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> I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately.

Open source is a niche. The vast majority of developers don’t participate in open source. If they do, it’s simple bug fixes that they need for their paid jobs. The number of people creating and releasing significant open source projects is vanishingly small relative to the entire pool of developers.

I think it was a mistake to tell entry-level devs everywhere that open source was some sort of secret cheat code to boost one’s career. On the hiring and recruiting side of things, seeing open source contributions is helpful, but it’s almost never the deciding factor in hiring someone. Meanwhile, Internet forums for juniors are full of anxiety about creating side projects and GitHub profiles because young developers think it will get them to the head of the hiring line. It’s a recipe for a lot of disappointment in open source.

I have seen hiring manager on this site say they wouldn't hire anyone without opensource experience. Sometimes they say something wishy-washy about how contributing to open source is such a specialized skill that they don't have the bandwidth to train someone new. At other times they are more willing to blatantly admit that they just want someone who's capable of spending all their free time writing code.

I tend to wonder about the legality of it all. Since when did judging candidates on what they do off-the-clock become acceptable? To make it easier, if I don't have time to do open source because I am heavily involved in my religion, does that start to toe the line of acceptable work qualifications.

Significant part of open source development is paid for by companies. I don't know why the myth of its being done mostly for free persists, but maybe we should stop pretending it.

Depends on how you define "part". Maybe the visible part like MySQL or the Linux kernel or Android. But I'd say open source has a long tail mostly unpaid. From where I'm staying there is also a myth that companies pay for all the open source I use.

I don't know what open source you use. But yes, the big ones are mostly done by people who are paid for it. They are not after work occasional effort.

The smaller ones are also often done a part of university research or on clock. Not necessary because companies are altruistic, but because they need something and because open source developers need to eat.

A big part of Apache projects are not done by paid employees. Which is why you see the main developer for Maven push his Patreon for donations.

Out of the hundred or so resumes I have worked with at this point the handful that have had their github up that I had time to look at were net-zero or net-negative as an addendum of their resume. There's a difference between an engineer with a history of open source and one that 'did something and pushed to github', and most entry-level engineers haven't had such a strong history of open source that what you see of them would be meaningful anyway. I do try to preach this to what developers I come across but there's only so much that can be done.

If you work with web standard technologies your code is probably inherently open. Even still most developers in that space cannot write any original code to save their lives. They are utterly reliant on mountains of shit that does everything and they string a few build tasks together. As an experiment take NPM, Angular, React, or SpringMVC away and observe the forth coming violence like a zombie apocalypse in a third world nation. The entitlement runs deep.

Take away browser plus html? Sure. Take away React? People would get along just fine imo

I have hired a guy that was applying for his first job at the highest salary we could afford because of his phenomenal open-source contributions. We knew right away that it was a particularly strong candidate. We were right.

Most Github repositories I've seen since then are net negative and it would be better if they hadn't been included at all.

> The vast majority of developers don’t participate in open source.

On the producing side, you mean.

I'd argue that including a package in your code is not participating. It's consuming, but not participating.

Football players participate in a football game. Fans consume that game.

The only reason this ‘bargain’ existed at all in the first place was because of the GPL and other more restrictive licenses which encoded this ‘bargain’ into their verbage.

The current version of the ‘bargain’ - use MIT or BSD and expect more participation as a result - has never been the norm. The norm is corporate programmers taking whatever code they can and using it.

The norm is a cleanroom implementation of open source software written because companies would rather pay for that implementation rather than muck around in open source licensed code (I watched Oracle do this with several MySQL feature/bug fix patches).

And so here we are. Yet Another MIT License Regret.

> But for a while now large companies have been adopting a model of taking from open source contributions and raking in billions.

I've been working at a large corporation for about five years now. I've been on more than a few projects where we wanted to use an open source product/tool to help build an application and it was roundly rejected by the security team. After two back-to-back requests were rejected, we were told corporate policy was 100% against using any open source tools or products in anything we did.

The ironic part is this monolithic, hulking corporation is losing chunks of market to smaller, more nimble companies who can get their product to market in three months. Whereas, it takes us 18 teams and 100 people and two years to get the same product to market. Their solution? Just buy the technology instead. We've had dozens of acquisitions over the past year or so.

Which now creates another new set of problems I'm sure you can already see. . .

>Whatever the case, developers are starting to believe that voluntary free open source contribution is for smucks.

In today's environment, it kind of is for shmucks. How many times have I seen the same tired FreeBSD copypasta about how FreeBSD powers netflix and playstation, and won't I please donate because netflix and sony are parasites who won't pony up the dough to keep FreeBSD solvent.

Why on earth would anyone directly subsidize these CEOs when they could get paid to do it instead?

It's because we could never get users to care about open-source software. Users continue to lap up closed-source software and that's what leads to billions for these companies.

"I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately."

it's open source vs. free software

open source = free labor for private profits.

I think the term "free software" is a marketing failure because you'd always have to add "as in free speech, not free beer".

In German you can differentiate that, "frei" vs. "gratis".

I'd go as far as saying that the term "free software" is a complete an utter fail. In my mind "free speech" is speech that is entirely unrestricted. Almost all FOSS licenses come with "restrictions", such as you must leave the copyright notice in place, you must add the "PROVIDED AS IS" spiel somewhere the end user can read it, you must release your derivative work's source code under the same license etc., so it is by definition no longer "free".

WTFPL is probably the only real "free" license.

the freedom part is not for the software developer, it is for the end user running the software.

I've obviously missed something here, what are the freedoms the end user is afforded?

0. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.

1. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.

3. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

It's as if open source was invented to make part of free software more palatable to corporations.

Even in 1998 it didn't take a genius to see what a Faustian bargain that Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond were leading us to sign.

Now we have SaaS, PaaS, and AWS. L-O-L. Bigly L-O-L. MySQL and PHP alone probably contributed to half of Zuckerface and Bezos billions.

Imagine writing an npm package that the FAANGs install as a dependency of their giant website and not being able to pass the leetcode gatecheck to even get a job there. Dystopias aren't much fun when you live in one.

Like which npm package? This would be a great tale to hear :p

you mean the good ole days when Microsoft paid 50k for quickdos before making billions from it?

That's 50k more than most open source projects make, also: No one forced the owners of qdos to give Microsoft that license for 50k. Sellers remorse is a thing, but I'm not sure why we should feel sorry for them.

As a really fun thought experiment, imagine that they took the $50,000 and put it into 30-year US Treasury bonds in 1981 and sold them in 1986 to buy Microsoft at the IPO.

It would be worth about $212 million today. And that ignores dividends.

But MS hired Tim Patterson and gave him equity. How is that not fair?

I already realized that during the first .com wave, it is naive to think otherwise, rainbows and happy songs can only last so long.

It is easy to be idealistic when the source of income is not selling software.