This is something Stallman[1] and others have talked about for a while now, with this article having been published in 2003[2].
He won the MacArthur award in 1990.
It doesn't matter if it's google, mozilla, microsoft or the fsf.
This isn't bad. But it is resonant with what Stallman talks about.
Their current market rate speaks for itself.
Regardless of the initiative (could have been rural broadband) by expanding into these areas Mozilla's parent company said..
We have enough money for operations. This extra money will go to this good cause.
As someone who might donate I would hold off because they have more than enough. I could use my money directly to support a cause.
Not sure how a charity starts giving to another charity (unless that is what they specialize in). That strikes me as greedy. If you have enough don't ask for more. There are local charities who could use the money.
Which is why I'm a huge fan of sortition as a way to run groups of people larger than a dozen.
You aren't using the Stallman Trick here. The fact some organisation or person seems good today is totally meaningless compared to what it is legally allowed to do, and what they have incentive to do.
It is a bit cynical, but assume people are going to do what the incentives push them to do and the world becomes a very simple and predictable place. The time to panic isn't when someone threatens you, it is when they have the means & incentive to threaten you. Run or fight then, not later on.
If the FSF gains power, it will abuse that power. Sooner or later. They will react to money just as much as the rest of us. Look at what happened to Mozilla.
Organizations are just groups of people. People have varied motivations, and their motivations don't have to change just because they join forces with others.
If what you're saying is correct, then either people's own varied motivations are all evil, or instantly become evil the moment they join a group (whatever that means).
The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying. It's the creation of new, useful information that needs to be incentivized; that's where UBI or some other hire more public works creators / maintainers would be good.
The hardware still matters too, and much of why _that_ is under attack are greedy actors who want to have a cartel of control and manipulation; so that they own all things and can have them work against end users.
Might not be able to pay out a quarter million a year like the FAAAM crew does, but we need a bunch of jobs paying half that to write and maintain open source. If it isn't competitive with the other options, it won't attract the best people.
I don't have a plan here. I found my niche but, like most of them, it isn't scalable. But we have to keep plotting if we want something sustainable.
1) you'd still budget 125k a man-year? Why? That's only needed for devs in SV, NYC, London and other places with mad rent, besides - all you're gonna get in these places are fresh university grads and hipsters, not seasoned people with actual experience that tells them to not use a two months old JS framework for something that is supposed to live long.
2) Why limit it to USA? Other countries have decent programmers too, with way lower cost of employment. 60k is going to fetch you quality in Germany, 30k in Eastern Europe.
Besides, the best way to finance all of this, other than pressuring government to procure only/preferred open source is some rich startup exiter putting a couple billion dollars into some sort of trust fund and pay the development from the interest.
The big question though is how to run the investment without it being wasted on people aren't helping the project at all.
Some notes (I'm planning on eventually writing a blog post on this subject):
- You probably need to pay people differently depending on whether they're the maintainer or a minor contributor - There needs to be a balance of power between users and the maintainer. A simple balance could be, the maintainer is dictator for life (or until they lay down the mantle) but compensation is based on number of users. - Maybe compensation is done on a per-feature basis, e.g., users put a bounty on a feature and the interest money doubles that bounty.
Naval: "Ironic that the most monetizeable code in the world is now open source (running on blockchains). OSS has the best business model."
That is thinking in the future, I'm sure of it
Instead of paying 10 people 100k annually, I'd rather pay 20 people 50k. That's enough to live a comfortable life in most places, including most places in US. Would it give you the people who are in tech only for the money? Probably not. Maybe you don't really want them in the first place, because even though they might be smart and work well, maybe they aren't the "best" people for the job, as they don't optimize by what's best for their users but by what's best for them.
But they can afford large families, and good marriages for their children. Monks they are not.
I think you underestimate what UBI would do, or you are only looking at very narrow direct effects. There probably wouldn’t be that many coders that would directly move to 100% coding while living off $1,500 a month UBI. But there would be lots of people already making decent money that would be able to rely on that extra $18k a year cushion to start their own business, or reduce their hours to work on a passion project. All the people that could go to school full time to learn skills useful to society because they didn’t have to also work full time. All the people that could afford to take a pay cut to take a more fulfilling job. All the people that could step back and take meaningful steps to get a higher skill job because they were not 2 paychecks away from homelessness. All the business that could push automation because they were no longer the only thing standing between thousands of minimum wage employees and poverty. Things like Wikipedia are just examples at the extreme end of the spectrum. UBI would free up an almost unimaginable amount of human potential to try new things and start the process of decoupling us from having to find some sort of drudgery for every single person in exchange for not starving.
The problem is that the individual is not being greedy enough for their own control. They are being greedy for many wrong things, not exclusively but many.
This problem is solved with education not control, which is what stallman had tried to do. People should understand what they should be greedy for i.e. protect at all costs
This might be stretching the definition of greed as it's commonly understood.
Edit: for clarity I not implying negative connotations to either side. I think corporations are doing exactly what they should do. But I also think people need to be more responsible for their choices and the consequences thereof.
Living by greed in the market economy is an exercise of exploiting a positive feedback loop. Larger entities benefit more from it, and the larger they are, they more they benefit.
The problem is that there are political entities that can be manipulated to give unfair advantage and or effective monopoly control by making that cost of entry so prohibitively high.
Education will ensure people will understand that political entities are no more inclined to have your best interest at heart than a corporation, there both made up people it would be moronic to think they'd act any differently.
Educational policy is not exclusively for the benefit of the recipient either intentionally when pandering to teacher unions or unintentionally when said policies set targets that drive the system in the wrong direction per Goodhart's law.
Wow, no, this is a fundamental misunderstanding right at the core of the issue.
The 'cost' is that of 'creating and developing'- and FYI it's not 'information' - in most cases it's 'creative works' not some kind of 'discovered knowledge'.
MS Windows is a 'Developed and supported Product' - not 'Information'.
In much the same way it only costs $2 to 'make' your pair of Nike shoes - it's definitely not the 'cost of parts and labour' (though that's obviously an input).
Making anything working, of material value is usually an excessive grind involving a lot of people. 'Software' is not 'the implementation of some algorithm' it's all of the ugly complexities around that and the sausage-making realities of getting things to work well and play nicely with other platforms. And then of course it requires ongoing support, maintenance, docs, training, security updates etc.. That's real work.
In then 1990's when we 'controlled' the software that went onto our Mac/PCs ... that we didn't have access to Windows or Adobe Photoshop source code wasn't really an excessive problem.
Especially the fact that there was a clean delineation between 'OS and Software' (other than for say MS Office Products) - then it 'mostly worked'.
IP protections are absolutely not going away, for good reason, the challenge is to make those work as the situation evolves, moreover, they are not the 'real problem' frankly, as excessive platform control (i.e. Apple, now Google) represent a more fundamental issue, and consider that happens while technically most of Android is open source anyhow.
Even Linux is open and popular, and to this day it's still a mostly 'dev/interest' OS that most people don't use in their homes, partly due to distribution power controls by MS/Apple, but also because frankly managing massive real world deployments of 'Moms, Dads and frankly most people' who 'just want it to work' is an operational challenge as much as it is an R&D/Creative effort.
Consider the basic economics involved: Even reasonably smart corporations with 'good IT' still don't generally deploy Linux to regular userbase. Why not? Because $50 a year to MS is very cheap, and frankly worth every penny in terms of value created. Any 'supported' Linux variation is going to cost 'something' anyhow, so what's the difference between '$20 a year' for some 'supported Linux variation' and '$50 a year' for MW Windows? Basically nothing. In a per capita basis, the true cost of a lot of software is marginal.
There are a number of free and commercial substitutes for Linux that could be used at that embedded level and of course, they are perfectly encapsulated and monolithic: your 'fridge' is not a platform wherein there needs to be some degree of OS-level integration with other bits of software. From a systems perspective 'it doesn't matter' what OS is running on your refrigerator.
But it's moot: there is no inherent morality in 'free software'. Software is just another good, with different means to distribute, one of which is FOSS, which is really great, but it's only one piece of the puzzle.
> Wow, no, this is a fundamental misunderstanding right at the core of the issue.
It is, because it is also a misstatement. The actual rule is "unit price will trend toward the marginal cost of an additional copy", but that elides a couple of caveats; first, this only holds true under conditions of a "perfectly competitive market"[0]; second, over a sufficiently long term ALL costs eventually become marginal costs[1].
[0] Suffice it to say that most businesses try to leverage or introduce imperfections in the market (aka "sustainable competitive advantage").
[1] Instead of thinking about the "sunk cost" of building a factory, consider the (eventual) marginal cost of building the next one.
Good software requires incredibly investment, even if the 'unit cost' is nothing.
Books aren't sold for $25 because of the cost of paper.
I think we are wired to think in such material terms, which is why maybe why we have an instinct towards the notion of 'free' software as being somehow special, when really it's not that much different than many other things.
True. But with open source that investment is of labor (sometimes it is volunteer labor, in part), and is usually incremental, there is often little in the way of large up front capital outlays.
Most of the exceptions would be a commercial company making a "Big Bang" initial release.
This is just to say that the concept of "marginal cost of producing another copy" needs some contextual adjustments.
For F/OSS, it might be better to think instead of "the marginal cost of making a new release", since at the point of making the release the marginal cost of all subsequent copies becomes zero.
It was not until much later, due leaving good environments for bad reasons, that external financial motivations became a driver, providing a temporary bad self justification for not leaving sooner. Even then, solving the puzzle, exceeding the clients expectation. We're still the most rewarding parts of the job.
If you love what you do, money just becomes an issue in just 2 cases.
(1) When your needs for living in comfort (and with that I mean the luxury of not having to worry about money) are not met.
(2) When you feel others are exploiting you financially (you see disproportionate gains by others based of your work)
Now. Against this background, let us return to the question of 'will software still get written if we allow the free distribution of it'?
My believe is yes. While it is most certainly not for everyone, a certain type of people just love to create digital platforms and solutions. In fact their passion is now more often than not exploited, see for example the practices in the major gaming industry. There are more than enough specific needs that people will want to prioritise to offer financial incentives for their prioterization even if that means the result will become part of the commons. Current exclusive IP exploitation rights very seldom reward the creators, most often just those who have constructed layers on layers of financial instruments confining and leeching of the creative.
Finally IP protection most certainly stifles innovation. It restricts forms of further creation. The question is Wether this reduction is compensated by a boon in extrinsic driven creation that would be missing in the absense of guaranteed monopolies on exploitation. My guess once again is no. Science, innovation in knowledge, has progressed for centuries through the free sharing of ideas. The Eastern electronics industry has thrived in a climate of fluid copying and absense of IP enforcement. Most of the 'major' industry investments carry disproportionate public investments through grants and incentives while still locking up all rights on the publicly funded results.
We might see a different software world if copying and extending of all software was free, but not one whete creators go hungry, or innovation ceased to exist.
Suppose we already have an open source project developing a snazwozzler, now somebody else develops a new kind of snazwozzler software with a better UI and more scalable architecture but missing some features the new developer doesn’t think are necessary. How do we tell whether to allocate resources to the old project or this new one? Customers can tell you this in a way that users can’t.
Not exactly. A feature gets developed if it brings in more money from customers, but not always because the customers are happy to pay.
Consider putting ads to the software.
Consider turning software to a subscription service.
Consider preventing other software from interoperating with yours without a license, or at all, and locking users down on your platform.
I agree that when a user votes with their money, it is a great incentive. But the way it currently works with commercial software is a bit far from a meritocratic ideal. Other mechanisms are possible (see sponsorship, Kickstarter, bounties), and I hope they will grow in popularity.
We're obsessed with celebrity trivia and judge the person rather than the message being delivered. I see that a lot in other areas these days as well.
This is a broken society in my mind.
I've known who Stallman is for a long time, but I had never heard about the toe cheese incident. I just looked it up. My reaction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_NXSa0_Uc
For anyone interested in the toe cheese incident:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ
I'm not trying to malign Stallman here, but you can't deny this is interesting.
It's interesting because it's unique. The only other person I can think of that would do something similar is Danny DeVito.
Or at least I think it's interesting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think it's actually quite impressive that he saw something incoming which only now (20 years later) is becoming feasable.
then again, a lot of people think I am also crazy, so there's that
For someone who was such a large philosophical influence on our industry he had some basic sociological lessons to learn, which in the past ten years have been a more dominant topic in the industry than software freedom. Both are important topics, and it's unfortunate that software freedom has taken a backseat recently.
Even though we have Linux, I would love to see more dominant GPL projects out there. It is an excellent license when used strategically and I think it's dismissed as too extreme too often.
Unfortunately, the startup/business world has largely taken over most forms of open source development, and they've put a lot of pressure to change the default license for new projects from (A/L)GPL to ASL. That change enables a lot more exploitation of software projects and open source software developers and it's almost embarrassing how often open source projects and commercial open source entities are surprised when it happens.
I wish we could live in a world where the default was to contribute with time and/or money to support each other, but we don't. If we did, I think we wouldn't even need share-alike licenses. But we don't, so we do.
How have they put pressure?
I've written some libraries personally and licensed them under the Apache or BSD license because I want it to be helpful for anyone who needs it. I'm really not concerned if they make money off it or not or if they contribute back.
If you're talking larger projects, a lot of the big, recent ones have come out of companies--projects like MongoDB, Cassandra, React, Kubernetes. Some like Hadoop were inspired by work at big companies.
As an advocate of the AGPL, and someone who releases software under it, I think Google's argument is pushing FUD.
It's not about getting contributions back, but ensuring that everyone who needs it can use it includes end users.
But we can. One Thing that is absolutely evident from the fantastically vibrant open source communities forming around every conceivable niche, it is exactly how much energy and enthusiasm to do just that is out there.
We “just“ need to scale it up.
Hmm, maybe we could 'exchange' our services and creative works for some kind of 'credit system, or currency' - not controlled by a 'central source' - but, you know, acting as 'free acting agents and groups of agents' - freely exchanging our products services for one another, setting our own prices and terms with one another.
Hmmm ... I wonder if there's a term for that kind of system ...
What we are talking about here is carving out a complementary arrangement scaling up _intrinsicly_ motivated production.
One interesting thing that happens when trying to use extrinsic rewards to encourage some behavior is that it tends to suppress any intrinsic motivation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory
Also for more on the intersection of open source development culture and economic systems I warmly recommend to checkout “The Wealth of Networks” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks
A market economy is not based on greed, it's based on the willingness of people to provide services for one another whereupon actor's first motivation may be individual wealth creation, but the side effects of trade, division of labour and especially competition create massive surpluses, usually for the buyers, i.e. consumers.
Most importantly, companies are only successful if they focus really hard on doing things that others (i.e. 'the market') believe is valuable.
Paradoxically - it is 'intrinsically motivated' behaviour that is 'greedy' or purely self-oriented. To think that someone - anyone - deserves some kind of high standard of material living because 'they want to do whatever they want all day' - irrespective of the net utility they create for the community ... is selfish.
'Intrinsically motivated work' already has a name, it's called 'art'. And in that I would lump the vast majority of OSS which was designed to meet the makers view of what is useful, not 'the market's view', which is why most of it is not used.
Nothing could be less healthy on the whole than letting Engineers build 'whatever they want' because most of it will be completely useless, and projects will generally not produce enough material input to be able to do anything at scale.
Another bit of paradox is that if there were more efficient means to fairly license and maintain software - 90% of OSS makers would happily do that. I don't believe they are ideologically tied to OSS - if they could tool away on their favorite bit of software and earn what they though was a 'fair living' by selling it - they would do it in a heartbeat.
Intrinsically motivated initiatives are important, and frankly, nobody would do Engineering if they didn't like it on some level, but it's only one ingredient, and not the primary driver.
And of course, most labour has zero possibility for intrinsic motivation: 40-80% of jobs would instantly be vacated if that were the only motivator as they're just too grinding, boring, difficult for someone to do mostly on that basis.
The market forces people to 'serve others' and that's ironically want people don't want to do ... because it's a grind. What people really 'want to do' is 'whatever they want' which probably won't bode well on the whole for having a broadly high standard of living.
I do think we have some problems in the current incarnation though. Way to much resources are spent on, frankly, destructive behavior. Which I think the word greed perhaps could be used to describe. But I think it’s anthropomorphizing things that are actually structural and institutional deficiencies, not necessarily moral failures of individuals.
I do not agree that intrinsically motivated work is just art though. The public sector can be described as being the kind of scaled up intrinsically motivated production I was thinking of. But thoughts of what is and should belong to the public sector vs the market differ wildly.
On a personal note I might add that I am actually primarily motivated intrinsically. A sufficient income is necessary, but not sufficient.
Now I’m not actually arguing for giving everyone a heap of money and just see what’s built. I do think it would be interesting to study the result though.
What I do argue is that there probably are some interesting, and worthwhile, ways to put more capital in the hands of more organizations that produce things of value for its own sake.
A stopped clock is still right twice a day.
I even feel the need to add that I don't share his skepticism, lest I raise suspicion about my own position by posting this.
One thing I just don't understand is how people can want to shut off their brains when seeing one thing unusual and not go "That seems really odd, maybe I'm just misunderstanding it, and need to investigate a bit more."
If you don't, you miss out on some of the most exquisitely unique samples of the human species. People with life experience so deep as to have limited exposure to some of the more mundane ones we all take for granted. I'd recommend offering a bit more benefit of a doubt, and a wee bit more effort in terms of investigating context before writing someone off.
After all, if they're going to be your enemy, you might as well know them for what they really are that you don't underestimate them.
Yes, I pointed out his backtracking on that.
> After all, if they're going to be your enemy, you might as well know them for what they really are that you don't underestimate them.
I don't think of Stallman as an enemy, just a very creepy guy who happened to make some important contributions. Regardless of his backpedaling, I would have extreme reservations about leaving him unsupervised around children. That doesn't mean his ideas were all bad, just that he shouldn't be put on a pedestal. Lots of great ideas came from very flawed people.
- Fritz Haber is responsible for the Haber process that unlocked atmospheric nitrogen for use in fertilizer, and saved multitudes from starvation. He was also responsible for horrific suffering thanks to his other project, chemical weapons.
- Hans Reiser was a brilliant engineer who created a widely used linux filesystem. He's also a convicted murderer.
- Wernher von Braun was a brilliant rocket maker who was responsible in large part for putting Americans on the moon. He was also a Nazi who made weapons that killed many innocent civilians.
To me, all radical libertarians are crazy. But the fact that he also doesn't have a grasp on what is acceptable social decorum (don't simulate nasal sex at dinner, don't make an apologist argument for pedophilia in public, etc) is probably what makes other people reach for 'crazy'.
So the user must trust someone. Typically this is going to be at a minimum his OS vendor. He might also have to trust other software vendors, and maybe hardware vendors and network operators. That the vendor provides Free Software makes no difference. I have a machine running Debian. I still have to trust Debian.
What TPM does is give the OS vendor another tool so I can be assured that I’m running what the vendor provided. Of course the vendor can abuse this. But if he does, I have bigger problems. I want the vendor to be able to provide me with what I asked for and therefore I welcome technologies like TPM.
I don’t disagree with RMS because he’s paranoid. I disagree with him because he thinks Freedom is an elixir.
And TPM does not allow other people to maintain that software.
Freedom's no elixir, but proprietary isn't either. You have to trust someone, but in a better world, that's a community of experts reviewing freedom respecting software.
Sometimes, the benefits of that centralized control are real, but the concomitant abuse of said centralization appears almost axiomatically inevitable at this point, so you have to ask yourself if the benefits are even worth it. Microsoft's OS itself has nearly turned into spyware. It'll be signed spyware, assured that it's doing what Microsoft wants it to do. If I'm going to get exploited, I can at least get exploited while remaining free. There's a real chance that maybe I'm not getting exploited if I'm free, but just about 0% chance if I'm not even free.
I'm no ideologue, just sayin'.
It's the same idea as with Right to Repair - the movement isn't expecting everyone to learn how to use a soldering iron and a chip programmer; is to allow local communities to have their own specialists capable of repairing hardware. Similarly, with free software, my mother isn't going to look or modify the code herself, but she may ask me to help with it. Or a different neighbourhood tech whiz, who may even take payment for the service.
Software freedom is in part enabling local markets to work.
That doesn't mean he's wrong. Just...a loon.
Yeah. Pretty much the only people who took him seriously were the folks who wanted to lock down computers, or were being paid to do so.
I remember going to a west coast science fiction convention in the early '90s (most likely a Westercon or LosCon, possibly a BayCon) that had a panel on "computers and copyright" or something similar.
I don't recall the panel itself much, except that it was a fairly small room, but one bit stuck in my mind from the Q&A: An audience member said something to the effect that the necessary restrictions on copying would just be implemented in hardware rather than software. I think a panelist dismissed his statement, but the audience member insisted that it was possible, and that he had X years industry experience to prove it. At which point the conversation started getting very loud with a substantial fraction of the room speaking over him (and each other) saying he was wrong.
And that was it. I'm pretty sure most of the folks in that room came away with the impression that "information wants to be free" and there was little that could be done to oppose that.
It was about a decade before that whole exchange came to mind again, when "Trusted Computing" started gaining traction and criticism.
I've occasionally wondered just who that audience member was, what their "industry experience" was at that point, and what they've worked on since.