would never have gone as deep as I did into coding (linux, gcc, irrlicht), 3D modeling (blender), etc.
Also an angle you are considering are open source projects like Spark maintained by a company (databricks) for the benefiet of being used as a sales tool. This whole class of open source exists and pulls unwitting contributors into helping out who don't realize that they are benefieting multiple layers of corporate entities not willing to pay for it. And they will not see any benefiet from it (unless they use it as a personal sales tool to get a job at those companies).
It's worth noting that many of these companies give back to the OSS they leveraged, and are often the genesis of some of the best OSS software themselves.
OS matured, contribution in 2019 does not necessarily mean you commit code. Donating some money is fair use in my point of view and is simply a sign of respect.
And this is bullshit. Most popular open source projects see heavy usage in academia, personal projects, public projects, government projects, etc. Python is a massive reason any students know how to program at all.
At other points in our history that language would be BASIC or Pascal. Their initial implementations may not have been open source
What open source projects specifically?
> So, a large portion of open source contributions do nothing other than provide free highly skilled labour to Coca Cola, Walmart, and McDonald's.
In my opinion, any open source development is valued WAY MORE than closed source development, as it can be shared and verified by others. If you have a project that's benefiting multi billion dollar companies, then you've created something useful that can be shared with small companies and individuals too.
Also at the end of the day it's the developers choice, they can stop maintaining it, but the point is; sharing code is better for everybody
I have not contributed to any of these projects but for instance: Spark, Flink, Druid, Akka, Hadoop, Cassandra, Kafka, Java Spring, Hibernate, etc etc.
The world of open source benefits the powerful entities, and that's OK that's what open source is about... Everyone gets the code for free... No matter who you are
The risk is that it devalues labor. And could build a culture where so much is expected for free that there is never enough financial support.
Much like the improvements in farming and agriculture have changed from manually reaping the fields to AI controlled harvesting equipment.
There will always be software engineering problems to solve, they just move up the stack...
When fewer and fewer people are needed to do the same work it doesn't necessarily make for a better or more sustainable market: socially or ecologically. Consider a world where one needs 40 years of education (instead of say 20) to begin to contribute in a way the capital owners are willing to pay for. And paying for the privilege of much of that education.
But to me that's a pessimistic way to look at it. It's an accomplishment to need less people to build amazing things.
We're already at a point where even the most experienced engineer can only understand a fraction of the stack they use. Compare that with the 1970's where a programmer might understand 90% of the mainframe they use... because it was simpler...
Basically you don't need to know as much knowledge as earlier generations to accomplish the same thing, but this devalues that thing (or makes it much harder to be good at) ... All the low hanging fruit is gone I guess
Its Open Source that is chiefly responsible for every bit of that personal skill I have.
In this game, the "giant" corporations are the irrelevant little players that hardly matter. They don't contribute, so they may as well not exist. They can be safely ignored except for the rare occasion that they "fart in our elevator" with their patent nonsense.
I'm not talking about your small hobby project with a few dozen users - as good as it may be, the internet doesn't run on it. cURL is really an exception, not the rule.
I’d argue without trying to classify and quantify Debian contributions, there is no way to know who is doing work on Debian on their employer’s dime.
I also try to contribute to various projects in spare time as well. My contributions don’t really add up to much overall, though.
Sure, it’s all anecdotal. But otoh, the notion that FOSS is mostly volunteer work is probably worth challenging. Most non-huge projects I’ve come across only have 4 or 5 key contributors. Open source is at least, not as distributed as believed for most projects. On the other hand, companies using FOSS have incentives to contribute, and sometimes will even hire contributors on important projects.
The spring framework has contributions from many volunteers, but most big contributions and all of the integration work come from Pivotal.
The contributions to the linux kernel are graphed here:
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/175919-who-actually-de...
80% of new contributions are from companies. That shouldn't be surprising at all, because these companies are also the biggest users of the project.
As for myself, in the rare occasions I contributed a patch to an OSS project, most of the time it was to solve a problem I encountered at work, so I have anecdotal evidence that at least some from the category 'volunteers' also got paid to write that code.
What about science? If you ever benefitted from a genetic screening for any disease, your doctor made anywhere between $100 and $400 an hour, and the graduate student who discovered the function of that gene $10 an hour if you're accounting for his tuition credit. Who tells these students to stop spending 60 hours a week at the lab and start using their skills doing something people will pay for, like develop a no-palm-oil no-aspartame but-still-addictive Mars bar for 25c unit cost?
People will accept less money in exchange for doing something meaningful, like sitting in their basement painting stuff rich people will speculate on for millions of dollars after their death, or campaigning for a rich lawyer who already makes 200k and will get a good bonus post-election because he has the right party colors.
If you could literally sell meaning to people for less friction than those alternatives they'd eat it up. And they'd spend their time making money to spend it on your meaning-making money-sucking machine.
Because that's all money is for: be exchanged for things that make your life not suck. And this exchange tends to bear transaction costs.
"If you want to get rich, start a religion" - L. Ron Hubbard
prediction: 2020's will be a decade of hyperactive cult growth, accelerated by proliferation of private alternative currencies, loneliness and the decline in traditional religious affiliations. Patronage of the ambitiously famous will be direct and recurring, without need of branded material maguffins to mediate the transaction loop.
Almost everybody, whether in or out of academic science, tells them that.
I can't think of any civic institution I belong to that isn't constantly asking for volunteers, and riding the volunteers they have to do more. I'm not sure it's any different.
Society needs volunteers, and money isn't everything.
This is a great point. Still, the local church meals do not enrich multi-billion dollar companies; unlike FOSS.
hell, most programmers would probably take a pay cut to work in a "cool" language. i'm willing to wager that C/C++/COBOL/java mean salaries are a standard deviation higher than haskell/elixir/clojure salaries. why? many reasons but i bet that companies know that they can use programmers' passion for mastery against them. leave your boring C++ slog job to "hack in Haskell!"
i'm guessing many of these guys are just clueless when it comes to how potentially valuable they are as individuals and what that's worth, while they put up a $10/mo patreon that 6 people use. i'm guessing most engineers are severely underpaid when it comes to value added, they consistently fall for the okie-doke's of "we get to type stuff into a computer and learn and oh wow, i ought to be so grateful for my six figure salary", yet they're putting entire swathes of the economy out of work for their corporate overlords.
it's tough to convince management you're worth a lot of money if you're willing to give away your precious time and resources freely.
I 100% agree most engineers are severely underpaid. A lot of my colleagues get paid more than anyone in their family ever has (sometimes whole family put together) and just like to ride it out.
Such a wild claim would require some evidence. But it's so patently false, I'll give you pass.
Linus has gotten extreme benefit from Linux and Git. And developers have massively, directly benefited and the world indirectly from Linux and Git.
Wikipedia, directly benefiting everyone, would not exist without open-source either its infrastructure or the code it runs on. The Internet would not exist without open-source.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/00/01/22/1843258/open-defensi...
and still do not know whether any formal method exists (apart from the choice of license model) which could inoculate "Open Source" from being tragically impressed into corporate rent-seeking service. Or at least, as much of the Open Source ethic as is encapsulated in the public works of ethically motivated open source contributors; people who are essentially investing their time, skills and resources in the improvement of a lightly defended public common that continues to be parceled out to private interests.
* rereading the above I don't think I've made much progress in my posting style. Maybe it's something about the apparent structural inevitability of this problem, which seems more a recapitulation of deeper conflicts in human dynamics than something specific to "open source".
One benefit of OSS is to lead the world to a place where you want the world to go.
I had access to Amiga and PC, bough my software tools that I actually cared about (with student discount), and did some programming gigs already before getting into university.
Back then, making a living from selling developer tools still looked like a possible way of life.
That is not the case with the D programming language effort. Quite a number of strong D open-source contributors have been recruited into very well paying positions directly because of their contributions.
I suspect the key is contributing to a higher profile open source project. One that is high enough that one can make major contributions, and not so high that one has a hard time standing out amongst the other contributors.
We do care. We're hiring for backend engineers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20871478
I don't think that's true. The software itself doesn't benefit their bottom line because it's free for everyone. You can't charge a premium because your business runs on Linux.
All open source software does is provide a base-line of technology that all companies and all individuals can use. You can't directly or even indirectly profit of it -- you can only profit on the value you can provide on top of it.
As technologists, that's what we want! We want companies and individuals to stand on the shoulders of giants and peek a little bit higher. We don't need anyone to re-invent the wheel over and over.
I can’t see anything wrong with that, it’s like people doing favors every day for other people without asking for money
> I now am starting to rethink this sentiment because the vast majority of the benefit of open source contributions on github, be they to languages, runtimes, application frameworks, databases, etc, go towards increasing the bottom line of for-profit companies, not to developers. And the vast majority of the beneficiaries of open source will never support the project even when they are fortune 50 companies saving millions of dollars by using the work of one volunteer.
Yes open-source improve computation as a whole, companies as well as individuals
> There is also the idea that contributing will be great for your career development. I have found that not to be the case at all, I think that no potential or current employer has ever given a rat's ass about open source contributions, and do not consider that work as valuable when making hiring decisions. The work you are paid to do is the only thing anyone cares about. I'm not saying that that shouldn't be the case, but just that that is the case.
Not my experience, have never stumbled upon a recruiter that doesn’t value OS contributions
> Given then, that there's very little upside to doing open source, and most/all the benefits go to profit-making corporations, it is puzzling why do we even push for greater involvement in open source at all? It seems we shouldn't be, we should be warning people who want to contribute to Open Source that they should probably spend their time doing their own studying and personal/skill development which will allow them to succeed in the roles that they have with their current role or a role they'd like to obtain one day, for money.
Since all previous assumptios was wrong, conclusion doesn’t follow. But I agree that people should not do Open Source for money
Is there research comparing the current situation with a hypothetical world where OSS doesn't exist? How many less developers would have a job? How much less would the remaining be paid? I'm imagining it and that's not a world I want to be in.
To add a bit more to the "factualness" of the conversation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Software Engineers in the U.S. took home $144 billion, which for comparison is more than the revenue of Alphabet or Microsoft. How much of that do you think can be attributed to OSS?
I partially disagree. Yes, the benefit will not be fairly shared. However, the volunteers' works accelerate entreprises' works, which can then provide new services and new products faster.
Imagine some ML algorithms could find the cure to aging. You have two options : either wait that some company develops it, but you might be dead by then, or accerelate the process by open sourcing your code and hopefully get the companies closer to this goal. Now, that doesn't mean you will be able to access that cure if a company finally finds it and decides to sell it, but you increase the odds that something might be discovered.
It's like giving $1000 to charity, but with the scale of software, your coded contribution can have way more impact than $1000 on the world.
How would you weigh the benefits of millions of people using and loving a piece of software, even if no profits are generated? What if they are able to free up time which they use to improve their communities, spend more time with their friends and family, maybe even make money for themselves?
I don't think you can make a sweeping generalization like that, because "employer" is not some omnipotent figure sitting in an ivory tower. It's other developers, and managers who are (typically) technical and can appreciate individuals who contribute to open source.
If I see someone is an active contributor on Scikit-learn, numpy, etc. that is a certainly a strong signal for me. Yes I'm not making the hiring decision, but I can assure you the HM is going to be influenced by those who interviewed the candidate.
Companies may not care about volunteer work when making hiring decisions, but that should not be why you do it.
You say most open source software is used by companies to better their bottom line, but if you’re making six figures through skilled work and not giving anything back to your community, I fail to see how that’s any better.
I guarantee I earned less money in the past year than anyone reading this (I don't work in tech any more), and it didn't stop me from volunteering my skills. Being rich is not a requirement for contributing.
Which inturn creates jobs doe devlopers.
Let's face it. As a devloper. My day to day would be tough and slow without many of the free tools devlopers created for fee.
So maybe the pressure for me to contribute is just.
The problem is in the licensing.
Large companies have become the primary user rather than the real end users and other developers... because the licenses make it possible.
Isn't this kind of the problem the GPL is supposed to solve?
Sure, a company can build off an open source project to increase their bottom line, but they'll have to contribute back any changes they make. Which means their work is now benefitting other developers as well.
I feel like the GPL has somewhat fallen out of favor in recent years. To an extent I understand why, and yet...
> "the benefit of open source contributions on github... go towards increasing the bottom line of for-profit companies, not to developers"
Don't those for-profit companies employ people -- including developers?
>"[developers] should... spend their time doing... skill development... to succeed in... current role or a role they'd like... for money"
Are those roles you mention positions in for-profit companies? In "for money", whose money?
so to turn the argument around BSD unix would not exist in its current form if the initial corporate developers had not released it under a BSD compatible license.
so it's not just about volunteer BSD developers subsidizing corporations. but there is a give and take in the BSD world too.
compare that to mariadb which contains most of the code that is owned and controlled by oracle now and which prevents mariadb to sell to clients that demand a custom license agreement.
now for a GPL fan, this is irrelevant because they shouldn't be selling such licenses anyways, but fact is that the owner of a GPL product is the only one who can sell such licenses, whereas anyone who uses a BSD product can sell such licenses.
in this sense, BSD code ownership can not be sold because actual ownership of the code is pretty much irrelevant, whereas GPL code ownership can be sold because the owner always has an advantage.
It's just not financially beneficial to developers.
- free software (GPL) can be used for any purpose, by the user. Yes, this means a corporation can use the software without paying. However if it tries to redistribute the software it has the obligation to distribute the source code and any improvements made to it.
- Large corporations are made of people. It is also of value that a person inside a large corporation can learn to use GPL tools, then leave the corporation and download use the same tools at home or another job and continue to use the skills learned.
- GPL software is also great for education - students can not only use tools, but can also pull them apart and see how they work
- GPL software can be a legacy if you're into that. You can write and distribute software under the GPL, and it can survive your current job, or corporation, or live on past your lifetime. GPL software has outlived most of the places I've worked. Meanwhile the non-free software those places created during my tenures have largely disappeared.
- GPL software is a great foil against our losing war with privacy. I can foresee a future where running software you can view and modify might be the only way to ensure you know you aren't being taken advantage of.
This is nowhere close to true, unless you define “benefit” as “cash profits”. Even then, it’s a tough argument.
There have been extraordinary benefits to most people in the world from open-source contributions. Without a wide range of open source code projects there would be no Wikipedia, no SciHub, no web forums, no search engines, no web maps, no movie/book/restaurant review sites, no craigslist, no online dating, no news websites, no web education platforms (MOOCs, Open Courseware, Khan Academy, ...), no technical Q&A sites, no video sharing sites, no social media, no e-commerce, no online banking, no ...
The great majority of the benefits of all of these software products and projects accrue to their many users, not to their authors or corporate hosts.
(Of course technology is not all positive, and many people have also been harmed by technology. Open source also enables surveillance, stalking, bullying, new kinds of fraud, new venues for propaganda, new legal risks, new avenues for social and political control by self-interested and unaccountable people and institutions, etc.)
I have also hired people who don't have GitHub accounts. In those cases, they have some other proof of work. Papers, thesis, references (which are a drag, because then I have to also figure out how to vet the reference) and, particularly valuable, referrals from people I already know personally. This last one goes both ways: not only do I have high confidence in the good intentions of the person making the referral, I can then retrospectively assess this contact's ability to assess.
The publishing industry is much better than software at getting the money to flow towards the creator, but software jobs overall pay better than most writers because of the skill sets involved. Both publishing and software, however, do have multiple ways of going from amateur enthusiast to highly paid professional if you have the talent and connections. And open software, like contributing to small literary magazines, is one way that you can make that transition.
Money is only a fraction of motivation for many people. Many do open source to make the world a better or more efficient place and reduce barriers to entry.
So, you can make your software free as in 'free speech', and obligate other companies to keep the products they construct above yours still free.
Better than to make them free as in 'free beer' where they can just consume your work and not give back to the overall movement.
Nobody is doing anything they don't want to do. Nobody is forced to build open source software. And, most importantly, most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for. It's only collectively that these contributions have value and we all collectively benefit from it. And for-profit companies are part of that collective benefit but that doesn't mean money needs to be involved.
I'm working on an open source project right now -- I've put a lot of hours into it -- and it's cool but there is no way to build a profitable business from it. It's an end-user product, the small number of users will like it, and I just enjoyed building it. But I also don't want to make it business. I already have a job.
Started a website for fun, maybe I'll sell books. Then my website got popular and people want more content faster.
I have a day job, so I can't work full time unless I'm paid similar.
I'm unsure what to do next. My free website can be monatized with the goal of quitting my job.
Or users can get my hobby for free.
It seems no one is happy except me. The only benefit, my popularity will likely have me employed forever.
That sounds ok to me. You're only responsible for your own happiness.
Well, keep what makes you happy, and rest assured that happy people usually do not voice their happiness, so the entirely one-sided voices you are hearing carry almost no real information.
I disagree. Plenty of people are enjoying your content so much they want more. That doesn't mean they are unhappy, only that they think they could be happier than they already are. They are happy.
Then why does my employer pay me even for the small bugfixes I make to their code?
The stuff they don't use and the years of learning how to invent successful stuff is every bit as important as the failures. The successes can only be built by salvaging good ideas and abandoning bad ideas from the failures and obsolete successes. You pretty much have to demonstrate how you continue learning on Github just to get an interview.
Vital projects are not ok financially and we're starting to find out when they get repurposed as malware, or go unsupported despite being a dependency for a double-digit percentage of the internet. Most of the world is default-excluded from creating brilliant programmers because their parents have zero hundreds of dollars, let alone thousands, to subsidize a Stallman, Gates or Torvalds for the rest of us.
We are subsidizing corporations and they are racing to see who can hoard the most hundreds of billions of dollars.
This is such a red herring. There are plenty of ways we can look at this situation that don't involve unreserved consent.
My off the cuff solution is for project owners to add a status flag to their issue trackers: PAID. Anybody can submit a bug as PAID, but it costs $50,000-100,000 to do so, per bug. And no private fixes: there is one version and everybody gets the benefit. No badgering on ETAs either.
If Ford thinks it has value, then the developer should get some of that value, and $100K for a suitable patchlevel of cURL might even be a low estimate.
If anything, it'd probably exceed expectations.
I want to live in the fantasy world some of you live in where you expect corporations to cut you a $100k check, no strings attached.
Also, I've seen companies cut larger checks for sillier things with minimal conditions, so...
And yes, this would be the only voice they get in the development process. Why shouldn't it be? Apple's had a 12 year free ride so far.
And in practice, it also "buys" you all of the other bug fixes and releases from helping to fund the developer. So while the bug itself might only take a day, the infrastructure around being in a position to do that takes much more time.
Of course this also incentivizes people to add bugs in on purpose
$10K is way too cheap. I recommend putting some thought into the idea of business value.
If they want it fixed, let them add resources to the project like submit a pull request, donations or charge people support fees for urgent bugs, which many OSS projects do...
First of all, I believe that everything people do is according to some ethic, or set of criteria that motivates them, so there's no such thing as "unethical."
Secondly, it's not charging money because of who they are, it's charging them because of what they have, which is money, which is a desire to have a bug fixed, and which is not expertise in doing so.
Thirdly, charging money like this is not antithetical to free software, and as a matter of fact is promoted by FSF. Here they are dispensing with your argument in the first sentence: [1]
Fourthly, if they were going to submit a PR they would already be doing so (and maybe they have), but as the story goes, the lion's share of coding is performed by Stenberg. PR's are free and money is also a resource. Why not put the resource in the place with the most expertise?
In what way is the money I suggest not a donation or support fee? Lack of contracts to complicate things? Lack of tax writeoffs? These companies don't pay taxes anyway.
OK, that's one way to look at it. In that case I mean bad ethics...
> Secondly, it's not charging money because of who they are, it's charging them because of what they have, which is money, which is a desire to have a bug fixed, and which is not expertise in doing so.
That sounds reasonable and is similar to taxing the rich I suppose, but to me it's discrimination on WHO you are.
> Thirdly, charging money like this is not antithetical to free software, and as a matter of fact is promoted by FSF. Here they are dispensing with your argument in the first sentence:
That's their opinion, my opinion is that charging money for open source software (usage, support) usually results in bad incentives for the people controlling the software (more bugs = more money), which is bad for the consumers of the software.
Allow people to contribute money/resources to the project if they want/need, is the best for everyone.
> These companies don't pay taxes anyway.
True, but a whole other issue.
Are you aware of how much price discrimination these corporations do to everyone (including yourself) every single day? Most stuff we buy everyday, including the name brand generic stuff, is priced at what we will spend and is completely divorced from any kind of cost to produce. You will be charged more if you live in a wealthy area, you will be charged more just for living in a developed country, you will be charged more for shopping at certain times of day, you will be charged more because advertising manipulated you.
It's unethical, but giving them a taste of their own medicine isn't.
Many job postings list OSS contributions as a requirement / desirable for employment. So, I'm not sure if your statement holds up.
I personally know developers that contribute to OSS because of this. And many that have burnt out because of the constant need to contribute.
Most OSS contributors do it for fun - but there is a section that do it because it's becoming part of the interview / job hunting process.
Well employers simply want to see your portfolio and coding abilities, and open public code is the easiest way to screen candidates. It's not the most ideal way of checking since there can be many good candidates that don't write OSS for fun but I suppose it's a trade off the employers are making. If you can demonstrate your coding abilities through blogging or other mediums other than OSS than that's a good way to show you know what you're talking about.
If you write OSS on the side then of course that's a bonus but definitely not a requirement. I tend to write OSS for fun but I don't feel obligated to fix issues if I don't have the time or resources unless they offer payment. Anyone can simply fork the projects and fix it themselves.
I don't see how that is not enforcing free work.
You could say that you can choose to not apply to that company, but not everyone lives on SF and has tons of offers to choose from.
It becomes this unspoken rule that to work on many companies you have to contribute to OSS (preferably on Github). If you really need a job, you can't really pick and choose.
> I don't see how that is not enforcing free work.
Paid open source work, on GitHub-hosted projects, still produces viewable GitHub contributions. That requirements enforces open source work, it doesn't enforce free work. Like other professions where people are hired based on portfolios, having a portfolio requirement doesn't mandate free work, just work that is not restricted by the client in a way which prevents it's use in your portfolio.
Of course, if your paid work doesn't fit that model, you may need to do free work to build a portfolio.
If my hobby is to bake cakes, there isn’t typically some corporation making money off my cakes.
That's still a perfectly valid hobby.
P.S. You give away your designs because everyone else does and you get this big collection of free cake designs to bake. That's worth more to you in your cake baking hobby than selling your designs and making it a business. Invariably someone comes along and sees all this huge body of cake designs and says "This collection is worth money, you should be rich" and completely misunderstands the whole situation.
> That's still a perfectly valid hobby.
Of course. There are many hobbies which can financially support you, but there are lots of hobbies that don’t. Most hobbyist sports for example wouldn’t make anybody any money, but that’s fine, you do it for yourself. But the point I was making in my previous comment is that corporations aren’t making profits off the back of your hobby either.
If you build some software, you can share that an infinite number of times.
That chair has value. Maybe you can sell it, but maybe you just wanted to make a really nice chair.
That software has value. Maybe you can sell it, but maybe you just wanted to make a really nice piece of software. But just because the software is infinitely copy-able doesn't make it worth infinite dollars.
That last point is really the only important one and it makes no difference, to me, as the developer. I just want to make cool software. It just so happens that software is infinitely copy-able and chairs are not. The production side is the same.
I’m just pointing out that in open-source-as-a-hobby its very common that large corporations, who may or may not give back to the community themselves, derive profits off of hobbyist work while this is less common with other hobbies. Even if it doesn’t financially hurt the hobbyist, it can be demoralising (although others love it, so to each their own, I suppose — that’s why we have different licenses)
Companies may use open source software but they don't directly or indirectly profit from it; they can only profit from the value they provide on top of it. Software that is free for everyone cannot be a distinguishing feature.
Contributing to open source software, even if used by for-profit entities, is increasing the total state-of-the-art for the entire industry. If you are demoralized by that then you probably want a job, not a hobby.
The other case is a project desperately needed by the community and every corporation is making their own internal version of that code. No one really wants to commit the next 10 years of their life to it but someone eventually does sensing the need. The author gets many stars and forks but almost no money. Corporations then want to twist the library to their own specific needs while an individual or small team build a necessary tool but there's no business model. Then either a corporation adopts the repo to keep it going or the author tries to turn it into a business. Both of these outcomes rarely succeed for the wider needed but no one's really willing to pay for it.
These are super broad generalizations. The big problem seems to be when some software is really needed, someone steps in to build it and then no one pays them. Need != business model.
What you're saying is that someone who might enjoy gardening as a hobby should be able to make a living mowing other people's lawns for free. Which is, of course, as ridiculous as expecting to make a living on free software contributions.
We already have a perfectly good system for exchanging goods and services for money. Free software is not that system and that is fine. The issue comes from misunderstanding what that system is and how it compares to basic capitalism.
I agree with your general thrust but on a tangent, this isn't true and isn't the right way to think about software contributions, even 'trivial' ones.
A trivial change seems low value to you because you wouldn't have to spend much time at all doing the same thing yourself.
To see its market value, you have to view it from the perspective of the average person - how long would it take them to make that change? Answer: a very, very long time. They'd have to learn the fundamentals of programming first.
The value of something isn't how long it takes to do it in isolation. It also factors in how long it took to get to the position where you could do it at all.
For example, how much would I personally for a fix to a graphical glitch fixed in the Dolphin emulator? Think how hard that is to quantify! Is it worth $20? It it worth $0.00001 over thousands of users? Is it not worth anything because nobody even noticed it?
If there was a dollar amount attached to it, would it ever get fixed at all? Maybe it's value is too low to bother now that we've quantified it that way; new features are worth so much more.
Even if you sell something for what's it worth to the end user, it might not be worth doing. Most of my open source projects fall in that category: It's worth maybe $20 to an end user, and there might be handful of users, and that's definitely less than my hours are worth to make it. But that's why it's not a business.
Sure, but that article mentions business (you do too in your comment) that expect something from the OSS project. The alternative for that business is certainly much more expensive than paying for that fix, thus it does seems to be worth that much to them.
That tiny fix could take minutes to a person that knows the code base, and weeks to one that doesn't. Its financial impact could be in millions.
When really the open source software is about making it easier to work with across jobs so that everyone doesn't need to tediously reinvent the wheel ad nausuem or jump through hoops.
The downside I see is that leads to a lot of “just good enough” solutions out there. There are things like the Spring “framework” that kind of sort of almost do something useful but add conceptual overhead and leaning time and subtract troubleshoot-ability in exchange for not much, but enough that the people in charge push you to use it since it’s free anyway. On the one hand, if not for open source, Unix, vi, grep, awk, sed, lex, yacc and bash would all be long dead and buried now - there was a time before I came across Linux that I was starting to try to implement all of these myself in DOS because they were so useful and there was no available equivalent. On the other hand, if not for open source, I wonder if we ever would have gotten PHP or Java or a lot of the monstrosities that hang off of them like Zend and Hibernate.
And yet, one party is making all the profit, and a different party is putting in all of the work. That seems like a non-ideal situation?
The whole idea that anything can be so "shared" as to have no value in itself is
not a problem if the rest of the world ensures that nobody _is_ starving or
needing money. For young people who have parents who pay for them or student
grants or loans and basically have yet to figure out that it costs a hell of a
lot of money to live in a highly advanced society, this is not such a bad idea.
Grow up, graduate, marry, start a family, buy a house, have an accident, get
seriously ill for a while, or a number of other very expensive things people
actually do all the time, and the value of your work starts to get very real and
concrete to you, at which point giving away things to be "nice" to some
"community" which turns out not to be "nice" _enough_ in return that you will
actually stay alive, is no longer an option.
It strikes me that the open source bounty model never really took off, and neither did the open source crowd funding model.
It's hard to convince users to contribute funding when many of them were drawn to your software _because_ it is free as in beer. Free2Play video games have struggled with this for years, and look at the state of monetization in that market: predatory gambling mechanics, digital storefronts tuned to maximize anxiety in purchasers, and so many hats.
Perhaps the future of open source funding is in selling personalization customizations, somehow.
But nevertheless, contrary to some open source developers, doctors are not giving their labour force for free nor living below the poverty line. The value of a doctor is very clear to our society and in Europe we happily pay our taxes to keep the universal healthcare system running. The value of software on the other hand is decreasing.
There are countless developers making successful careers out of it, just like medical doctors. In addition, there are many more successes on a spectrum that includes the programming equivalent of GPs, nurses, paramedics, pharmacists, drug store clerks, pot farmers, herbalists, dietitians, mothers dispensing band-aids and kisses, and aged boy scouts who happen to be in just the right place at the right time to save someone's life with first-aid.
There are countless activities in life that may or may not have viable business plans behind them. What sets programming apart from doctors and other service-based industries is that our work product is trivially replicated and shared by others. Look to literature, music, theater, and cinema for metaphors about the roles and compensation of content producers in culture and society.
There's your problem. Don't shackle yourself to a system you already know doesn't care about you, then get upset when it's abusive.
- "Grown up" is a children's game (which somehow doesn't involve taking responsibility for them world), - you don't need college to learn or hone a skill, - you can love a person and not marry them, - you can't simultaneously dislike the world and justify bringing children into it, - and if you can't afford your house you can always sell it and live in a van.
Open Source Software is one of the few decent things people still do, even if the world they're doing it for is not.
I saw a conversation on twitter the other day about how great XML is and why we should use it more and realized that even if I posted Erik's classic take on this, it would only mean reactionary outbursts. I wonder how many people would even understand his arguments about SGML today?
> The whole idea that anything can be so "shared" as to have no value in itself is not a problem if the rest of the world ensures that nobody _is_ starving or needing money. For young people who have parents who pay for them or student grants or loans and basically have yet to figure out that it costs a hell of a lot of money to live in a highly advanced society, this is not such a bad idea. Grow up, graduate, marry, start a family, buy a house, have an accident, get seriously ill for a while, or a number of other very expensive things people actually do all the time, and the value of your work starts to get very real and concrete to you, at which point giving away things to be "nice" to some "community" which turns out not to be "nice" _enough_ in return that you will actually stay alive, is no longer an option.
And the catastrophic Specter and Meltdown bugs show that private code doesn’t prevent this sort of thing either...
Caller ID uses a protocol used by dial up modems, which means the telecoms hardware supporting it, is in effect, a dialup modem which makes life easier for security services to remotely access systems once they have updated the firmware on telecoms hardware, for a persistent backdoor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callback_(telecommunications)#...
The whole point is that tons of companies relied on OpenSSL but none of them were stepping up to the plate and funding its maintenance to the point of there being multiple maintainers, so it all fell on that one maintainer's shoulders.
Of course after the shit hit the fan those companies had a change of heart and... forked it. Learning the wrong lessons as usual
I recall reading a couple articles in the past about how NTP was (is?) maintained by one full-time developer who barely broke even on doing it, despite the fact that massive chunks of internet infrastructure rely on it. There's money and personnel out there who could be contributing to infra like OpenSSL and NTP and very often it seems like nobody cares enough to fund it.
A bad thing about moderators is that nowadays they tend to be immature teens, it's one of the reasons Reddit content quality has been going down in the past few years.
It also creates some moral questions, as companies with giant revenues are outsourcing their internet janitor duties to naive unpaid child labourers
A great point. Succinctly, the moderators need moderators.
it's an interesting phenomenon and am curious as to whether its better this way, or actually making things worse.
1) Moderators create alternate accounts and gobble up offshoots. They'll either have multiple mod accounts so they can "step down" and pass power to themselves when opinion rallies against them or they straight up seed themselves throughout reddit as moderators to dozens of communities
2) How do you spread the word when moderators have final word on what's posted in the "main" subreddit? Say there's an uprising in some obscure fandom and fans want a new place to correlate outside of the moderator's rule; how do they spread the word to the community efficiently that they exist when there's only one main hub for that fandom currently and the moderators silence anything (often with the AutoMod) that reference the new community?
---
I think public moderation in general is good. But the tools for the community to branch out are often lacking and when moderator power-tripping crosses a line there's no outlet for members to reach Admins who will objectively weigh the facts and act on complaints.
I got banned on a platform for saying a public figure was physically attractive to me. Prior to that, I had engaged in a perfectly factual discussion about certain statistics that were in favor of a particular political position. There is no doubt in my mind that I was flagged for having a political position (to clarify: I didn't actually have the position, I was just posting statistics that supported that position).
I like HN's approach to moderation. You don't ban the person unless they are really unreasonable. You flag the comment, disappear it from the thread and tell them to behave. I also like Gab's approach which is: if it's not illegal and you don't like it, then just block them from your feed.
The wholesale banning of people for single statements that are generally taken out of context is emblematic of cancel culture and it isn't surprising to me that "hacker news" is more nuanced and understands that people are not one statement or one act.
It’s also an emblem for “people doing things other people don’t like and getting ditched for it” but which emblem you choose to see is up to you.
That’s kind of the power and the weakness of emblems.
That line is not the line between "good" and "bad", necessarily. I'm just saying it's a relevant difference that shouldn't be blurred away.
That does happen, but HN also silently rate-limits and downrates comments for people that have been flagged as troublemakers by the mods.
I'm currently rate-limited on HN to no more than five comments in a period of, I think, several hours. Trying to post more often produces a cryptic error message that I honestly thought was a bug. I eventually messaged the mods and was told that I must have done something disruptive (they couldn't tell me what) and they'd restore my privileges if I'd promise to stop doing that (which I can't do in good conscience without knowing what "it" was). I received no warning before this began.
They said the obfuscation was necessary because, if I were a troll or a spammer, I'd just create a new account or three if I realized I was being restricted.
I don't claim to be a perfect commenter. I know I've let emotion get the better of me on occasion, and it's fair to want to rein that in. But I think it's clear from my history that I'm posting in good faith, at the very least. Treating me like a malicious abuser benefits no one.
I guess gab is the way to go. Block others from your view if you disagree, not from the platform.
(The error I get is "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.", if that sounds familiar.)
Have you ever worked with a PR firm or talked to folks that work at one. Have you ever worked at a large company, or talked to people who manage social media at one? They are very far from this level of coordination. Most can't even manage to deploy a properly measured ad campaign, much less some kind of op sec driven Reddit content campaign.
There are plenty of companies doing things like SEO and suchlike that build up networks of websites/content farms, and bots to comment on blogs and suchlike. Not much of a jump from bots commenting links on blogs to bots commenting more subtle messages on Reddit.
There are also plenty of companies that are "doing things like SEO" but none of them run networks of interconnected websites that they all control or content farms because those tactics stopped fooling Google over a decade ago.
Today, a lot of FOSS is corporate sponsored. But it's not end-product. It's all middleware. Hophop/Hack, Lightbend libraries like Slick, React, etc. It's all to help you build things to interact with the big commercial players.
Yes there is still a lot of FOSS that's small, 1 ~ 5 people maintainers that's volunteer. But there is a considerable about that's corporate backed. We're a far cry from the FOSS hope of the 90s. I wrote about this a few years back:
https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source...
> So, it kind of makes sense that FOSS found a niche somewhere that UI/UX didn't matter.
I wonder if there can be a push for UI/UX designers to contribute to open source Projects, I'm sure there's people out there who want to contribute...
Today it's something you do to show Microsoft they need you, because today Bill Gates is the world's nicest old man, big companies are safer than the state, and nobody needs any individual person anymore.
It's happened with many other things. For example, early in the last century, journalism was something you did because you didn't want the powers that be to be the only ones heard, and today, well. In the 70s, popular culture was something you engaged with because you didn't want money to be the end-all of your life, and today, well.
It doesn't make open source (or writing or talking about music you like) a bad thing. It's just eventually adults who have money adopt things you like and adulthood and money change people. And when that happens it's not necessarily a loss. Counterculture becomes mainstream after it's _won_. In a lot of ways Linux won, and it _is_ on most people's daily computers today, even though that computer doesn't have a keyboard.
I wish I knew a kid today like I was then, though. A kid that doesn't want mainstream stuff, a kid who thinks we've all got it wrong, a kid who could tell me I don't get it. Because I'm sure I don't "get it" the way adults didn't get it in the 90s: I just don't know what "it" is anymore.
It = feminism and men’s rights. I don’t know where is the crux of it, but nothing adds up about it: Feminist studies are all disproved one by one (remember wage gap?) and storytelling keeps making people believe women are unequal, which _isn’t true_ by far.
It’s Brexit. It’s Trump. Again, storytelling makes people believe they’re bad although careful study shows... least I say, the opposite. Storytelling.
It’s the state. People, especially in Europe believe in the state like they believed in God in 1100: The state is the source of all goods, it represents the people’s general will, and no matter how you show them this isn’t the case, they believe in it so much that we’ll need a Galileo Galilei to shake them off their beliefs. We’ll have to disprove this belief in the state like we had to disprove the belief in God in 1630.
If there’s something you underestimate, it’s the culture shift represented by Youtube, in which youngsters devote themselves. Youtube is a great way to present an idea and link to sources. Show a document on screen and link to sources. Everyone can present a trial of a false idea on Youtube and disprove it. That’s what’s happening for feminism. For Brexit. For Trump. For Kavanaugh. For the Iraki war. For Bachar el Assad. You don’t get Youtube ;) Those answers lie in all the deleted channels of Youtube (ex: “Soph”’s deleted channel, available on Bitchute). You say people engaged in journalism in 1900 because they didn’t want the powers that be to be the only ones heard. Now you have a full generation of Gen Z kids, 13 years old, already able to denounce the storytelling that doesn’t add up, built by mainstream media, movies, school, newspapers. It is sweeping. You _don’t_ get it :D
I’m kidding of course, because chances are you do understand where they’re coming from. But chances are you’ve built mental barriers to prevent from acknowledging their points too, like “muh fake news I only trust CNN”, but so did conservatives in 1969 couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that the Generation X could use a bit more social freedom than their parents. Older people never understand the big changes, because they had reasons to believe they were incorrect.
Just as Google maintains their search engine for "free" to show you ads, they maintain Kubernetes so that you use it on their cloud platform. You fix bugs in Kubernetes so you can have the fix you need, at work, when you need it.
It’s often as vital to them as the publicly-provided infrastructure used by their employees to get to work, but because they never see the costs, they assume there isn’t any.
In an ideal world business-critical FOSS projects would be funded by the government the same way that other public infrastructure is.
Until that happens I think lone developers of those popular projects should start to adopt licenses that allow them to charge businesses. It’s the only way to avoid creating martyrs of them.
It might also be because, even when they have to, they refuse to. As in this case described in the article, for example:
"Last year, a company overseas contacted him in a panic after they paused a firmware upgrade rollout to several million devices due to a cURL problem.
"When Stenberg asked the company that needed him to fly to a different country to troubleshoot their problem to pay for [a support contract], they refused."
I wouldn't be surprised if this effect is even stronger for commercial software, because of the sunk cost effect.
Perfect platform in what sense? A perfect platform for burnout when the project becomes too popular?
Exactly this. Take the cURL program, as mentioned in the article. The license [1] states:
>Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
So, if an organization is free to use something, then you get upset that you don't get paid for it, why not just adopt a different license? Build a model where they have to pay for it?
I use the AGPLv3 for most of my software and it's a feature that large corporations horrified of contributing back fear it. I'm not exploited, because I use a license that doesn't allow me to be exploited.
No one using a permissive license, which are pushed primarily by corporations that slander the GPL I think, has any right to complain about being exploited, in my opinion. Copyleft is good and copyleft software still gets paid support and other things; as many companies have found, it's also a good means to release Free Software that people will still pay for, in the form of license exceptions, even.
All the same that's no excuse to abuse people who are acting far from rationally.
You forgot what is perhaps the most important one: using the resulting software. For instance, when Linus wrote git, it was because he wanted a source control system with certain characteristics for himself to use.
From the rsync man page:
EXAMPLES
Here are some examples of how I use rsync.
To backup my wife's home directory, which consists of large MS Word files and mail folders, I use a cron job that runs
rsync -Cavz . arvidsjaur:backup
each night over a PPP connection to a duplicate directory on my machine "arvidsjaur".
A rational actor with emotions can work for free is that work makes him/her feel well. Some people even call this a hobby.
Rationality is more about how goals are obtained than what those goals are. The latter can still play a part (e.g., are the goals coherent? that's a proper question for rationality), but it's lesser.
If a rational actor might do anything for any reason, then it's of limited use. I think that by changing the utility function to include personal feelings, you are putting the cart before the horse.
And a few others should have put me on their marketing payroll.
That said, it would be nice if corporations would give their teams donation money for the smaller projects that they rely on. With easy options like OpenCollective and GitHub having a donation option, it would be good time to start.
The advancement of automation should lead to a post-historical quasi-utopia, and our biggest problem will be sorting out our personal baggage. (Like Star Trek but without FTL and teleporters.)
From my POV, charging money for copies of software is regressive and foolish.
Curious if you have any literature expounding on this idea; it's hard for me to wrap my head around.
Is the idea to use software as a tool to provide the product, not as the product itself?
Meanwhile, I'll try to explain where I'm coming from.
Briefly, it makes sense to me to get paid to write software to solve some new problem; but once it has been written, I feel it would be venal (at this time in history) to refuse other people the use of it unless they give me a set amount of money. It costs me nothing and adds value to their lives, presumably, so why wouldn't I let them copy and use it for free?
(It also makes sense to me to pay for support if I need it, and not to use software I can't repair myself if support is unavailable.)
In more detail, I see automation as having its highest goal in the transformation of civilization to a better mode. Technology doesn't solve the human condition, but it does alter the set of daily problems with which we must cope.
Bucky calculated that we would be able to work for two years and then retire having paid for our living expenses for the rest of our lives in those two years, and this by sometime in the 1970's. The catch is that we have to align our technology with our needs efficiently.
He said:
> Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before - that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime.
In this scenario your problem is what to do with your free time, not how to get paid for writing/maintaining software, eh?
Restrictions on copying bit-patterns create an artificial scarcity and delay the arrival of this techno-secular Golden Age. That's why I call it regressive.
It is foolish to predicate your business-model on prevention of copying of data (software or media) because then you set up an open-ended source of additional overhead (cost of DRM) and bullshit (DRM).
Well, that depends on the license.
Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER>The only time it makes sense to release something to the public is as a complement to one of their paid services.
It may be argued that they don't contribute enough, or that they aren't contributing to what you think they should be, but they certainly do contribute.
The most famous example is Moloch DAO which funds things ranging from entire software teams building Ethereum clients to individual positions like a test plan runner for coordination across multiple organizations. These are the types of things that are traditionally hard or impossible to get funding for as the smallest unit of funding typically falls to VCs who fund an entire company for many years.
Anyone can submit a funding proposal which is akin to a business plan that doesn't aim to make money and it is voted on by members of the DAO. A lot of interesting ideas are debated and refined with the best ideas making it to the front and being funded by democratic vote.
We are still within the first few years of the existence of DAOS and there are already a dozen DAOs focused on funding various aspects of tech and design with likely many more coming in the future. Open source has always had a hard time competing with corporations but with DAOs like Moloch and others the future is starting to look bright.
I am an academic. Simplistically stated, students come to study with folks who have an academic reputation (yes, I know it is much more complicated than that). A person could imagine that one place to get an academic reputation is through the development of great Free software, or other Free works such as texts.
The shirt on your back cost only $10 because it was made by a kid in Bangladesh for pennies. The tunnel under the city cost millions more than planned, and somebody will have to eat that cost. Your theatre program has a page of 6-digit donors because ticket prices don’t cover half the cost of producing a show.
Nobody likes to admit the true cost of anything.
I guess this makes software, on average, much more costly...
But there are some of us who believe in Open Source[1] and giving value to the world, including companies. So please stop bullying us into being a victim culture, we're not.
Besides, scientific research over the decades has shown that Open Source produces valuable work specifically because it is unpaid creative work, and when pay is introduced, quality drops.
Here's a good summary video of the studies: https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc
[1] Disclosure: I work on Open Source full time now because 8M people use my tech ( https://github.com/amark/gun ), but I do not charge for it and previously had to do it in my spare time (it is only its success that has lead to me being able to work on it full time - not the other way around).
I then moved out of state to somewhere insanely cheap, so I could survive & build for years more. Now we're finally doing well enough that I've moved to SF to hopefully make enough connections for the next stage!
Do you have any OSS projects yourself? :)
The irony is, in not paying directly for suppirt they are paying indirectly with risk. Risk to product. Risk to brand. And perhaps in sone cases risk to life.
It seems to me a new licence is in order. One that distinguishs from small fries and big fish. And big fish that refuse to be good citizens of a given (product) community should be outed and shamed for their lack of cooperation.
Extreme? Sure. But sometimes fairness and justice require such guidance.
I myself am an open source contributor working for free and I do it to the best of my abilities even though its "free".
[0] Predictably Irrational - Chapter on The cost of Social Norms.
No one has to do FOSS! It's a give and take, you take, so there's no harm in wanting to contribute back. It's about freedom, passion, getting your work out there for the benefit of humanity. Can you be sponsored / paid? Sure! Are you obligated to work for anyone or do what they want? No!
It's is just impossible for big companies to pay every FOSS developer everywhere. When I install create-react-app, it downloads thousands upon thousands of libraries, from thousands of developers. Do each of them get a fraction of a cent from the profits of my company? No.
Does a developer at a job cloning a repo mean they have a moral obligation to pay the developer? No.
Right now, the top companies do primarily mobile / web development, and use code probably written by thousands if not millions of developers. Splitting payment to all of them is impossible.
The big projects like Blender, Krita, GNU projects... are all sponsored, and receive donations. The devs work on them for the passion, recognition, and "fun".
FOSS has always been a give and take. If money is a driving force for you, getting a traditional developer job (as they're very in demand) is the best choice for that goal.
I'm not going to hide any software I write from big companies. They can take if they so desire so long as they adhere by the licence. The magic of software is that this community has realized the incredible value humanity can realize by open collaboration, value we realize personally. So I don't really care that the Internet relies on people working for free. It's like the government kinda relies on my reporting a pothole to fix it. But I get a fixed pothole out of it, so we gucci. It doesn't matter if someone gets more value out of it if I get sufficient value out of it. I'm all for chasing Pareto improvements to my life.
When I really really want something I take a risk to get it with money, like when I had to go fund a tiny piece of `neovim` in the beginning or when I fund a Kickstarter thing.
Every free software project you can think of was already created by a company as a proprietary product, but was not released as free software/open source. We had to write them on our own time for no money, because companies have never wanted to pay to publish them [and also relinquish control of them].
I still work on projects all the time that would be fantastic to open source, but the company doesn't want to spend the time or money to put it through lawyers, clean up the code, release it, and maintain it for the community. (they are invariably unwilling to release control of their own project to the community at large)
Occasionally a technology group will get buy-in from an SVP that this is a competitive advantage, and a project actually becomes open source, but there's still tons of red tape, and it's still owned by the company. You have to fork it to be able to do anything of your own with it, and then nobody will use your fork.
The linux literally exists because lots of people believe in something greater than "I need to be paid per line of code".
If you want to reduce it to a simple transactional level like that then year...they are not getting paid.
Even the article's example mentions a FOSS writer that got hired (and thus paid) literally because he is a famous FOSS writer...yet somehow he's not getting paid?
Yes FOSS crew deserves more credit and perhaps money but the logic is all over the place there.
There is one significant barrier stopping me from doing that on my own (meager) projects, and it's that a scheme like that would require contributors to sign a CLA, a whole kettle of fish I'm not really prepared to deal with on my own.
Yes, right now, there are places where work isn't getting funded, but if that lack of funding ever actually causes critical work to go undone and then get noticed, the money comes out. OpenSSL and Heartbleed showed us that.
People have noticed that the ways that this money gets disbursed tends to concentrate power away from the community and towards commercial interests (which is where I think a lot of the systemd hate really comes from, the fact that Red Hat is making those decisions and not the community), but the money seems to be there for infrastructure projects in the long run.
Like most things, the top couple of percent are being used to project an upside that does not apply to everyone else.
Can you give an example of a very popular project whose maintainer is not employed in a related field?
Not exactly fitting your question, but an interesting point.
I'm personally in an interesting spot, as part of why I got my current job is that I have demonstrated proficiency with various sets of tools through writing open-source software (even there it's not my open source work itself, just my understanding of the stuff I'm writing it against). But I'm also aware that I'm very much the exception on that one.
> My assertion is that having those open source software projects is not materially impacting the careers most writers of open source software because of that software's existence
If you define 'open source project' as something that exists on GitHub, then the vast majority of open-source software is completely useless and unhelpful to a resume. On the other hand, if you have a popular piece of software, a community around it, and a demonstrated ability to manage tickets, contributors, etc, then you are going to have great chances of working in an environment where that skill is used.
It just seems disingenuous to me to give out your work for free, with little to no strings attached, and then expect companies to either give back or pay you money.
This isn't really what the open source movement is all about. I've contributed to and release many libraries as open source. There are many companies using it, for free, and not giving me anything in return. I really don't care, because I just wanted to release something that anybody could use.
I feel like the movement is starting to turn from giving code away for free to all..to giving code away to only be used in the way I see fit.
The important question here is "why was this software written in the first place?" If you think that the purpose of software is to make money through licensing fees, open source doesn't make any sense at all. However, if you take a contrary view that the primary purpose of software is to solve problems (with revenue generation as an optional secondary goal), then it does make sense that a developer could get paid quite well to create something they give away for free.
Follow with me. People need to eat in order to stay alive; therefore people will often spend a part of their precious time working on acquiring food.
So, there's no such a thing as "people working for free". What is effectively happening is that the costs are being outsourced, either to who's working or to someone else who buys the worker his lunch.
(*No judgements necessarily implied here, merely an observation.)
One example is google translate, which encourages you to correct the suggested translation.
(Just kidding. We take this kind of thing for granted. In reality it should keep us up at night!)
There's a very interesting book called "Hollywood Secrets of Project Management Success"†. Actually, IMO only about half of it is interesting, the parts about how Hollywood makes movies is fascinating, the rest of the book seems to me to be a mildly enterprisey pitch for Agile Methods, (of which YMMV.)
THe fascinating thing about Hollywood is that it's old (over a century) and they have developed a system that works: it's rare for a film to go over-budget or over-schedule.
I can't do a proper summary here, but the fundamental gist is that they have detailed plans, that experience says are realistic, and they track those plans closely and deal with divergence systematically.
†https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hollywood-secrets-of/97...
Anyway, one of the tools they use, if transposed to the IT industry, would be something like an Inventory of Dependencies. It would list every piece of software that your system depends on along with costs, risk assessments, and alternate dependencies for each. I don't have the book with me or I'd give more details.
My point is, we should do this and usually don't. It's kind of on the company management if you're using, e.g. cURL, and your stack blows up and only then do you discover there's not a great "support story" there, eh?
Taking infrastructure for granted is not how you get reliability. FWIW.
- - - -
BTW, readline and bash are maintained by one volunteer.
> GNU Readline is today maintained by Chet Ramey, a Senior Technology Architect at Case Western Reserve University. Ramey also maintains the Bash shell. Both projects were first authored by a Free Software Foundation employee named Brian Fox beginning in 1988. But Ramey has been the sole maintainer since around 1994.
> Ramey has now worked on Bash and Readline for well over a decade. He has never once been compensated for his work—he is and has always been a volunteer.
> I asked Ramey what it was like being the sole maintainer of software that so many people use. He said that millions of people probably use Bash without realizing it (because every Apple device runs Bash), which makes him worry about how much disruption a breaking change might cause. But he’s slowly gotten used to the idea of all those people out there. He said that he continues to work on Bash and Readline because at this point he is deeply invested and because he simply likes to make useful software available to the world.
https://twobithistory.org/2019/08/22/readline.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20772053
There is a thing about open source and I would submit, many uses of the Internet, that ESR (and others) talked about early on, and that's use value.
Because the entire work product is available to anyone, the use value is high. There is a skill / understanding investment to make, and while that is expected, it can get ignored, or overemphasized in these discussions.
Once someone has made the skill investment, they need only entertain incremental change type investments.
Overall, great return on investment. Anyone learning *nix systems can get a ton of work done, and or have set themselves up to explore and benefit from a large number of technologies.
The point ESR made is simple:
Nobody is really working for free. They are getting the use value, and it's non-trivial. In the case of some important developers, use value is not enough. Can't eat it, or live in it. Fair enough.
In this way, OSS is a whole that really is greater than it's parts, and high use value is why.
Contributions, and their cost, are multiplied across users and that is often enough to warrant making said contributions. Anyone doing that can improve their use value, and anyone may see the benefit of other contributions.
None of that has really changed, but for large corporations deriving significant financial returns, all of which further demonstrate the huge use value in play.
I submit this high degree of use also comes with more demands for contributions than an average user / developer too. Funding this should be a no brainer given the extremely low costs needed to see awesome use value and potential to profit.
Seriously, the larger players are making plenty. It's my opinion more financial contributions can and should be made, and made in a way that leaves plenty of agency for those who receive them too.
Without that, it could be a sort of tragedy of the commons scenario. OSS is awesome, but could be a lot less awesome if this is not improved.
Surely an ecosystem like this can be maintained from the billions that it has helped others earn. We say greed is good. Well, so is a degree of fairness, and some respect for that which has delivered so much too.
If not, the question, "why should I bother?" is totally fair, and will present itself more and more over time.
And this:
>It’s still not clear that companies would be interested in such a contract. When Stenberg asked the company that needed him to fly to a different country to troubleshoot their problem to pay for one, they refused.
They totally got their use value. If they can't be bothered to help with the code, paying for said help is totally reasonable.
What drives that?
Perhaps some important people can start posing the question:
Either help with code, or dollars, which is it because everyone needs to help?
Who cares what he says.
ummm, the gist of it is, someone else have to write for free, else every time you curl you would be paying $$ to oracle or someone :|
The article's point is that the reason curl is so widely used by almost everything is because it's free and has a open source license. If it requires some small amount of money per commercial install, or even if it had some license terms that weren't appealing to legal teams at these companies, it would likely not have the widespread adoption is currently has. If every piece of curl-like software in the space were pay-per-install, these companies probably would go and use one of them, but if just one of the offerings is free for all use it's going to top the paid offerings most of the time.
There is a tremendous amount of free software that runs the worlds infrastructure.
Programming languages, compilers, libraries, frameworks, text editors, databases, operating systems, utilities, servers, encryption, and even curl all lower the price of entry for everyone to contribute and innovate, even when they’re using free tools for commercial purposes.