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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough.

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.

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This is something I've been thinking about a lot. Most of my ideas have been variations of creating a scholarship fund where interest from the initial investment goes to pay for continued development on a specific project.

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.

Traditional Judaic society has a caste of people who do nothing but study sacred texts, and they've got a decent track record - I think it comes down to how much public admiration there is for the best open-source coders, if there's a lot it would attract a lot of talent.

Rabbis aren't the wealthiest members of traditional Jewish society.

But they can afford large families, and good marriages for their children. Monks they are not.

But importantly, a brilliant scholar of humble means is considered a desirable partner. If a brilliant coder of open-source were similarly desirable in our hypothetical future, I'm sure things would work out.

What generally makes men desirable to women is status, which can come from money, influence, or any other power to shape the world around them.

Agreed. So if we wanted to go that route (disclaimer: I think it's our best bet) we'd have to somehow confer high status to the best open-source code monks.

We talk about the software a lot, but we mustn't overlook the hardware. Talking about, say, the next 10 years, we need to find a way of making Open Hardware truly affordable: I can't afford a Purism device but I could probably afford a PinePhone. However, that would probably not be powerful enough for me nor the average user. The Raspberry Pi is looking tempting again but it incorporates non-free BLOBs. What we need is a Open Philanthropist who'd be willing to recognise the problems and throw money at them. We recognise the problems and have ideas about solutions, but I get the feeling we're missing the tools to get up on the next rung of the ladder...

Half a FAANG salary to write open source sounds pretty good.

Ha. Yea of course it does, it’s still a better salary than most of people in the richest countries on earth make.

> We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough.

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.

People take smaller salaries all the time if their work is for the public good. Quite many charity organizations find lots of people to man them. Universities are another example. Some people go into the industry, others become researchers.

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.

This is something that Gitcoin Grants solves fairly well. Quadratic funding of public goods allows open source developers to be funded full time by the community.

There are a number of resources for FOSS funding listed here:

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

Two things:

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.

60k, even in EUR (about 71k USD) will not give you quality in Germany. A senior developer in Berlin is about EUR 85k, and may go up to 120k for strong tech leads.

Good news: Crypto created the new business model for open source software.

Naval: "Ironic that the most monetizeable code in the world is now open source (running on blockchains). OSS has the best business model."

https://twitter.com/naval/status/867860551522598912

That only works if you're willing to attach a scam to your software and it gives you no incentive to work on the software since it doesn't generate value.

They created a new business model for a new type of open source software. It doesn't do anything for all the existing types of open source software. Nobody is going to turn glibc into a blockchain.

That's just a sign of glibc being stuck in the wrong millennium more than anything else. Add a couple functions to create ERC20 tokens and add the EVM as a supported architecture and I'm sure that can change. It's high time to remove those unsafe APIs like strcpy and printf that cause CVEs all the time and refocus effort on things that actually matter.

Yeah like add features nobody uses for real and remove functions that will break thousands of programs used by millions of people

That is thinking in the future, I'm sure of it

Hahaha I almost got so mad at this comment :)

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