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Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

I think the "dream" of writing FOSS for a living is that it's like a normal job except for all the non-fun parts like mandatory HR meetings, boring standups, performance reviews, having to deal with customers/PMs/etc who don't understand the technical constraints, etc etc etc. It is just writing code you want to write with zero other obligations but somehow you get paid for it.

When it's written out like that I think most people would recognize why it is not very realistic to get paid for something like that, but it is still a very tempting vision.

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It's perfectly reasonable to want to be paid when your work has positive externalities. It doesn't matter whether you liked doing the work.

I agree, but there are two obstacles to actually getting paid:

- The amount you can be paid for any sort of work has a range. The ceiling of the range is the value you added, the floor of the range is how expensive it would be to get someone else to do it. Since in open source the competition costs zero, this sets a very low floor for how much you can charge.

- Wanting to be paid is indeed reasonable, but just wanting it is often not enough when it comes to companies. There will be contracts involved, minimum time commitments, purchasing processes if the company is big enough, etc. Navigating all that is what will turn open source back into a job, if you really make work of getting paid for it.

> Since in open source the competition costs zero, this sets a very low floor for how much you can charge.

The competition? Does that mean copying the same software without paying it is competing against paying for it? Like how movie piracy competes against DVDs, or not tipping competes against tipping?

I meant it more in the sense of "there are 5 different logging libraries for the language I use, will I use the one that charges money or one of the 4 that don't?".

I wish there was an open source fairy that put money in my bank account every time someone used my software! Until then, it's reasonable to want to be paid without having to deal with the attendant hassles and responsibilities of participating in a business venture, but not reasonable to expect that to happen.

Starting around the renaissance, we kind of had “open source fairies” in the form of research grants, professorships and other forms of patronage. If you look at 19th century scientists, it seems like most the famous ones weren’t paid to do specific research, but instead we’re given space to do whatever research they could.

This has gotten more and more restrictive: even in academia today, it seems rare for open ended grants to be given, and even when there are, there’s a lot more competition for those grants than we can sustain with current funding.

Open ended research doesn’t necessarily work in a pure market system. And most open ended research probably won’t provide any concrete monetary benefit to the person funding that research. Even Bell Labs wasn’t really self-funding despite having developed some of the underpinnings of our modern economy. This is an (if not totally compelling) argument for a basic income: anyone can focus on fundamental research without worrying about covering life’s fundamentals, so long as they’re OK living a bare bones life while they can’t get outside funding for it.

The market can work, but I think we've been going through a particular centuries-long period where the capital-intensive projects are most celebrated since they bring together the best of industrialization. However, there are crowdfunding platforms of various kinds now that let you sustainably finance small projects or build a marketing story that can be taken to a larger investor. When you get some proof, the funding spigot can flood in rather suddenly.

I agree that open-ended research still isn't very rewarded since it goes too far from immediate wants. But I also suspect we are going to get a quality bump on "small stuff" in the coming decades, because so many of our technologies were rushed to market as soon as they were mature enough, and that was a causal factor in major quality issues like buggy/insecure software. Those issues are not cap-intensive to fix, and could subsist on crowdfunding solutions, but they need awareness.

Edison (et al) especially early on, had to spend huge amounts of time raising capital. Our remembrance of history is often rosier than the reality.

Bell Labs in many ways was self funding, 80% of the research the labs did was unglamorous, and wasn't basic research, it was things to directly further the business of AT&T, the Labs did product development and software development directly for Western Electric, which is what the BOC's paid a license for back to the Labs for, and which funded the whole of the Labs operations.

The occasionally glamorous high profile basic research that the Labs did was something AT&T did partially as a public good, and to avoid antitrust scrutiny as well as to develop new foundational innovations for its primary business.

Unless you have a deep knowledge of AT&T's pre divestiture organizational structure, these facts are just not well or widely known.

I think that it’s less that people expect it to happen. But that it rudely points out the absurdism and structural inequality involved in building free software within capitalism.

Not just from the perspective of individual compensation but that billion dollar corporations can be completely exposed due to their reliance on people’s hobbies.

Sounds like you might like dath ilan.

I would :(

I want there to be world peace and all dogs to be happy and I think that is reasonable, but I also understand that it is not likely to happen. To be honest I feel that is pretty similar.

If someone wants to get paid for something, it needs to be explicitly charged for. Can always set up a patreon or something and only give it to backers or whatever. If they give something away for free I think it is a stretch to expect to be paid for it just because someone else finds it useful.

> It doesn't matter whether you liked doing the work.

It matters hugely, a lot of the good FOSS is good because the people who wrote it were passionate about what they are doing. You cannot create this passion with money, which was one of the largest points the author is making.

Is being averse to having good things a prerequisite to passion?

I did not say that, I only said it matters that you like doing the work.

If anything, wanting good things and being dissatisfied with what you have is a pre-requisite to having the passion to creating something new. But none of what I am talking about are liquid, they are tangible - you can't have bad money, it's just money.

If you want to be paid for creating value, exchange value for money. If you want to change society, create value in exchange for conditions on its use and obligations of its users.

It is certainly reasonable to want that. It is unfortunately not reasonable to expect it. Sorry.

I hope you like what you're doing.

What does positive externalities have to do with it? The entire point of volunteer work is to do something with positive externalities where you don’t get paid.

Why should it be "volunteer work" though? It's question-begging.

Proper use of "begging the question"! I never expected to see it in the wild!

Are you asking why people volunteer?

If you’re asking why people choose an open source license when they expect to get paid instead, the answer is simple: they don’t understand open source.

This is no different than someone putting some literary work in the public domain and then getting mad when their work gets popular, criticized, all without pay.

No, I'm not asking why people volunteer.

I'm saying that you're _assuming_ that they are "volunteers" when that is precisely the question being asked.

Thus, "begging the question" -- begging means assuming. Begging us to take for granted an answer to the very question we are debating.

Probably there is a reason the phrase isn't found "in the wild"... people don't understand what it means.

> This is no different than someone putting some literary work in the public domain and then getting mad when their work gets popular, criticized, all without pay.

Federally-funded research is placed in the public domain. Emphasis on funded.

In the absence of funding, people may still perform. If they do, why wouldn't they be upset about the lack of funding?

(In fact, people can be, and are, upset about the lack of funding even if they don't perform. I am personally upset about the lack of funding for many works that are not my own.)

You seem to have a victim-blaming mentality. As if no complaint about the social environment or the treatment of the individual by society can be valid because "you should have known better." The mere fact that people can know about some aspect of society cannot ever justify that aspect of society.

And don't presume people didn't know. They probably knew. Either way, it doesn't invalidate the complaint which has to do with basic fairness considerations.

> I'm saying that you're _assuming_ that they are "volunteers" when that is precisely the question being asked.

It’s not being asked. The authors didn’t get confused and expect to be paid for their work. I don’t know of anyone in the open source community who expects payment for their work from the community. If you want to get paid by your users, open source is not for you. I say this as a long time open source contributor.

> Federally-funded research is placed in the public domain. Emphasis on funded.

Open source contributors get funded by corporations all of the time (see Red Hat, Canonical, Google, etc, etc). That’s not new or novel and is a well-known way to get paid to work on open source. That’s still not comparable to complaining that your users aren’t paying you.

> In the absence of funding, people may still perform. If they do, why wouldn't they be upset about the lack of funding?

Again, we’re not discussing lack of funding. Most of Linux contributions come from people who are paid by some party to work on Linux. The important point is that they aren’t trying to turn around and shakedown people who use it under the auspice of being open source.

> You seem to have a victim-blaming mentality.

No, a victim blaming mentality would imply I’m blaming the victim of something. Who is it you think is the victim here and what are they victim of?

> Either way, it doesn't invalidate the complaint which has to do with basic fairness considerations.

“Basic fairness considerations” is a weasel phrase. What exactly is it you think is unfair about people publishing open source work and it being used under that license?

What I'm saying is that you're merely taking for granted that society will not compensate free software so that it will have to be done by volunteers.

Yet the question under consideration is exactly whether this state of affairs is acceptable or not.

It is a reasonable desire, but not one very likely to be fulfilled.

Let's say I pick up some trash at the local park. Plenty of positive externalities there.

But if I then send the community a bill afterwards, I don't think it will go over very well. Even if they all appreciate the effort they might object, on any number of grounds:

- There are other trash pickers who are more efficient and can be hired more cheaply.

- There are other higher priority projects to which those funds should be allocated.

- That the quality of the trash picking was not in line with the bill.

- And on and on.

If I want to get paid for picking up trash I'll have to work it out with the community before hand. And then there will be expectations, contracts, a supervisor, and all those things that come with jobs.

What an excellent answer.

There is a lot to be said for the value society receives for paying a 10 cent bounty to pick up cans/bottles. How to implement a similar universal petty payment system for FOSS contributions is beyond me, but a minimal overhead method to funnel subsistence-level money to contributors feels like it would have net-positive societal benefits.

While not the reason for "Pfand" in Germany (originally it's to encourage reuse of bottles, now it's expanded to include recycling), this is a pretty good analogy. Including the points beyond which it fails: You get emptied trash cans because people tried to get at the Pfand... Which brings you back to the original point: People are far better at gaming a system than the system is at setting its rules

But if there was already an established budget and way to decide how much the trash collection ought to be compensated there's no good reason why you shouldn't be. There probably needs to be a set contract between the community and "whoever wants to pick trash" up front though.

And some sort of new tax on everyone who uses FOSS, of course. Budgets don't appear out of nowhere.

Right, but that last part of your statement is the required piece that changes everything. An agreement in advance that when you do something you’re gonna get money for it.

“Positive externalities” are irrelevant.

But if the community reacts like this then you didn't really solve a problem for them. At least they didn't see it this way.

Perhaps a more apt analogy: you invent a better water filtering system and provide it to the world for free.

The community immediately starts using it as the benefits are undeniable, but now the community needs someone to do maintenance on their new filter system and you are the only one with the required expertise.

Should they "sponsor" you or is it fair of them to expect you to provide them support for free?

I don't necessarily think it is fair, but my guess is that even in your example, the inventor is unlikely to get paid very much by the community unless they had a maintenance agreement worked out in advance. They might be able to get some funding through something like the Nobel prize or Gates foundation.

Like the author of the article, I've observed that if you give a gift, it's very hard to charge for it after it’s been accepted. Whether this is innate to human psychology or caused by social constructs, I don't know, but it basically feels like a law of the universe.

A few years ago my housemate found out I was cleaning up trash around town and replied (with some disgust, I might add), "But we pay people for that!", to which I replied, "You mean the town owes me money? ;)"

It’s also perfectly reasonable for people to not pay you if they don’t have to. Which is what happens 95% of the time.

would you like to live in a world where every behavior that could be construed as having benefits for you was expected to be compensated?

It reminds me of the joke "I thought I wanted to be a software developer but found out what what I really wanted was just a paycheck."

The essay is definitely resonates with me in so many ways, and the whole idea of foundations as a charity structure not a development/company structure was both new and quite profound. I expect charities that get "targeted" donations feel similarly about them as paying for free software. It is all about whose agency is it really?

To be fair you can greatly reduce the necessity of those other things you list if you take on a role of contributing to FOSS dependencies used by where you work. Because you can have a significant portion of your time devoted to that work & it won't involve those things. You also then gain a passive political advantage as feature requests to that dependency will fall under your responsibility as the contact point between the project & company

Note that I may be totally wrong, as I've never found myself in too bureaucratic a team, so have generally found myself able to do whatever I want (within reason ofc, but I try to be reasonable)

That model works OK for the music industry. If you write code and people go 'wow, super useful' you ought to be able to make something off it. I mean, it's not so hard to figure out if a free software product is widely used or not. A lot of problematic situations you outlined had to do with expectations of either payment or performance. But if there's hundreds of thousands of people using A Thing that sort of speaks for itself.

If you singlehandedly write TensorFlow, and I singlehandedly write a left-pad library which has more deployments, should I be paid more than you?

When I make a suggestion involving heavily qualified generalities, that's a signal that it's not offered as as a fully defined proposal ready for deployment. It's an invitation to explore the concept rather than just throw rocks at it. Of course I think a big project like TensorFlow or Pandas involves a lot more effort than some little helper function and should be rewarded proportionately, though not necessarily in purely linear fashion.

This. Money and accountability are directly related. So are accountability and processes/controls, the "boring" part.

I think the developer dream isn't really FOSS, but something along the lines of "very popular, stable API in an API marketplace made by a single person".

> "very popular, stable API in an API marketplace made by a single person".

Could you explain this a bit please? Or give a few examples? It's getting late here and I can't wrap my head around this. :) Thanks!

Imagine youre the first one to automate something many developers need, like converting IPs to locations or convert between two specific data formats. You can offer your API and make money from it. Check out this example:

https://rapidapi.com/spoonacular/api/recipe-food-nutrition/

There are many other APIs with freemium models at this API marketplace, and there are other marketplaces as well.

I work at AWS on opensearch.org, literally to do this as described.

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