Would anyone donate to a service that maps your dependency tree and breaks up your donation to support the projects in your entire tree (not only surface level) proportional to their usage or something like that?
On the other hand, in market capitalism, economy of scale is a powerful force for conglomeration that sometimes results in an anti-competitive reduction in consumer choice.
Serious question. If you are devoting your working life (that is, time that would otherwise be dedicated to remunerative work) to OSS without compensation, then by definition you probably don't need the money, right? Perhaps because you are already wealthy, or have a family that will support you. There's nothing wrong with this of course, many of us would contribute to OSS for free if we didn't have mortgages and families to pay for. It's basically like doing volunteer work after retirement.
Put another way, are there many people devoting their entire working lives to OSS with no other compensation or resources, essentially going bankrupt to write OSS? I'd imagine very few people are in that category, or if they are, can't sustain it for very long.
I guess because I was not living hand-to-mouth, I didn't "need" the money? But I wound up nearly going into debt, because it took another year to get a job after that--turns out that maintaining an open-source project is not an asset for employers but a liability. I had an offer from a HugeCo for decent money, but I turned it down because it would basically have precluded me from working further on this project which is only now starting to walk on its own.
It's not my entire working life, by any stretch, but those 2 years were 5% of it, and I figure that cost me $200k+ in "lost" wages. And that does not count all the "free" time I've spent since, fixing bugs and helping people use it, because I love the thing and I want other people to love it too. I'm glad I created it, it's very useful to me and other people who do data exploration in the terminal, but now I have to accept that I probably won't ever recover any significant amount of that value, because...people don't pay for open-source software.
More that you made the conscious choice to work without pay for 2 years, and you and any dependents didn't starve or end up homeless in the process. That's something few people can do.
Besides that, it's in extremely poor taste to marginalize someone's sacrifice of two years just because you think they're privileged. It's usually better to make much of someone's contributions than to minimize them.
I didn't marginalize it. I said the ability to do it is rare. Those are very different things.
I think it would be great to live in a society where people can do what GP did without going into debt, but that will require bigger structural changes.
And then of course, manually approving each hours/month estimate above a certain amount i.e. 10 hours per month.
Not only is this a horrible metric of value, it’s ridiculously easy to game.
It’s pretty hard to measure objective value of software. I think the closest is letting the market set a price and that has lots of flaws.
One of the upsides of OSS is that it bypasses that whole aspect.
I think the best approach is to let projects choose their own license according to their goals. If they want to charge, let them. If they want to be free, let them.
- allowed the code to be visible and available as a general rule
- allowed an individual user to use it and modify it for non-commercial use
- disallowed redistributing modified versions (distributing patches would be fine)
- disallowed commercial use
Basically, a license that would allow free experimentation and grassroots adoption and all kinds of open-source goodness for individuals, while not giving FAANG profiteers a handout for RMS' ideological reasons.
Even simple stuff like note taking where it’s 95% personal, I still want to use at work.
I’d rather seek out an open source tool.
I’m not sure what the motivation is to prevent FAANG’s use. All of those companies contribute lots of open source.
Would you rather be back in the 90s where the giant tech companies kept everything proprietary and didn’t contribute anything back. Early 90s Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun sucked and I’d rather have FAANG contributing their open source stuff nowadays than make them pay for projects and stop contributing.
Example: Bram Moolenaar (ViM) asks users to :help uganda, not to pay him. And I speculate that he wouldn't be offended if you donated to help someone else in need instead.
Measuring usage in general I think will be tricky..