The problem with Free Software is capitalism | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Free Software is capitalism

occasionallycogent.com

64 pointsnanna123 comments

> If we want things to be different, it’s not enough to play semantic games with licensing terms. We need a sea-change in not just software development but in our society as a whole.

This "all or nothing" line of reasoning doesn't convince me. No, the legal system is not perfect but that doesn't mean the only way forward is to refuse to participate in it and adopt a radical system that totally reimagines the fundamental idea of property.

I dunno it kind of feels hard to fight the inevitability of trillion dollar corporations running everything. It really does feel like there these immovable forces in an increasingly vital sector of society we’ve abdicated control over. I often wonder if something so amazing and vital as the internet and web could actually get made in the current climate. I feel increasingly worried about future iterations on similar ideas like the metaverse/AR which seems to be gearing up to be a fight between Facebook and Apple with Unity, Epic and Roblox on the side. I think we’re going to end up with something pretty closed and dystopian.

Visiting the Bay Area, the spiritual home of it all really hammers home that dystopian quality. There is such a stark contrast between the glass palaced elite and the poor.

Sometimes I find it very hard to feel positive about “tech” and it’s future.

I’ve been around long enough to see many mega-corps rise and fall. Seemingly unstoppable juggernauts falter and disappear seemingly overnight. None of this is new; you just haven’t lived thru the cycle yet to see giants fall.

> I often wonder if something so amazing and vital as the internet and web could actually get made in the current climate.

I’d say the answer is no, it couldn’t. The internet was created during the tail end of powerful antitrust in America, which had the government actively fighting against the monopoly size of corporations. Both IBM and AT&T, had they not been kept in check with antitrust regulations, would have likely stifled the internet and the growth of the personal computer.

Hell, even the last dying gasp of antitrust in its feeble attempt to check Microsoft, paved the way for Google and the monopolies created since.

The answer is to actively support the ideas of anti monopoly and antitrust. To break up companies and punish them for suffocating the good parts of capitalism.

Part of Microsoft's "punishment" for monopoly practices was to give away free copies of Office to schools. With that, every parent has to have a copy of Office to read .doc files from their school. Ingenious! They use their punishment to increase their market share.

I don't think breaking up companies should be the emphasis, but rather the merging of companies. AT&T was already broken up once. Now look at them.

Yep, preventing the mergers first is part of the solution too.

Unfortunately, we’ve allowed too many, and need to break up companies across industries.

edit: and figure out a way to tell future generations not to give up on these laws next time? To your point, they may find themselves in this same place again.

This possibility of corporations running everything is exactly why we have FOSS licenses. Despite what this article says, many FOSS projects are doing fine and there are a lot of people who do work on making FOSS computing viable.

The practical solution is not adopt communism, but to use FOSS software and not accept any gaps in the FOSS ecosystem.

> I feel increasingly worried about future iterations on similar ideas like the metaverse/AR which seems to be gearing up to be a fight between Facebook and Apple with Unity, Epic and Roblox on the side. I think we’re going to end up with something pretty closed and dystopian.

I fail to see how this lawsuit you speak of is relevant to FOSS. Are you aware of Godot engine, an increasingly viable unity alternative? The important advantage of Godot engine over Unity is that the incentives of the developers are more aligned with the incentives of the users. Unity subjects its users to a terribly complicated EULA that many don't fully understand. It restricts the amount of copies you can install, how much money you can make, what you can use it for and so on. Godot doesn't have any of that, and they're well-funded.

Godot engine is an example of a FOSS project that exists simply because the open source development model is more efficient than closed source. Companies realized that a FOSS game engine would be in their best interests and therefore they decided to fund development. This goes to show that FOSS is not totally at odds with capitalism. Sure, the corporation funding Godot could try to take the project in a bad direction. If that happens, the people who care about FOSS rather than "Free software as cheap labor" could fork it.

> adopt a radical system that totally reimagines the fundamental idea of property

I'm pretty sure that's what copyrights over digital information are in the first place.

How far back does your fundamental idea of property go?

I disagree with the problem. The problem is cathedral open source doesn’t scale. The problem is the general idea of an open source project being a full time job, especially if you are unwilling to work for free.

If you want money for something, charge for it. It’s really that simple. I’m giving away lemonade at my stand away for free, being mad the donations don’t cover the lemons is just silly.

I’d far rather my open source be a shared resource developed by its actual users. More bazaar, less cathedral. Fewer pigheaded decisions of a bdfl or corporation. Want to make a major left turn? Fork it.

So many recent open source projects are essentially just a business with a bad revenue model instead of a great project with a business backing it. Horse before the cart.

> I disagree with the problem. The problem is cathedral open source doesn’t scale. The problem is the general idea of an open source project being a full time job, especially if you are unwilling to work for free.

A great summary of the situation.

> does anyone really think that the FSF would be able to stand up in a copyright court against Apple and Google?

I do. I strongly suspect I’m not the only one.

And the fact that Apple refuses to use any GPLv3 software suggests that Apple's lawyers think so, too.

Same with Google and AGPL.

Also, court cases are not just decided by the amount of money you pour in them. You need money to prepare correctly the case and work a good strategy, but in the end facts are considered, and if someone violates copyright, they're going to be found guilty, be them a small company or a FAANG.

In both those cases, it's also just about risk/benefit. There's relatively little software that uses those licenses, which are (relatively) new as licenses go and AFAIK there is no legal precedent around them. So I daresay companies just figure there's not a lot of advantage to offering some AGPL service in particular and there is a risk of exposing their proprietary back-end to a lawsuit.

FSF annual budget is on order of 1.3M [1], a tiny portion of which can be spent on legal fees, the rest being normal operations - people and hardware and offices and such. So, if lucky, FSF can afford $200k / year in a court battle.

Google v Oracle racked up around $2M a year for google in legal fees alone (at least early on - I didn't find a final cost for the decade of litigation) [2]. And either could afford vastly more as needed, especially if it could simply bankrupt their opponent and get a default win.

I don't think the FSF can even remotely cover such costs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation

[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-wants-4-million-from-or...

I think it’s a mistake to look at the FSF peacetime budget and conclude they couldn’t sustain a war.

If Apple or Google were foolish enough to allow themselves to be pitted head-to-head with the FSF on a clear AGPL violation (the premise of TFA), FSF would easily raise the money required (in dollars and in pro-bono work). I’m not even especially a fan of AGPL and I’d crack my wallet open pretty wide for the FSF side here.

> In an ideal world, housing and food would be decommodified

That sounds more like prison than an ideal world. Considering the complete mess that industrialized agriculture is at the moment I can only imagine how much worse it would be if it was entirely centralized. Also the idea of not having ownership of my own housing is a strong incentive for me to fight against these ideas when I see them. My home is a very much an extension of my being in that it is customized to suit my needs and desires, I am not willing to accept a one size fits all that isn’t completely within my control.

Cities in Europe consist of mix of communal housing (rental apartments built with support from government) and private. Some of the cities are top rated in quality of living. Hardly a prison. So I don't know where you got such idea?

What is the legal ownership model of this communal housing? You say they are rentals which means money is exchanged for the right to live there. How does this work without money?

Someone wants to abolish money?

Do you take the argument to be that there is a single owner of housing to which everyone pays rent then? The reasons why that would be worse should be plainly obvious.

No. There is no single owner. Whoever wants to own their property, can buy/build one, there are enough of these for sale. I don't know of any case where municipality building houses (or another infrastructure like broadband) would make the situation worse for everyone.

So you meant we keep the current system but have expanded public housing? That’s not really decommodified though which is the original quote.

You sounded like you are completely against any form of communal/public housing.

We differ, and that’s okay. I’ve lived in something like eight or nine houses as a dependent and a similar number as an adult, and I don’t consider it housing stress relative to the trauma of what some of my high school students experienced. Good games have fitting rules. This current ownership system is a framework of rules we generally accept. I’d be willing to trade some control for security, so long as I don’t have to maintain a lawn and can instead plant prairie/meadow/woods if space exists. For example. I prefer to minimize traumatic events for as many as possible, especially in early life. What infrastructure enables a home that is completely in your control?

It’s a noble thing to help others escape from poverty and abuse but you should do so without imposing on others. The option to buck the trend and plant a more ecologically friendly yard is precisely the type of thing that private property allows to flourish where regulation or communal ownership would require herculean feats of bureaucratic rangling. Same goes for rooftop solar, choosing to buy an electric car, or growing your own food in your back yard. I acknowledge that some people do not have the capacity or desire to manage their own homes or property, I’m all for there being many options. People should be allowed to experiment with different ownership or rental accommodations many of which would probably ease the housing burden. Housing speculation also needs to end since it greatly distorts the market. There is a lot that should be changed I just don’t think it should be done through further regulation or some form of communal ownership.

Decommodification does not imply centralization, nor does it mean losing ownership of your housing. Commons have been used by people for a long time before the idea of housing markets or central control came along. Most often when I see the idea floated around w/ regards to housing it links ownership with use - if you live at your house, you have control over it. But noone can say "I control the home where someone else lives, because I have a paper that says so."

Sounds like the concept of squatter’s rights. How do I prevent others from “using” my property and preventing or impinging on my use of it? What happens if I build a home and go on vacation only to come back and find someone living in it? Why would anyone have incentive to invest their time into new construction? Would people bother to maintain the property they are using or would they just pack up and leave once they had sufficiently trashed it? How does this use concept apply to food as mentioned in the quote? Private property solves all of these so any alternative must also provide workable solutions.

Coming from a family that has suffered severely under Marxism, anti-capitalist sentiment that promotes Marxism as an answer like this makes me very sad.

Capitalism is based on fundamentally democratic principles. Markets are basically continuous ongoing referendums on what people want, need or care about. It's based on freedoms to own property and buy or sell products and labour as sovereign individuals, and freedom of association to form companies.

Marxism replaces markets with bureaucratic fiat. Resources are expropriated by the bureaucracy and allocated according to political priorities, it's a fundamentally coercive and authoritarian system from top to bottom. Take away the need for people to satisfy a market of their peers in order to earn a living, and who gets to decide what they work on and what it's value is? Marxists have an answer for that - it's the bureaucracy again. All power becomes centralised. This is not a theory, this is what actually happened everywhere this has been tried.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no free market fundamentalist. I'm a Brit but probably closest to being a European style social democrat politically. Socialism has had many failures, but so has capitalism. The real world is a messy complicated place and no one answer ever fits every economic question we have to deal with. But Marxism is sheer political and economic poison.

Bingo. Currency and free markets are the best implementation of distributed democracy we’ve seen yet. Everyone can vote on everything as many times as they want constrained only by their participation in the system. I still believe we need a level playing ground though, anti trust and a strong legal system to prevent abuse. We should be careful about safety nets though, preventing failure and saving people from disaster are different things with different consequences.

Right, and just like democracy needs rules to make sure elections are fair, you do need rules to ensure the markets are fair. We do need safety nets too, can we really have bailouts for banks but somehow ordinary working people who fall sick are out on the street on their own? But it's a net not a pedestal.

I do worry about basic income the article fantasises about developers getting a guaranteed state income that allows them to write whatever software they like. That really is a fantasy, most open source projects are single-contributor repositories that get a couple of downloads ever. I know, I created a few ;)

Thinking of software as media paints it in a much more obvious light.

There are two forms of media - free and paid. Free media is funded with advertising. Paid media gets paid for by the customer.

The benefit of free media is distribution. It can go anywhere, cheaply, and impact the largest audience. This is a common model for TV & large YouTube channels.

The benefit of paid media is income. Generally, something that is paid for earns more than something that is free with advertising. However, with paid media there's a significant decrease in distribution. If the decrease is large enough, the creator would have earned more by putting it out for free with advertising to increase distribution.

Now, here's the other catch, the benefit of mass distribution is power. Power of perception, mostly. You are now a voice for the vision you are trying to put into the world. You're impacting the way people think, and you're causing them to learn what you want to teach them.

Open source developers of large projects do a chronically poor job at capturing the upside of distribution. That's the issue.

They simply need to have advertising to fund their "media" that has a large distribution, or they need to charge for their "media". Or a hybrid approach works too – ads for freely distributed software and charge for proprietary or managed software.

"Welcome to FreeBootloader 2.7. The system will boot in 90 seconds, but first, a message from our sponsors - Raid: Shadow Legends!"

I'm not sure I agree with the assertion that something that is paid for earns more than advertising.

Very few successful opensource projects is the product of an single entity dedicated just to that project but is the product of an process where someone in company A develops something that company A need but don't mind sharing with companies B and C if it means improving the product beyond what their own resources can support. And due to cartel legislation the absolutely easiest way for this to happen is in the context of an open and transparent project.

The fact that open source exists in an "intentionally created" loophole in the regulations designed to prevent big companies from "conspiring against the market" is a huge part of what took the mostly failed academic concept of "committee controlled" free software and turned it into an industry dominating "open source" movement with no clear leadership.

Such rhetoric again fails to note why such work is “work”: a significant fraction of the effort isn’t fun & fulfilling, it’s unpleasant and nobody would do it except others will pay to get it done at a price higher than what the workers could earn doing something else.

Food/housing/etc isn’t free. We pay others, and get paid, to efficiently rearrange workloads for better results at less effort. I write security software because few can do what I’m good at but millions need it; in return I pay others to make/do the myriad things I can’t do well. Few indeed would (out of love for the art) continue such work without profitable compensation; I like my job, but don’t wrangle encrypted keys just for fun & fulfillment.

Also, people are kinda assholes. If you've ever had to deal with open source project issues and bugs, it sucks. For totally unpaid side-projects I'm thinking of going to open-source-closed-contribution model with no public PRs or issue submission because its just 98% toxic.

Capitalism isn't a problem with Free Software. The problem is free software people want to have their cake and eat it too.

Billion dollar corporations using your software and never having to paying you a dime is a feature of the FOSS system, not a bug, the rights of the user are paramount and sacrosanct. You, the developer, don't own the software you write any more than anyone else, and because it doesn't belong to you, you have no right to make demands of its users beyond their continuing to respect the rights of the end user.

If you can't make a living writing FOSS, that's not relevant to the philosophy. You chose a philosophy that doesn't care whether or not you can earn a living under it. If you want to guarantee people will pay for your software use a proprietary license. Otherwise, stop complaining that the world is playing the game by the rules you set and is beating you at it.

> Billion dollar corporations using your software and never having to paying you a dime is a feature of the FOSS system, not a bug.

FOSS is libre, not gratis. Most FOSS happens to be gratis as well but that's not intrinsic to the FOSS model.

Culturally, the FOSS community has been allergic to exploring new business models to see where there can be alignment with their production models. eg: I think models such as feature bounties could be a sustainable path for many FOSS projects but almost no FOSS projects look into such things.

there's not much I can add to this comment other than to say a wholeheartedly agree

> Someone devotes a large amount of their time and effort to making something that many people both depend on and make piles of money from, but don’t recompense that original developer.

I wonder how much free stuff that original developer used to get to the point where they could write working code to begin with?

I find the problem with free software isn't capitalism, but greed. Some people are quick to forget how much free software/information they utilize without paying a dime back.

> It seems clear that open source isn’t sustainable as things are now.

Clear to you maybe, I on the other hand am bewildered to find that anyone can seriously think this is such a clear position they don't feel the need to back up such a claim with any data. Even their linked article doesn't make any real argument other than "what if?".

The problem with Free Software is people thinking that the part you pay for is the copy of the code and not ongoing maintenance.

Look at busybox (or even Linux itself) for example, people probably work on that full time and get paid for it but the code is free (in both senses.)

>Expecting the freeloading corporations that benefit from open-source software to contribute fairly is, I think, unrealistic.

If you don't want people to benefit from work you voluntarily put into the commons, then don't put it into the commons. Corporations are just groups of people. Who gets to decide that this group of people over here can legitimately benefit from the commons, but these other people over there can't? That's not a commons anymore.

If you want to put restrictions on who can or cannot benefit from your work, then put those restrictions on the work when you release it. But don't then claim you put it into the commons, you didn't.

If you want to benefit privately from your work, what on earth are you doing giving it away? Surely a big bunch of people coming along, picking up that work and using it to provide incredibly useful services to lots of people, benefiting thousands or millions of other people at much lower cost than they otherwise could is a good thing, right? How is that not a massive success?

The problem with people like this guy and Elastic, etc, is they don't actually want to give things away for free. They actually want to get paid. Ok, fine, I have no problem with that, just for goodness sake be honest about it.

It seems that basic income should be the solution here. Anyone will be able to work on their hobby without dying of hunger. With time, the amount of basic income can increase, leading eventually to a society free of exploitation.

Why should people expect to be paid to work on a hobby?

Why should people have to constantly justify their right to exist by working for someone else's profit for 40+ hours/week?

This is always inevitably thrown out there as a straw man whenever capitalism is discussed online. A variation on Godwin's Law for post-modernists. The typical response is that "They're not, they're free to work as much or as little as they'd like," which is invariably followed by rabbit holes about health care, welfare, various entitlements, and migration.

Please, be more original.

Because it is cheaper than paying continuous survailance or taking care of his mental health and dangers to society that he may pose without any kind of support.

Edit: replaced "occupation" with "support".

then don't frame it as a hobby. a hobby is something done in someone's spare time. I think you want to frame a hobby as an entitled occupation

Because it benefits humanity?

no it doesn't. it benefits the individual. it's a matter of choice; you choose to use what someone else is written rather than write your own. you choose to use what's been provided, rather than fork it. it benefits you, the user.

A lot of hobbies benefit the whole society. I would say most of them do. Hobby means making something. Hobbyists often make something valuable not only to themselves. It also often involves collaborations. Especially in the field of software development.

What about a type of liscence that behaves like a union. If you pay into this union then you are free to monetize all software with this particular license? Then at least AWS has to pay elastic something if they want to use it

Philosophically, I hate the idea that someone else will waste part of their short life reimplementing something that I just got working way, way more than I hate the idea they’ll make something so valuable that they become fantastically wealthy from it, especially since the last is such a rare case and it’s incredibly more rare that it will be because of my software.

If someone wants to use my software, I want to let them. If they use it to make 10 bucks, 10 kilobucks, 10 megabucks, or more: good for them! I don't want to erect a toll booth in front of the software for everyone just to block that.

So basically a proprietary license. You use software under the terms of the license (or negotiate). Nothing wrong with that. There's a lot of proprietary software out there. But it's not free/open source.

ADDED: Music is more of a pay-per-play thing and I'm not sure how that works for software. But it's still effectively paying the copyright holder for the use of their work.

I hate it how whenever people try to constructively think about these kind of issues they're immediately shot down with words like "proprietary", which functions nothing more than a snarl word here, or the old It's Not True Free/Open Source™ discussion stopper.

Can't we just allow people to talk about these issues and discus the pros and cons of various approaches based on their merits?

There's absolutely nothing wrong with proprietary. It used to be used all the time to mean something like special feature that only we have.

I'm a big supporter of free/open software. I also appreciate that business models based on it don't work for everyone. But, in that case, don't just use free/open for branding purposes.

Then poor people will not be able to use the software.

I suspect that's up to the software developer. If they want to write software in a manner that allows its use by poor people, then no problem. I write software like that. I use the MIT license for most of my software.

I don't like GPL, because I don't like coercion; but I'm a contrary bastard.

I like the "ASCAP" suggestion. I would be unlikely to use it, myself, but I think it's a viable option.

> I don't like GPL, because I don't like coercion

Permissive licenses allow coercion of users by corporations.

It also allows corporations to use that software to provide society with a good or service that is valuable.

If you're like me and believe the whole of mankind is generally pro-social - permissive licensing enables that majority to do more good than harm with open-source overall.

> If you're like me and believe the whole of mankind is generally pro-social

I indeed believe that. But I don't believe that corporations are pro-social. They are pro-profit due to the capitalistic system. Also, opening the source code is not a bad thing per se and does not harm anyone. It encourages the spread of knowledge and therefore innovation.

Sure, and how do corporations make money? by doing something that the generally pro-social public finds valuable.

Of course it's not hard to find examples of corporations acting poorly and even examples of anti-social behavior making lots of money, but society in general seems to be quickly moving in a good direction. Less violence, more wealth, better tech, etc.

TomaTOE, ToMAHto.

We'll just agree to see things differently, then.

No probs.

Cheers!

You are of course right that GPL is a kind of coercion, too. The question is which coercion is more harmful to the society. It's the same as with any law.

I write open-source software. Almost every line of code I've written in the last decade has been open. Not only that, but I also tend to open things like "raw materials," such as SVG originals, OmniGraffle files, Word Processor docs, and data spreadsheets.

I want ALL people -especially poor and disabled people- to be able to use my software, without any restrictions, so I use the MIT license, to give a figleaf of self-protection.

I know that some folks would like me to use licenses that add restrictions to the use of my software, but that has been an issue, in the past.

If I think that the software I write should be more restricted, I have options, and I'm grateful to the open source community for creating those options.

I used to participate in a fairly left-leaning political community, but I am very "centrist." I'm able to find common ground with either side.

For a couple of years, it was fine. Lots of urbane, articulate, respectful discussions. The community actually developed a fairly respected reputation.

Then the extremists arrived. They were LOUD. And quite abusive.

They managed to chase out anyone with any moderate political leanings. We had to be 100% extreme, or we would be branded "Nazis," and abused, doxxed, insulted and every conversation rapidly devolved into screeching monkeys, throwing poo at each other. I assume the site owners liked that because..."engagement."

I haven't been back to that community for years, but I haven't heard much good of it, since. It no longer has a respected reputation.

It can be similar to fines in Scandinavia (AFAIK). They're linked to your total income e.g. 0.001% of it for running a red light.

Does this not just drive people to organize their finances to have less income and more capital gains?

Sweden has a Gini coefficient of 0.867. Only Russia and The Netherlands are higher - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in...

Theoretically it’s supposed to include capital gains, but according to German Wikipedia we use the net salary.

Ah so it's worse for poor people than rich people. Unintended consequences I guess.

It’s still better than flat amounts.

Were you thinking about Switzerland maybe [1] ?

[1] https://www.wired.com/2010/01/record-speeding-fine-dents-swi...

>0.001% of it for running a red light.

That would be $1 on a $100k salary.

While it’s not for fees and only for court convictions, Germany has the concept of "Tagessatz" (Day-fine [0]) which means the monetary punishment is given in a number of those, one day-fine is supposed to be the money you would normally make in one day.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine

I've also thought about something similar, though I would call it a coop instead of a union. I would also say you need to share your other code too and contribute some profits - basically if you use the software you become part of the coop.

I like that idea. Things like ASCAP[0] come to mind.

Not everyone loves ASCAP, though. I am not in the business, so I don't know all the issues.

[0] https://www.ascap.com

ASCAP (and BMI) sound like a mafia shakedown in stories I heard from small businesses. "I hear you've got live music here. The performers must be playing our licensed material. It'd be a shame if something happened to your business." I've heard this from two small business owners who hosted live music and had strict guidelines that performers play only original or public domain music. Both said that the union rep simply wouldn't take "No" for an answer and kept coming back and making vague threats.

That makes sense. You'd need to make sure that didn't happen. It would probably be easier to ensure, because of easily-read written licenses.

You wouldn't have the bent-nose chaps trying to extort users of MIT-licensed software.

These shakedowns already happen. Oracle is a good example of one company who conducts them. Microsoft gained a reputation, back in the early 2000's, for feigning incredulity that you'd be using PCs with a non-Microsoft operating system.

It's a lot easier, as a user of software, to choose software with Free or permissive licenses than it is to know if a musical composition is part of the ASCAP or BMI catalog, though. I'd just avoid proprietary licenses, like those from Oracle, Microsoft, or you're describing, and encourage others to do the same.

One might organize such a union as a platform cooperative.

> The problem with Free Software is capitalism

I've spent a bit of time thinking about this a few days ago. I believe the real problem with Free Software is the copyright landscape.

With everything copyrighted-by-default, with no expiration date in sight, it's much easier to handle proprietary software than free software. It actively hinders distribution and cooperation.

Of course, the FSF builds on copyright. Imagine as a thought experiment if copyright would last 3 years for software. What would happen next?

I'd argue such a short copyright term would be beneficial overall, extensible if a) you submit source code to a governmental archive that publishes it once it falls in the public domain b) extension is paid-for, like patents c) maximum length fall to 10-20 years (no longer than patents).

Oh, and that doesn't only apply to software.

See also a step in the right direction: petition to make publicly funded software free, https://publiccode.eu.

I feel the incentive for free software / open source has changed. The >2000 explanation of why people code for free is basically "they hope to get hired due to their work". Maybe I was too naiv back in the 90s, but it didnt feel like it back then. And it is still not the truth for me personally. I publish code for free because I want to share with ohers. Yes, I've been invited to a conference or two due to what I wrote, but that was never the goal, and would have been far too little as a compensation for my time. Granted, I am not a major contributor, so I should probably keep my mouth shut. However, I feel like the incentive these days has been poisoned by capitalism.

Perhaps "the incentive" depends upon the individual. It's like folks saying "in the '60s everybody..." where they're describing what they did or somebody they knew did.

Yeah, in general, unless you're in the position of having a trust fund/investments that mean you don't need to work for a living, if you're going to be spending 40 hours a week on something, you probably want to get paid for it. Some people do have compulsive hobbies but that's mostly not sustainable.

Of course, casual nights and weekend activities can certainly work as unpaid hobbies and they may even be intensive hobbies for a time.

But the reality before people got as widely paid for writing open source code is fewer people spent a lot less time doing it.

As someone who considers himself a commie (in the sense of desiring collective forms of property not in the police state sense although of course right wingers will shout that you can't have one without the other but that's another debate), and while I am sympathetic to the author's concerns I am not convinced by the line of reasoning. See, in a "capitalist" society, that is one where the capitalist mode of production is dominant, you can pretty much state that capitalism is the root of all problems in last resort. While it sometimes makes for complete and thorough analyses, it is often an hand wavy explain-it-all and intellectually lazy answer. Not because it is not true but because it is not relevant. And as every hn reader knows, saying something true is easy but saying something true and relevant is not.

"L'heure de la dernière instance ne sonne jamais"

> The only way free/libre/“open-source”1 software can be a sustainable endeavour is to change what “sustainable” means. In an ideal world, housing and food would be decommodified and people could work on software projects for the love of it and place it in the commons for others to enjoy the use of.

This is purely the problem of “other than capitalism”. We don’t need 1000 people getting paid via socialism to work on skins for a game. The advantage of pay is that it can be used to persuade people to work on things they are much less interested in. How many of you like your jobs but would probably do other things if not for your good pay? Pretty much everyone!

Right. And as with most problems that have to do with capitalism, we will get exactly nowhere if we try to fix capitalism first.

FLOSS was a hack from the start. It hacked the capitalist concept of copyright to turn it upside down, or dare I say rightside left? Because that's what hackers do. Hackers don't wait indefinitely for the evil system to fall once and for all. Like most protagonists of cyberpunk novels, they find tricks to make life less unbearable for themselves and those they care about even as the system resists change. Because after all, it is the only way to bring about any change at all.

The problem with Free Software is: there is no problem with Free Software. People have choice no to use it, people contribute to it, it works, it helps open source, a few a very mature and used in mission critical applications...

There is a problem with people trying to link Free Software with a single political line, be it socialism, capitalism or anarchism. Free Software has characteristics of the three lines: the freedom associated with capitalism, the community benifits associated with socialism and the diy aspect of anarchy.

The problem isn't "capitalism" but that most projects don't know how to raise money. We all know the value of project managers, testers, CI/CD specialists for open source projects: perhaps it's time to recruit and promote the role of donor advocate whose job it is to raise money for the project. Just because you build it doesn't mean people or companies will contribute: ask and it shall be given unto you.

The problem with contemporary capitalism is concentration. It's became too common to raise huge investment in order to become a monopoly and then take rent from such a position. All kinds of commons, not just Free Software, get plundered in the process.

What to do... perhaps if customers prove they are subject to vendor lock-in, the court will proclaim the supplier as a monopoly. Then automatically tax the hell out such a corporation?

> Of course, as soon as you bring up the idea that the capitalist system itself is a problem, inevitably people will start objecting, saying that capitalism is what has enabled the creation of all these things in the first place. While many of the creations that they would point to in fact benefited a great deal from government subsidies and/or regulatory capture, it is true that we’ve seen an unprecedented boom under capitalism. However, that doesn’t mean that capitalism is the system we need to stay with.

This kind of drivel drives me nuts. Let's just dump on the system that got us here an enabled amazing things to happen, whilst trying to be vague and non-committal about a suggested replacement. The author tries to slip by the fact that they're sympathetic with Marxist ideology - so they show their cards. We've experimented with the kinds of systems that the author subtly favors, time and time again, and they either turn into dystopian authoritarian madness or fail outright. I wish these folks would spend time in one of the failing states, or one in which they have little guarantee of any aspect of life (including liberties), before waxing estatic about utopian tomfoolery.

Sounds like a pig talking to another pig (that wants freedom) about how good they have it in their pens at the farm.

Well, the industrial revolution with its child labour, or colonisation with outright slavery "got us to where we are" in many ways, but then we decided that wasn't such a great idea after all. And hey, fossil fuels got us very far too. But maybe we should stop with that too and move beyond them.

I don't even agree with the author, or not exactly anyway, but I don't think this type of "it's the system that got us here"-type of reasoning is a good argument at all.

Don't be so obtuse. we aren't talking about individual aspects, the author clearly suggests a fundamental change of the entire system. flawed child labor laws, or a lack of thereof, do not define capitalism.

Entire economies were built on slavery. This isn't a little trivial aspect.

slavery also is not a tenet of capitalism. slavery is a separate societal issue that permeates every economic system. you are conflating societal issues with economic systems.

There is no such thing as "capitalism", it's a vague ideology with myriad different implementations. Besides, that wasn't even my point, you've turned this in to a the Not True Capitalism™ word-game, my point was merely that many systems that "got us to where we are" have since been abandoned, and that merely "it's useful" is not a good argument.

when it comes to word-games, you're putting on one heck of a display. Capitalism isn't a vague ideology - it's literally defined as:

an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

You seem intent on conflating historical societal issues that have come and gone under a capitalist economic system. I'd argue we are where we are despite those societal issues, and that capitalism has endured through them.

I personally don't see that capitalism itself is the culprit of the issues mentioned but I don't like monopoly powered by free software.

as long as competition is in place, I am kinda ok with big companies exploiting(?) free software.

the only logical fallacy is wanting people to pay for software you distribute for free, capitalism has no way to solve that, nor any other system.

either you get the headspace that comes with the free software license or you charge for the software and use the money to sustain growth.

it's actually quite simple, but every now and then some people think they're entitled money for work they willingly did give away for free and write a thousand word essay trying to externalize the internal logical fallacy of that proposition

Open Source is socialism stuck in a capitalist world. A square peg trying to fit a round hole.

This should have been obvious from the start. Good luck changing the world to fit.

The thing I like the most about capitalism is the whole laissez-faire liberalism aspect. You do what you think best, I do what I think best. I don't have to do things your way, you don't have to do things my way.

In particular, this is what allows us to try out new things: for one, open source. It's really nice to not need approval from anyone before starting your new project, and to me that's the best part of capitalism (though you may choose to call that liberalism instead, it's the same laissez-faire spirit: each person does what they think is best.)

A capitalist world is therefore a great place for open source to grow and blossom—rightly or wrong, you might not like capitalism for other reasons, but this, at least, is to its credit.

(I myself would also argue with describing Open Source as socialism, for similar reasons—the laissez-faire spirit of everyone doing what they think is best is the spirit of capitalism as I see it. But that's mostly just a semantic point.)

A capitalist word is therefore a great place for open source to grow and blossom...

Alrighty then. So Open Source is growing and blossoming in capitalism and there is no problem and this article is just totally misguided?

Yes, open source is doing quite well.

Nothing is perfect. There are things worth improving. But it's hard to look at all the amazing open source projects that exist and not be impressed.

Is there more to be done? Sure. But don't take for granted what we have. Nor should we throw away what we have because it's imperfect.

So no, I'm not saying that everything is perfect as it is. I do think the article is misguided in its focus, though. The way I'd frame it is something like this: What we have is great, but not perfect. So let's work to make it even better.

> Open Source is socialism stuck in a capitalist world.

Then so are families, churches and other voluntary associations. But I don't think they are. I think it becomes socialism when it becomes a form of government, enforced with law. Cooperative, non-profit associations may not be capitalism, but they are compatible with it. Capitalists may try to tempt members of such into rent paying relationships, but as this week's Freenode episode demonstrates, their powers in that direction are distinctly limited.

We're living through huge growth in both proprietary and open software. To me these trends seem to reinforce, not oppose each other.

I think that capitalism is a somewhat less jealous god than socialism, in that it more easily coexists and cooperates with other forms.

I think it becomes socialism when it becomes a form of government, enforced with law.

The objective of the GPL is to use the law (i.e. government) to enforce a system of socialism.

In this case those laws are enforcing capitalist-style property rights, which are not limited to profit-seeking associations. The creators, or their assignees, own the enforced rights, and among their property rights is the power to distribute those rights as they see fit. Socialist property rights are more likely to be assigned to the community, with less regard for the rights of the creators. A socialist OSS society may still have a GPL, but choosing that license would be less the right of the developers and more the right of political representatives.

Socialist property rights are more likely to be assigned to the community...

You mean like the "open source community"?

Imagine if the open source community, rather than the specific developers of that repo, got to choose the license. Is that an improvement?

Most who use and contribute to Open Source have no choice with regard to license. That choice has already been made by "the community". And once made, these licenses often require the developer to assign copyright for their contribution to "the community". These "viral" licenses can also infect any subsequent project that tries to makes use of any code.

The intent and effect here is pretty clear --- individual property rights are being re-assigned to "the community".

As a contributor, do you wish to seize that choice from the founders/owners of the repo? If you could, wouldn't that make you somewhat less likely to start your own project, that you can reign over?

If your right to vote on the license was a percentage of your contribution to the codebase, I'd expect that repo owners would be far less willing to merge outside pull requests.

Nothing to do with socialism or capitalism. FLOSS has always been about users freedom.

I think it has more anarchist influence than socialist.

Same response as above. You don't need licenses with dozens of pages of legalese to prescribe "anarchy".

Anarchy doesn’t preclude the use of contracts.

A contract is meaningless without some entity (government) to enforce it.

Our current method of enforcement is government but any unbiased third party can be used. It could even be automated to avoid human failings.

When you buy a house who holds the money while the property exchange is made?

... any unbiased third party can be used.

Under who's authority?

If government didn't exist, one of the first things people would do is recreate it. And your comments reflect this.

The important difference is having a choice of who you deal with.

If a person creates something that is useful to thousands of other people but capitalism can't even provide for that person's most basic needs, I'd call that a failed system.

It's also a problem to call a failed system Capitalism when it's something between fascism, crony capitalism, and oligarchy. In a truly free capitalist landscape we wouldn't have the barriers to entry that exist in the US and most western countries today.

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