I'm not good enough to work on open source software
journal.dedasys.com
journal.dedasys.com
But maybe some global "fund" should be used or something like that, I don't think that giving to the project you use is going to scale (we don't want a few guys rich, and nothing for all the rest, otherwise it's a company). But then bureaucracy starts to be an issue, who selects the right projects? And so forth. Not trivial.
Or maybe the solution is that if you are an enough large company, hire N open source developers. Like charity there should be a non written rule that most tech corps should follow. Like the 1% rule: hire 1% of your work force to write open source (and probably this would end being a largere return about branding than many ADs large companies run for more money than that).
Sure its true, but it aint gonna happen.
So soon or later it's gonna happen maybe as everything is posing on this base.
It's true that there's a much larger population of people (like me) who want to work full time on open source and would take a job if it was offered. But that just gets to what the linked article is talking about: companies don't generally "staff" free software projects with new hires. They hire the projects that already exist.
So basically the solution, if you want one of these jobs, is to get off your butt and make something people want. Then give it away. :)
I don't know... I'm not sure it's really a ton. And a great deal of it comes from companies that derive their revenue from something else - in many cases, proprietary software. Ubuntu, for instance, is all about Mark's millions made from the sale of Thawte.
> So basically the solution, if you want one of these jobs, is to get off your butt and make something people want. Then give it away. :)
And then hope it's useful to someone who makes a bunch of money via proprietary software or something else that's scarce, and that they hire you. Why not just make something proprietary of your own to be more in control?
Really, if you were handed a big check and told to build a team of open source people, you'd have a hard time doing it without poaching from Red Hat, Google, Novell or Intel.
And the final point was exactly what I was getting at. Getting yourself a free software gig requires pretty much exactly the same things as getting yourself a funded startup. In some sense it's a subset. Whether you want to make proprietary things or not is, I think, a personal decision.
My last big open source effort, Hecl, weighs in at something like 100K lines of code. LiberWriter, my first real "pay for it if you want to use it" project, doesn't quite pay me enough to live on, yet, but earns decent money at around 10% of the lines of code.
I did make some money consulting on Hecl, so it's not a total loss, and I had fun with it, and learned a lot. But in terms of the money, there's simply no competition: LiberWriter wins by a huge margin, even though it's simpler code that doesn't do as much.
The big difference is with LW, people pay me directly. With Hecl, it was a matter of hoping someone would come along and pay to have some work done on it. It's just so much easier to deal with the former in terms of cash coming in.
Certainly if you make something people want, people will pay you to develop it. I don't see a real problem with the model, though for obvious reasons the incentives are going to drive more people to startups than to new open source projects.
My point is that for people to start hiring you at a high hourly rate, there's got to be a burning demand, whereas with a product or app, the costs are much lower, so it's easy to spread them around.
> Certainly if you make something people want, people will pay you to develop it
Only after a certain critical mass, that is a lot higher than what it is for a proprietary project, where all sales feed back into the project. I mean, I certainly don't pay people to develop Linux, Postgres, Ruby, Rails, gcc or any of the other projects I use, although I do try and contribute back where possible.
BTW, strange but true story: I probably made the most money off of Hecl doing a BlackBerry port for... of all people, PASOK, the Greek center-left political party. This was all before the country ran out of money, and I did get paid.
It's not too hard... Open source coders are likely to write more open source software, so it's a good investment for the collectivity.
Interesting thing is that we currently give 1% of our profits to an environmental program through Patagonia called 1% for the Planet. Maybe we need a 1% for Open Source where companies can be encouraged to contribute developer or $$ to open source projects. Anybody want to work on that?
I think you are already doing it right, honestly. If you devolve 1% to whatever non-profit / good cause IMHO it's already enough. The real problem is that most companies will not do anything like that (1% is a lot), otherwise a few 1% to environment, a few 1% to open source, the world wold be a different place, entirely.
And the next level of the phenomenon is that the entire software industry has shifted its business model to avoid having to compete with piracy or open-source. There are now, to my knowledge, two major for-profit companies building their own PC operating systems: Microsoft and Apple. There are four or five building mobile operating systems: Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Google, (maybe) Symbian. The number of for-profit IDEs and programming platforms is still mostly healthy, but much, much smaller than it once was.
"That which is not seen"? That is, the effect of this privative of profits on the real world? Almost whole fields have shifted over into the domain of unpaid, spare-time open source work. Thousands, millions of man-hours are expended for no salary and no equity.
Think what would happen if all the open-source programmers (paid and unpaid) went on strike. Now you're realizing the economic value of open-source code that goes completely uncaptured by its producers.
Yes, the result is that less gets done, because everyone has to find day-jobs, and that the software industry has changed almost entirely from product business models to service business models.
Now, another scary thought: what if someone stole the code and databases to your web-service? You say that your contacts and relationships are what really makes your web-app worth something, but frankly, that's a load of crap. I'm sure there are some starving Chinese coders who would love to steal your code and your data, bring up their own web-service identical to yours (but in Chinese), get a few million users, and then translate theirs back into English for North American and European usage.
The "relationships and business expertise" excuse sounds much like what everyone said when America sent its manufacturing overseas: "We'll do all the high-value services and design and development work here." Well, no, the manufacturing was itself high-value and the other high-value points in the supply chain eventually followed it, and we're China's bitch now.
There is an imperative to enable value-creators to capture some portion of the value they create as cash. Otherwise the entire foundation of not only capitalism but all possible market economies breaks down into mush.
- Serfdom was still legal in most of Western Europe.
- Professional artists occupied the same social rung as prostitutes.
- An intellectual professional's primary option for making a living off his (that pronoun being sufficient for the era) work was patronage.
- The vast bulk of intellectual output served the primary purpose of glorifying the political and religious Powers that Be.
Of course that doesn't imply that the current copyright and patent law isn't enormously out of hand, or that it doesn't largely function to the detriment of creative professionals thanks to the grotesque ways in which it has been amended over the past three or so centuries. But the basic idea is admirable, and it can and should be salvaged.
I very much agree with your conclusion though.
And yet, computing professionals were much less free than they are now. Because programmers almost universally worked at the King's pleasure.
The exception to that rule was small garage shops. Like Microsoft and Apple.
What does it even mean to say "When you bought a program..." in the context of Open Source? Of course if you paid for it, it isn't open source.
But then see also Pysol; a free open source program that was being sold by sneaky companies. The devs decided to stop releasing it.
(http://bytes.com/topic/python/answers/41344-pysol-using-qt-c...)
As for serving Powers That Be - most of the creative people do it right now, only Powers changed. Some time ago, most disposable income was in the hands of aristocracy and later rich merchants. So they were served. Now due to huge technological advances pretty much everybody has disposable income - so artists cater to everybody. Some of them still cater only to the richest, of course - everybody has his niche. But except for the distribution of the disposable income, not much changed.
This exactly.
It's easy for a community oriented around mostly around things like webapps, SaaS, enterprisey stuff to hop on the anti-IP bandwagon. It just so happens that there's no convenient ways of pirating their software.
2) What day job?
As to 2, If you code, it's a very hot job market out there right now.
You make a lot of what seem like handwavey notions that OSS coders should get paid or go on strike or something like that without really convincing why.
Most professional coders know what they use daily has some strong OSS roots (then there are other branches which have little involvement there). A subset of them do work on them.
The fact people make stuff in the evening that happens to be OSS is often a sign of they like to program not some economic crime.
OS kernels. Linus used to work for Transmeta (sorry if I misspelled the name) as a chips-and-assembly guy before they got enough charity funding to put him on full-time Linux kernel coding, remember? He started the kernel when he as a Master's student in Finland, too. It took until the late 2000s (after having started in 1992 or so) for the creator of Linux to be put on full-time payroll working on Linux.
>As to 2, If you code, it's a very hot job market out there right now.
It's a very hot job market but very, very specialized. I cannot tell you how many things I've applied to and never heard back, gotten interviews with and been turned down for having the wrong skills (ie: C, C++, Java, Scala instead of Ruby on Rails, HTML+CSS, iPhone, Android), been turned down from for no given reason whatsoever, been turned down from because I had admitted to applying to PhD programs (and that was simply the coolest company I ever loved interviewing with that turned me down like this, and a HN-featured start-up too!), and just generally not had offers forthcoming.
Honest to God, if you'd like to see my resume so you can tell me what the fuck's wrong with me that's creating this pattern, I'll send it to you, have at it.
Oh, and then there's the companies with broken jobs websites. There's nothing I hate more than trying to apply for a job I'd love and finding myself facing a page that says, "Oops, an unexpected error has occurred!"
It's funny you mention that one: My day job for a number of years to was to do linux kernel drivers and other patches.
The fact that Linus didn't work fulltime on Linux seems to contradict your assertion that some projects require full time workers.
I didn't make any such assertion. My assertion was that coders need full-time jobs.
No. He released Linux in 1991, he received his master degree in 1997.
The only reason Google doesn't feel the pain from Baidu is that Google never depended on China as their primary market. While we're talking about the Chinese versus other nationalities, by the way, the Chinese currently share the attribute of many rising superpowers (including, in its day, the USA): complete disrespect for "intellectual property" as subordinate to actual production.
If you think copying Google is "dead easy", you're well on the way to become a multi-millionaire. I've tried recently a number of emerging search engines, and none of them is as good as Google, despite the fact that copying PageRank is supposed to be dead easy. On the other hand, I'm sure Google's understanding of Chineese or Hebrew or Russian is not perfect and specialized engines can do much better (I know about Yandex on Russian market, but I'm sure there are more).
There's a place on these markets for much more than one player, so treating everybody being in the same search engine market as Google as "stealing intellectual property" makes zero sense. It's like treating everyone that makes smartphones as "stealing Apple's intellectual property". Maybe some hardcore Apple fanboys think that way, but this is not useful for anybody but them and Apple, certainly not for the consumers or for the public.
As for "respect for intellectual property", I don't see why Chinese should necessarily respect artificial mental constructs that were erected by Western politicians in order to produce some utilitarian value. These things are defined as utilitarian, the only reason that is being argued of why somebody can use the idea and somebody else can not is: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". If Chinese do not agree that this would promote Progress and useful Arts for them, why they should feel obligation to respect it?
I don't either. But you've missed my fundamental claim: lacking any kind of "intellectual property" enforcement, pretty much nothing stops people from treating the code for web-services the exact same way they treat the code for video games or office suites: avast ye maties!
Also, DuckDuckGo seems pretty good to me.
As for DDG, I used it for a month to test, and unfortunately had to go back to Google - for my loads, its quality proved to be inadequate, Google found what I needed in more cases than they did. It may be because usually I search for very easy and obvious stuff. I would like to say my coworkers "why, you still use Google? Man, it's so 2000s... It's 2012 now, use something that's not ancient!" Unfortunately, it's not the time yet that I could do that.
Unpublished works are protected by copyright. http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm
Of course, China would improve. I hope so would US.
But the point about where the money comes from stands - Google's money comes from their proprietary stuff.
I actually think something like Google is a pretty good way to produce open source software, by the way, but it's made possible by the money made elsewhere.
If I get it correctly, your point is that one requires copyright for open source software to be viable, by opening up a revenue stream to support the (free) open source part. This is true.
You can make money form open source on either:
1) Selling alternate, source closed licenses. (MySQL for example) 2) Selling support, consulting. (Red Hat, many others)
(1) requires copyright. (2) maybe less so, but without the open source licenses, which require copyright law to work, the software wouldn't exist to begin with either. Red Hat uses trademarks (which really are similar to copyright) to reinforce their position. So does Mozilla.
The title was something of an attempt at linkbait (albeit not a very good one), but also a way to point out that effectively, it is harder to get paid to work on open source software.
If trademarks are the main protection, the main barrier to entry is branding, not technology.
(IANAL)
If trademarks are the main protection, the main barrier to entry is branding, not technology.
Yes. Isn't that obviously the case for open source software?
My point is that thousands of people get paid to work on open source projects. The project might not be their original creation but they still get to give back by producing something that everyone can use. Isn't that really the point anyway?
EDIT: added a missing 'not'
To continue the OP's concept, these are likely companies with employee counts in the single or double digits, whereas closed source companies have employees in the 5-6 digit ranges, reinforcing the "I'm not smart enough to get paid writing open source" concept the OP presented.
Missing from the above description are people involved in barter economies. There are several barter economy systems in the UK. The UK tax collectors (HM Revenue and Customs) are clear: barter trades can be taxable.
Suggestion: Find an accountant that would like to work as part of a co-operative. The collective either has one big joint account (like a business) or lots of individual accounts - either way good accounting will legally minimise tax burden and help with other stuff.
Maybe I just misread the entire thing, but I honestly don't see the message he's trying to get across. It feels like their is a massive amount of context that is missing from this.
I don't really agree with anything the article says. Open Source development is a segment of the industry. Getting a job in Open Source is really no different than getting a job in Game Development, Robotics, or any other niche market.
You generally have to (1) be willing to accept less pay (2) be more flexible about relocating (3) have specialized skills and experience or just get really lucky.
Many of the components and practices in our software are quite specific to our business and environment. They'd just be useless or, worse, an impediment to other people wanting to reuse the software in a different context.
Even if we were to refactor parts of our code base to produce some "clean" components that didn't rely on the specifics of our business or other processes, there are many cases where that would just add to the overhead of maintaining the software for us.
Software markets solve a coordination problem. Not perfectly, but reasonably well. Same thing goes for many other kinds of information goods. No way would I pay an author to sit around writing a book, but I'm happy to give them $5 for a copy.