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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

The exploitation of developers by big corporation must end. It is crazy that companies make billions out of software they use without paying contributors a penny. Some companies were able to amass incredible wealth on the backs of volunteers. I think we should start pressurise politicians so that they force companies to pay royalties to open source contributors based on % of revenue. In many countries (for example in the UK) it is illegal to work for free (even if you want to) and every worker has to be paid at least a minimum wage. The same principle should apply to open source projects. If your company makes money over a certain threshold you should start paying. Open source software should only be free for individuals and small businesses.

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Yes, so the first step is to stop demonizing projects that opt for alternative "source available" licenses, and stop idolizing one canonical definition of capital O "Open-Source" licenses.

Despite most everyone implicitly associating open source with gratis, it's not a requirement or even preferable in my opinion. The benefits of OSS to users are all still there with paid software.

Tangentially this makes me think of a recent phenomenon I'm sure many OSS advocates love to ridicule or trivialize, but which shows at least an attempt to solve the problem of compensation for freely replicable work: NFTs. If you manage to see past the mainstream view that people are "buying links to jpeg files", and rather understand that people are paying for public recognition of patronage, there's something to be said about their ability to get people to pay for "open source" work.

Can you list a project with a big community that has a "source available" license right from the start? I won't demonize these projects but people prefer "open source" over "source available" for a reason.

JWPlayer

Unreal Engine is a pretty big and successful one. In the cryptocurrency space: Metamask[1], and the upcoming Uniswap V3[2].

Of course, given the choice, myself included, users prefer the more permissive license. The question is what strikes the right balance of incentives for developers and respect of users.

[1]: https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-extension/

[2]: https://uniswap.org/blog/uniswap-v3/

The problem is that sources available destroys the antitrust forking feature that's core to open source.

MySQL/MariaDB, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, Cyanogenmod/LineageOS, a couple others had the IP go to someone who didn't have an incentive to develop it properly, so didn't. Source Available permits this with no real recourse.

Agreed on the NFT comment, BTW.

you are on to something. It is really interesting how much double standard I see on developers forums: "oh it is not open source, why?" "oh it is open source or free, and you raising vc funding...probably gonna end up acquired" It is sad.

This is not a double standard. If it's not FLOSS, then users have no essential rights: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...

I don't disagree with the sentiment but I do disagree with the implementation part of way Free Software (free as in speech) works is because I can do whatever I want with it, if I don't want to charge I shouldn't be forced to. Tbh what you are suggesting sounds like getting rid of FOSS entirely and bringing it back under the guise of Freeware.

If you really don't want corporations to benefit off your work without contributing back go GPL or stop maintaining it.

The thing is that not every developer is in a privileged position to provide work without payment. Good example are unpaid internships - if you want to gain experience, but you are coming from a poor background, you are unlikely going to sign up for such internship, because you will not have means to pay bills and so you are forced to find job that pays, not even necessarily in the field you would want. This creates divide, because only people from privileged backgrounds can gain experience this way and in the end get better jobs. That's why in many countries (for example in the UK) unpaid internships are illegal to create a level playing field. I think it should not be allowed to give away your work for free (to corporations) because of that. Then if you really don't want this money, you could send it to a charity of your choice. Such way would be much fairer to everyone.

Sure but we are talking about developing FOSS software not unpaid internships. So what relevance does your comment have towards me wanting to realease Free Software?

Not every developer is in a privileged position to contribute to open source projects, because they have bills to pay and have to commit time to do paid work. This can compromise their changes at getting better jobs, as employers tend to look whether someone has open source contributions in their resume. Very often it is not even possible to show any code from previous jobs, because it is confidential. This is just one of angles where this kind of model creates social divide.

Sure, its not everyone. On the other hand it also suck to be forced to pay.

This is silly. The vast majority of non-toy open source is written by corporations. I’ve made substantial open source contributions over the years but I’ve consumed far more value than I ever created, all for free. Maybe you think I should be paying those corporations?

And the vast majority of that is built on top of typically well maintained by a small number of people libraries and tooling. Let's not forget, much of the "non-toy open source by big corporations" is increasingly becoming Trojan horses either by sheer complexity making it all but impractical to run on anything other than Big C's cloud OR computational resource hungry allowing you to "toy" locally but again need Big C's cloud services

The change has to start with us. Developers should value their work, and stop going for virtual stars and points.

I used to determine my self-worth through the number of stars my GitHub project had. Boy oh boy was that silly, looking back at it. 1.2k stars on GitHub... and god knows who profited off it. Me on the other hand? Meh. Would someone like to buy my 1.2k GitHub stars? :D

Monetize your Github stars with a NFT.

Open source, like open science, is public good, that's value enough for me. It's a way to do good that's both aligned with my principles and personally stimulating. I'm not motivated by points or stars, recognition, money or self-worth, and I suspect I'm not in the minority.

I think developers do. Very much so. if they didn't every developer on this thread and this site would have been publishing their best work as open source. We know that is not the case. The people that write open source code are either academics, working on the project while being funded by their employers, have a business around it, trying to build up some resume credit or building or aspiring to build a business around their projects. There is of course the "hack project" or learning in progress project that one could publish, depending on one's reputation and standards People who are full time working professionals and have additional personal responsibilities could not be publishing and maintaining high quality open source. This is a shame, because those people would probably produce very high quality open source code if only they could afford to pay the bills in the meantime. What I am wondering though is whether the funding through something like this Open Collective initiative could ever match market rate a professional would command in a developed economy.

> The exploitation of developers by big corporation must end.

Why do people choose to work for free on open source projects that are mostly used by businesses? I can completely understand making things that are hard to monetize, user facing applications, or trying to learn something. But when I see free contributions to things like infrastructure management I just don’t get it. Why wouldn’t you just get a job doing this if there’s obviously a business demand for it? If I made something for free that was primarily used by people who made money off of my work it would completely kill my motivation and I would feel taken advantage of.

people do not stay on projects forever and then they are literally stolen. Or companies adopt a project and then throw their weight around.

for the former case: do you think former gnome contributors (who started the project exactly because their feared the ossification of window managers trying to copy windows, see their https://web.archive.org/web/19990224084927/http://www.gnome.... manifesto) would be happy with designers that ignore users and copy everything from osx?

for the second case, just look up how much linus fought against tainted kernel and still ended up giving up because of corporate/funding pressure. Also how google employees do whatever they want to chromium, for example, removing every single contribution to restrict referrer because that is how they made money from clicks on google search ads.

In my opinion those people are in privileged position - they already have money, they don't have to worry what they are going to eat if they don't do work and so on, so they show off. It's kind of like a rich person driving around in his or hers Lambo. They do this work for free and then there is less work for people who cannot work for free. Why would company hire anyone if they get free contributions.

Is there really a lack of demand for software developers of the level that can contribute quality open source contributions?

>> The exploitation of developers by big corporation must end.

GPLv3 plus a commercial license will go a long way toward that.

I was about to post the same. Pragmatically a collective company that could help carry the administrative work with open source projects would be interesting. Project with a nominal GPLv3 license while allowing paid relaxation of the terms (GPLv2 or commercial, etc) could bring in some revenue.

It may sound unfair but that is exactly what an open source license means: you release something for others to use without a payment requirement. If you are a developer and your intention is to make money then you should create a business around your project or if you find it unfair just stop releasing it under open source :)

> I think we should start pressurise politicians so that they force companies to pay royalties to open source contributors based on % of revenue.

...If someone makes something and gives it out for free, the government can't retroactively force users to pay for it. It's up to the creator to choose a different lisence.

The government makes people retroactively pay for stuff all the time. It's the basis for torts.

It is not retroactive, but "from now on" with a grace period. Granting a free license will not be legal, except for individuals, charities, non-profit organisations and SME. You may think that this is wrong, because this has been a status quo and big corporations were doing a great PR to keep it that way, but this is extremely damaging to society.

Majority of FOSS development is paid for - by big companies.

There is this sticky idea of imaginary army of open source developers who produce full time job worth of effort and live from thin air and don't have to pay rent. And who do all that boring routine and difficult work of maintaining, merging, reviewing, patching, testing and so on for passion alone.

This is not true except for very specific projects like the Linux Kernel.

On other projects that weren't started in companies from the start you see paid FOSS developers doing maintenance.

Whether that is money well spent or if these developers ever do anything creative or original is another question.

> On other projects that weren't started in companies from the start you see paid FOSS developers doing maintenance

How is that not development paid by companies and how exactly is that exploitation by big companies? You literally claimed it is paid by them.

I would like to add that the exploitation of the community of open source software and their authors must end. If the community _cares_ about the source being free, why are contributions relative to consumption as low as they are?

Something like this ? https://licensezero.com/

> In many countries (for example in the UK) it is illegal to work for free (even if you want to) and every worker has to be paid at least a minimum wage.

This is slightly off-topic, but how does volunteering work?

The exemption is for charities and not for profit organisations.

Surely I can, say, build a fence for my pensioner neighbor without them having to form a non profit or pay me?

Yes you can, as long as you are not building it for his company.

but isnt that already possible with a license?

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