Hacker News Reader

This conflates two quite different trends that should be considered separately:

1. A strange reluctance to financially support important software projects

2. Insistence on Free and Open Source software

I agree the first point is a legitimate failing of the software community, such as it is. I get the impression only a few percent of software professionals (or for that matter software-powered organisations) have ever, say, financially supported a FOSS project.

The second point though is not a failing. The problems with non-Free software are very apparent.

I'm not sure it's reasonable to separate the two.

I mean, someone who is fitting bathrooms or writing books or teaching piano will say "here are my wares, here are my prices" and the customers will pay.

But the major open source licenses all say "here are my wares, no charge, feel free to redistribute to all your friends too" - of course they're not paying, I just told them they don't have to pay.

If I'm hoping that Amazon and Oracle and Facebook and Wal-Mart are going to pay $$$$$$$ to me and hundreds of my peers out of a sense of charity and generosity - doesn't that seem rather naive?

> I'm not sure it's reasonable to separate the two.

One is a concern about freedom, the other is being a cheapskate. They're very different positions.

Plenty of people donate to FOSS projects or to associated organisations like the FSF and OSI, but it's a shame the numbers aren't higher by a few orders of magnitude.

Monetising Free and Open Source software is unfortunately not always easy, but it's not as if it never happens. Most Linux kernel contributions are from paid kernel developers, for instance. Some projects make money from paid support services (LibreOffice, RedHat), or offering a hosted deployment of the software (SourceHut).

> If I'm hoping that Amazon and Oracle and Facebook and Wal-Mart are going to pay $$$$$$$ to me and hundreds of my peers out of a sense of charity and generosity - doesn't that seem rather naive?

You're right that there's nothing to stop a major cloud provider from making easy money offering a managed service powered by FOSS, then giving little to nothing back to the project itself.

This is the reason mongoDB is unfortunately no longer using a FOSS licence.

> But the major open source licenses all say "here are my wares, no charge, feel free to redistribute to all your friends too"

It seems you've misheard then. Any vendor is saying "here are my services, here are my prices" and customers will pay (the real customers that is).

The open source licenses are part of the deal but not an intrinsic part of the business, hence the distinction makes sense.

It's up to us engineers to say: (1) I demand source code for my own benefit; (2) hey dude, pay for a RHEL subscription, apparently that money/power trickles to the actual engineers that do useful things for my own benefit! The rest of the world simply does not know about these two types of benefit if engineers don't speak. For (2), it's understandable that people think RHEL subscription is just 100% money wasted if they don't go opening any support tickets. Where instead maybe 90% of the money does go to execs but 10% benefits back the FOSS users around the world, figuratively speaking.

Many FOSS projects are also or largely used by businesses, which sometimes turn a big profit as a result, and which don't contribute even a pittance back to the software they use. It's hard to be motivated to donate to such projects as an individual.

If a project benefits you, it's worth supporting, whether or not large companies are doing so. If anything I'd flip the argument round: your support is most needed when large companies don't pull their weight. OpenJDK and the Linux kernel don't need your donation.

Also, there are plenty of good FOSS projects that aren't seeing much corporate use, such as perhaps KDE.

(Although Google are known for using Linux as a desktop OS, perhaps including KDE, I'm not certain.)

Most products that are fun to build are free software because some developers built it as a hobby. But all the products that aren't fun to build aren't free, and there is where all the well paid jobs are and those wont go away since nobody wants to work on that shit for free, this is just simple supply and demand.

This isn't accurate. For instance, most contributions to the Linux kernel are written by paid professionals.

But if the linux kernel became paid you would quickly see free alternatives spring up everywhere. The paid contributors to the kernel are corporate developers who wants to put their corporate stuff into the kernel, or need to change something to fix it for their corporation, they don't do it for charity.

Ok, so you agree that freely available Free and Open Source software can be developed by paid contributors.

You also agree that software solutions that are not fun to build can succeed as freely available Free and Open Source projects.

> if the linux kernel became paid

Like another comment I just replied to, [0] this conflates software freedom with price. Proprietary forks are often shunned as a lot of people care that the software they use have a Free and Open Source licence. This happens whether or not they're made available to download free of charge.

Also, the Linux kernel uses the GPLv2 licence, so non-Free forks are not permitted.

> they don't do it for charity.

Right, of course. When business interests can align with the interests of Free and Open Source projects, that's a good thing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32423273

No, I mean people would literally create new original OS kernels to fill the void Linux left if Linux for some reason stopped existing as a free option. I didn't mean they would create forks of Linux, in that scenario Linux no longer exists in open form, they would program new kernels. Many people love that kind of work, which is why you will never find a lack of free compilers, OS's, programming languages etc. And since companies wants a free OS for their servers they would start to contribute to whatever OS that looks the most promising, we would have another free big OS for most service needs running very quickly.

> You also agree that software solutions that are not fun to build can succeed as freely available Free and Open Source projects.

Yeah, I should have said "most products that aren't fun aren't free", there are exceptions. But the main point is that developers using these free products in no way clashes with developers getting paid, as the things 99.9% of developers are paid to work on aren't things they use for free.

> people would literally create new original OS kernels to fill the void Linux left if Linux for some reason stopped existing as a free option

Well, no, they'd use the other Free and Open Source Unix-like kernels, in particular FreeBSD. If we woke up tomorrow and there were no Free and Open Source kernels around at all, we would of course want to create one. This is why the Hurd kernel was started, after all. [0]

There are already various non-Free kernels out there. Windows is the obvious one, but also HP-UX and Oracle Solaris. There are also some freely available proprietary kernels, such as Menuet 64.

> you will never find a lack of free compilers, OS's, programming languages etc

It's fun to dabble in those fields, but doing serious work in compiler engineering or operating systems is just that: serious work. Major FOSS projects are very often powered largely by paid developers with specialized skills.

> since companies wants a free OS for their servers they would start to contribute to whatever OS that looks the most promising, we would have another free big OS for most service needs running very quickly

Hopefully we would, yes.

> I should have said "most products that aren't fun aren't free", there are exceptions

Not really, no. The list includes the Linux kernel, MySQL, Postgres, OpenJDK, GCC, LLVM, Chromium, and Firefox. Those aren't mere exceptions, and they're not the kind of software that can be achieved on a have-a-go basis.

> the main point is that developers using these free products in no way clashes with developers getting paid

Right, as I've been saying, business interests can align with those of a FOSS project, hopefully benefiting both so that sustainable progress can be made.

> the things 99.9% of developers are paid to work on aren't things they use for free

It's not clear what you're saying here. You're right that most paid software work is not released as FOSS. A lot of paid software work is on software that isn't intended for use by software developers, so they're never going to be the user anyway.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd

So true. Developers work for free on stuff that scratches their itches, so we have a wealth of free text editors and shells. On the other hand, you have to pay for a decent word processor, because the people who can write one don’t use one enough to be driven to work on it.

> nobody refuses to pay developers quite like other developers

It's because "I could probably just do it myself" (or someone gives away their work for free as a résumé portfolio piece and that becomes the de facto standard)