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Comment by mickael-kerjean | Hacker News Reader

As someone trying to make a living out of my OSS work, this kind of clickbait titles really get on my nerves. Just yesterday, like most week a company did contact me to get support but when sent a payment link and instead of ignoring me took the path of questioning why would they pay for OSS. This kind of behaviour is so common, I have a canned answer for all those companies oss attracts trying to get things for free:

OSS doesn't mean free labour and I value my time. FYI I would have made better money flipping burgers than working on this and I can't realistically extend that principle to help everyone on the internet with a rate that's below minimum wage where I live.

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The author did say that open source maintainers should be paid and was harsh about exploitive corporations. They were simply stating that we should not expect the maintenance problem to be solved by paying developers. Whether that's true or not is debatable. Historically, some have certainly made a living off of developing OSS since their work was valued enough for someone to hire them or because there have been people willing to pay for their services. On the other hand, many more have not been given that opportunity. Perhaps paying them will solve the maintenance problem, or perhaps it will only reveal other underlying hurdles with open source development.

> was harsh about exploitive corporations

taken from the article: "it’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a consequence to be embraced and exploited (if you’re clever enough)"

another interesting quote: "Microsoft and other companies railed about Open Source being a cancer on intellectual property: because it is"

none of the points made by the author are fundamental truth and most of his actual points are in direct opposition to what I do in my own OSS bubble everyday

Read the sentence in its entirety, dropping the parenthetical comment:

> If you follow the above, you’ll see the supposed “free rider” problem is simply a natural consequence of open source being free as in beer: it’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a consequence to be embraced and exploited.

"to be embraced and exploiting" is referring to the consequence, not to the open source developers.

What the author is trying to say is that a large segment of the users of open source software are using it because it is free as in beer. That sounds like a problem, and it is if you are narrow-mindedly thinking about how to monetize the open source software directly. But there are other ways for open source developers to take advantage of the opportunity.

That is how I read the bit about exploitation as well.

> That sounds like a problem, and it is if you are narrow-mindedly thinking about how to monetize the open source software directly.

That may be true, but there is another thing to consider: earning a living by running a business is challenging. Many people do not earn enough money for it to be worth while. Most will have to put up with other businesses trying to freeload, or at the very least cut an unreasonable deal. It is easy to claim the difficulties with open source exist because the software is free (as in beer). Indeed, it is probably more difficult to make money because of that. On the other hand, it is also a difficulty faced by all businesses.

> another interesting quote: "Microsoft and other companies railed about Open Source being a cancer on intellectual property: because it is"

well, that's wrong because Microsoft and other companies were worried about free (and therefore, open source) software.

IMO, open source (without any mention of the ideological aspect of liberty and freedom) is/was their remedy for this

OSS is business as any other, there is no need to take it personally. Be happy you discovered toxic customer before even signing contract.

I just thought of another possible explanation to give them. "All software has a marginal cost of $0, so all effort is in improvements and that still needs to be paid for."

Corporations use OSS for avoidance of paying tax and labour. There is plenty of activist, idealist developers that can be tricked into doing work corporations need but without receiving remuneration. That's why OSS is being championed by big corporations as it saves them a ton of money that they otherwise would have to spend on R&D etc. With OSS they can cherry pick ripe OSS projects, appropriate them and use to make millions or even billions and original developers won't see a penny. You know you may get the so called "exposure", but try to pay your rent with it.

OSS really needs to be regulated, so that for profit businesses pay OSS contributors living wages at very least, if they use their projects.

The hard truth is that these "for profit businesses" wouldn't use many of the projects if they weren't free and open source in the first place. This is why the moral argument falls on deaf ears.

Relicensing is an increasingly popular choice for OSS devs to to try to monetize usage, and it works since it is oftentimes cheaper to just pay than to rewrite software.

> The hard truth is that these "for profit businesses" wouldn't use many of the projects if they weren't free and open source in the first place. This is why the moral argument falls on deaf ears.

There is no evidence for that. If something is good for business and cheaper to buy than develop in-house, business will buy.

> Relicensing is an increasingly popular choice for OSS devs to to try to monetize usage, and it works since it is oftentimes cheaper to just pay than to rewrite software.

This is great to see that more and more projects offer dual licensing, but this really should be regulated, so that developers won't be bullied into giving up fruits of their work for free. This would also create the level playing field where developers from disadvantaged background could participate in OSS knowing they'll be able to put food on their table if they commit time and their skill into it. Currently, OSS is really a domain of people with privilege, who have the luxury of being able to spend time doing unpaid work. They then often get advantage when being hired, by having OSS projects in their CV, whereas someone who is struggling financially can't afford to work on OSS. Many employers look for OSS contributions and that gives people with privilege an edge.

> If something is good for business and cheaper to buy than develop in-house, business will buy.

Sure, but "free" is frictionless for most developers at any business while "cheap" would still incur going through the purchasing process (at bigger corporations and/or governments) or asking your manager to pull out the company creditcard. From my experience with bigger orgs, it would be MUCH cheaper for the organization to write most dependencies in-house than to go through the process of buying it off the shelf. Even if the OSS dependency would only cost 1 USD for lifetime use or something.

This goes for most small-ish dependencies like test runners, API clients and even simple ORMs. Very small things like left-pad or faker.js would be much simpler to write in-house.

> Sure, but "free" is frictionless for most developers at any business while "cheap" would still incur going through the purchasing process (at bigger corporations and/or governments) or asking your manager to pull out the company creditcard.

This is really a non issue. Developers can evaluate whether the product meets needs and then get whoever is responsible to pay. In every company I worked, when I needed a commercial product, I put my case forward and most of the time got the company card to pay without issue.

I simply can't see how this is a valid excuse. No amount of friction can justify people not being paid for their work.

After all we can say why pay workers at all if there need to go through payroll, it's such a hassle...

That would not level the field. Someone who is disadvantaged would not be able to dedicate as much time to writing software as someone who is not. So while someone who is disadvantaged may be able to dedicate, let's say, two hours a day and get paid for it, someone else may be able to get paid for two hours and then do it some more for two more hours for free.

The whole point of level playing field is that they must be remunerated, so there is no instance of someone doing something for free.

We had similar problem in my country with apprenticeships, that used to be unpaid. The good ones where snapped up white middle class children, while children from ethnic minorities had to work for money, not necessarily in their field of interest. That amplified the lack of diversity in the space of white collar jobs. Now unpaid apprenticeships are illegal and that has vastly improved the access to jobs for people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

It's exactly the same situation with OSS.

Relicensing is a big problem is the OSS world too. To work at all, it requires copyright attribution. For small projects this really hampers collaboration. But if you don't do it early it might become impossible to do later.

I don't know how that would work. I don't think I would get a $1/mo VPS if the provider had to transfer his costs for all the OSS projects to the customer, me. And I like cheap cloud services.

> instead of ignoring me took the path of questioning why would they pay for OSS.

Sorry, I thought you wanted support, not a therapist... Here's a local listing of professionals nearby.

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