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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

Writing free software is like painting. You should do it if you feel like it, or if you, yourself, get something out of it. The moment you start to feel that you are owed something is the moment that you should stop doing it, because what you do from then on is probably not going to be any good.

By all means, do try to aim for the greatest good that your software can create, by making good software, good documentation, a nice community, an AGPLv3 licence, etc. But never feel like you deserve anything, that the world somehow ought to pay you back. It might or it might not, whatever happens happens. The world is not just, and to assume it will be just is setting yourself up for inevitable disappointment.

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Unlike paintings, FOSS software is critical to many governments and multi-trillion dollar corporations.

Paintings are responsible for the happiness of millions. So what? What people choose to do with your work you gave away (or allowed a museum to hang on a wall) is up to them. Don't give your work away if you don't want people to use it.

I know it's not great. But software being used as intended by rich entities is not an intrinsic evil.

> Don't give your work away if you don't want people to use it.

This about sums it up.

But at the same time, many people feel like there should be another way to do things. To create code, libraries, frameworks or whatever else that many can benefit from, but there also be some sort of a financial gain to make it sustainable, rather than just a hobby.

Recognition is nice, but recognition won't pay your bills or put food on the table (it may help indirectly by opening up new opportunities, but that's a different conversation).

That's why some are looking in the direction of software that's free for non-profits or non-commercial usage, but requires a license to use commercially, yet that's not as easy as one might believe (bureaucracy and legal aspects), as opposed to ticking a checkbox in GitHub or wherever that would say "i'd like to charge money for someone using this commercially" and filling out some other data. There's probably a company or two out there to make software licensing easier for developers, though.

That said, then we are no longer really talking about "open source" anymore, since we're coming up with limitations of who can or can't use the code and for what, that's more like just source available at that point. That's why licenses like Server Side Public License (SSPL) aren't commonly recognized as open source licenses.

So, in summary:

  - if your goal is money (now or in the near future) then NO, open source is not worth it (at least if you expect a degree of certainty)
  - if that's not a concern (you have a job) or maybe it's something you just do out of passion or for the experience, then YES, it's probably worth it

To summarize: What some people are looking for is a business model. Free software is not a business model. Free software is an ethical stance, around which any number of business models may conceivably be constructed.

> Free software is an ethical stance, around which any number of business models may conceivably be constructed.

Genuine question: where are they?

Why do we get articles like the one in this thread, or maybe others like it, for example https://christine.website/blog/open-source-broken-2021-12-11 and https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html

Are we not just there yet, as an industry? Or are there models that work really nicely, but just haven't gotten popular enough?

So, for example, the arts have gone in the opposite direction. Play my recording of my song anywhere and you need to pay me. Make a song too similar to mine and pay me. Put my song in the background of your movie and pay me whenever the movie is on, (even if the TV was on mute or the viewer can't hear).

Royalties might be the opposite to open source ethically, but they'll let some developers get rich, for sure.

The key difference here is that for, say, a piece of music, you can very easily point to someone as the creator of said piece. Or a group of people, or a record label, or whoever owns the rights to it. How do you handle royalties for a FOSS project where dozens, or even hundreds of people have contributed various amounts of code over the years?

You don't. Royalties are a proprietary model, not an open source model.

I understand that, I was just pointing out a practical issue with the royalties model if it were to be applied to an open source project.

> How do you handle royalties for a FOSS project where dozens, or even hundreds of people have contributed various amounts of code over the years?

Look, you just mint a NFT for it. Easy peasy. If you can do it for Bored Gorillas or whatever, you can do it for a software release.

Every company which is contributing to free software, in any form, is a free software business model. A business model does not necessarily need to be defined by its ethical stances; an industrial manufacturer might decide that for ethical reasons they will not use child labor, or use CFCs in their products. But simply saying “I will be ethical” will not lead to a business model¹. I.e. to start with free software and from there try to find a business model will only lead you to a few well-known examples; to wit:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html.en

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html

However, any business model which is otherwise ethical and supports free software in some capacity is a free software business model.

1. https://ozyandmillie.org/archives/comic/ozy-and-millie-96

Isn't this already a solved problem, though? I have tools that are "free for non-commercial use, pay $xxx for commercial use." Sure it's an honor system (until you need support!), but so is any other licensing method.

If FOSS is critical to your government then your government should participate in maintaining it. They're owed nothing either way.

Governments are not demanding that anyone is creating FOSS. There is no labor camp for developers and bi mandate.

They are using FOSS as license permits.

I don't think you're considering the context of my reply.

And that's a good thing - I surely would not want governments and corporations to depend on secret, proprietary code! Free software should be a moral obligation, without restrictive "non-commercial use only" or "no use in a public cloud" conditions attached.

That's a choice the governments and those multi-trillion dollar corporations made.

They are free to write it themselves if they want.

No one held the US Department of Defense over the coals and said, "You MUST use log4j."

If you want in those deep pockets, figure out licensing

Once the proverbial cat is out of the bag, it's done. They'll fork and maintain if they have to

They could just as well create an equivalent in house. Nothing is owed

More sponsorships and such would be great of course... but expecting more than the system requires is excessive by definition

Thankfully, governments and multi-trillion dollar corporations are well equipped to pay for ongoing development and maintenance of FOSS.

IMO the AGPL license implies adequate compensation - you get to have access to the source of any derivatives of your source, thus you're able to benefit from them as they do from you.

Nope. The GPL, AGPL, etc. requires of anyone who changes the code to give the changed code to the users of that changed code. Not to the original author. It has absolutely nothing to do with compensation; it’s purely a question of freedom for the users of the code, so that the users, in turn, can further change the software as they see fit for their own reasons and purposes.

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