Loadsharers: Funding the Load Bearing Internet People (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Loadsharers: Funding the Load Bearing Internet People (2020)

esr.gitlab.io

102 pointsfelurx63 comments

I'm not sure about this. On one hand the idea sounds good on the other it raises lots of questions. For example, who will decide who is a "worthy load bearer"? Then once people are funded who will manage their workloads?

Also, I'm dubious the whole thing is actually needed in the first place. No examples of "load bearers needing funding" were given. DNS was mentioned, but what part of it exactly? Root TLDs are doing pretty well financially from what I heard by selling all the sub domains in their TLDs, so what are we talking about exactly reverse DNS? Things like .org or edu? These are funded by governments.

Network wise we have telcos paying for sub sea cables, Internet exchanges like the one in London are self funded (by connection fees). Routing is managed by same telcos and IXs.

What are these individual "Internet Load Bearers" that keep the entire Internet afloat without making a dime from it? Usenet admins? I might have paid to keep Usenet alive, but Google bought it all, didn't they?

> who will decide who is a "worthy load bearer"?

If you decide to contribute, you do. You contribute directly to people you think are worthy load bearers.

> once people are funded who will manage their workloads?

They do. They're already doing that anyway. If you decide to fund someone through this program, you're saying that you think whatever they are already doing is worth supporting.

> What are these individual "Internet Load Bearers" that keep the entire Internet afloat without making a dime from it?

The very start of the article explains this.

It makes a series of claims, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that it "explains" anything.

It explains the theory under which the "load bearers" initiative operates. If you don't agree with that theory, then of course you're not going to buy their explanation. But for someone who does agree with their theory, the explanation given looks fine to me.

Examples are on the adviser pages: http://www.catb.org/esr/loadsharers/, http://flent-fremont.bufferbloat.net/~d/lbip/. It seems like there will be more advisers and more candidates soon. My interpretation is that this is not about funding organizations, it's about funding independent open-source developers who maintain critical software.

A couple interesting (to me) candidates:

> Simon Kelley. (Simon promises a Patreon link soon) Maintains Dnsmasq, the most widely-used DNS implementation in the world, essentially solo.

> Paul Eggert. Maintains the IANA timezone database. Ubiquitous in key open-source projects for decades.

I don't know anything about Eric S. Raymond but it seems like everyone in the thread so far has pretty negative opinions of him, and I agree it's not a great look that he listed himself as a candidate here.

“It seems like there will be more advisers and more candidates soon”

You sure? http://www.catb.org/esr/loadsharers/ hasn’t been updated in nearly four years.

Oh no I didn't see the updated date, I just figured this was posted here because it was new. I guess it is already dead.

His idea was published in the last linux journal, and generated in part, in sympathy for my state of health at the time. Since then there has been a lot of decent research on the "load" and emerging government support for critical projects, as log4j woke up quite a few folk as to the problems that we are creating for ourselves with bad maintenence of open source code. The FCC has a NPRM pending on a cybersecurity label, for example, based on NISTś recommendations from this presidential directive.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

It is ok that the loadsharers idea, as conceived here, has died, as it lives on in other places, and the things that esr and I cared about then, are getting taken care of.

Of the five people listed, Paul Eggert is the only one I would consider candidate for "LBIP", although I also note that he's the only one listed with "Need: Unknown" (which to me suggests the answer is actually "no"). Admittedly, I am simply not knowledgeable about the projects the other people work on.

ESR listing himself is... egotistical (to say the least), especially since there's only one of his projects that I've ever tried using (cvs-fast-export). A look at his software page (http://www.catb.org/esr/software.html) indicates nothing that's in wide use (contrary to his assertion, giflib isn't actually the GIF decoder used by any large web browser). The other person he actually links to mentions inhabiting ESR's basement periodically, which doesn't give me vibes of impartiality.

It's also interesting to note that the list doesn't appear to have changed for over three years.

The one that was in wide use to my knowledge was fetchmail, and that was back before Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP.

He's been silent on the site and his blog for that long. Activity on gitlab seems to indicate that he's still alive though https://gitlab.com/esr

> What are these individual "Internet Load Bearers"

Unsurprisingly (if you know his history), the author suggests himself: http://www.catb.org/esr/loadsharers/

This dude has been a "hanger on" since the 80s and has continuously pushed to put himself in the spotlight of the free software movement.

I really think that we're just doing society wrong, and that everyone should be afforded the opportunity to live without income. In such a world, we could have way more of these "load bearing" people who are doing just fine without needing to extract anything from the economy. This makes it much easier for parts of the economy to be less parasitic, as large groups could work on projects that provide value without feeling the need to hamstring those projects with value-extraction systems. Often those value extraction systems really sharply impact the value of the thing on offer, meaning that an economy comprised of projects which all have to extract value could be much more poorly performing than an economy comprised of projects which can offer much more for free. The resulting boost in economic output could I believe pay for the support system such a system would require.

I sure do wish we weren't the only two people in "civilized" nations that think along those lines. Right now on this planet (for a fairly long while now) most of the technology and knowledge to create near Utopic societies exist, but ain't gonna happen, because "mo' money" and "more power (but only for me)" is the ultimate goal of most humans. :(

I honestly do not believe this is the goal of most humans. That view is seriously over represented in media because the people who run the media hold that view, but most people want everyone to thrive.

And there is a philosophical tradition going back hundreds of years concerning efforts to bring about such a world. That tradition is leftism, and while some interpretations have led to calamity, analysis of those outcomes shows that the problem was concentration of power. If we can have decentralized leftism, which generally falls under the label of anarchism or anarchist communism, then we can according to theory build the world I describe.

I tend to avoid these terms because they start flamewars, but since you suggested only you and I think this way I wanted to draw your attention to these traditions.

I boil all that down to less charged phrases like "community ownership of the means of production". It is through an economy described in that way which I believe we can achieve the world we desire. As long as there is an ownership class and a worker class, even with UBI or other schemes, there will be those that hold all the cards and those masses fighting for scraps. But if we can find collective ways to distribute ownership rights over the core systems in the economy, then we can all enjoy the dividends of factory ownership and see the gains that come from growth in technology and automation. I think this is more eminently achievable and sustainable than some hand-wringing capitalists would have us believe.

Have you ever read any Buckminster Fuller? "Spaceship Earth" had a huge influence on me.

I am surprised to see this show up again. The idea was ahead of its time, and sank without a trace. Since then, (and during) multiple orgs have attempted to also put some sort of floor below various maintainers. I see these finally beginning to succeed in some places, although I still struggle on a combination of patreon donations and the occasional grant, for what I do. Simon is semi-retired now but I think dnsmasq is mostly out of trouble. I can think of many others still struggling in obscurity.

Eric himself, had a bout with stomach cancer, and has mostly withdrawn from the web, tired of the perpetual onslaught and criticism. He´s been working on a new book, for a very long time. IMHO he was the right person at the right time, to get open source into the mainstream, and although many might disagree with him, and his politics, I think his contribution to internet history is assured.

ESR´s most recent project was ntpsec.org, which vastly reduced the attack surface of ntp. Another key one used in many places, and needed less now, was reposurgeon: http://www.catb.org/esr/reposurgeon/repository-editing.html

I remember noticing reposurgeon when it is used to move emacs over to git

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6524

Hope ESR is faring well now healthwise. His writings were very influential to younger me getting into computing and led me the to Unix/Linux/FOSS world

I'm no fan of his, but fuck cancer in the eye socket.

FYI there is a company called Tidelift that funds essential infrastructure project maintainers using subscriptions by companies that depend on them and information about dependencies that the subscribers provide.

In my experience, Tidelift has provided the most consistent and meaningful support to maintainers I know, and based on that experience I trust their model and judgment more than ESR's.

The Linux Foundation used to have a project to do this (Core Infrastructure Initiative), but it looks like they closed it down in 2021. Not sure if the LF is the right sort of organization for this.

But I'm very sure that ESR's involvement is the kiss of death for something like this.

The core infrastructure initiative sucked a lot of air into their room, and accomplished almost nothing.

Which is not uncommon for the LF, and why I doubt they were ever the right place to host this.

Ironically the reason the LF came into existence was IIRC "get Linus a steady paycheck", perilously close to this failed CII.

There is an even sadder backstory to the whole LF thing, and the time it got created and sucked the air out of the room. I wish we had found a way to get this idea off the ground, and established the academic and early response institution we dreamed of.

https://web.archive.org/web/20141217131407/http://icei.org/

But I do not want to talk about it, or how I feel about LF, the loss of GPL enforcement, the state of the embedded market, or the demise of linux journal, and of so many other ideals I still hold dear. I just keep plugging on, fixing bufferbloat, and home routers. Y'all caught me on a friday night, after a long week, trying to improve the cybersecurity label initiative at the FCC, as well as girding loins for yet another pointless battle over pointless points over network neutrality debate.

I know that ESR considers himself to be an “LBIP”. Not really convinced that the claim has merit…

It pretty clearly does not, and given his role in this program, his placement of himself in it makes the whole thing pretty dubious.

This would seem consistent with his pre-Web thinking.

For example, IIRC, he tried to organize a contest on behalf of the Internet/Usenet, in which all the computer companies would compete to see who could assemble the best "dream" Unix workstation. IIRC, the unusual thing was that, for his part in facilitating this, he would receive one of the dream workstations personally.

(Which, at the time, rubbed me the wrong way, because it seemed like other Internet/Usenet projects were done more volunteer-like. But in hindsight, or at least in today's cultural conventions, someone being upfront about wanting a consideration for their effort on a project seems perfectly reasonable. It just seemed unusual to me as a kid, in the hard separation at the time, between the techie non-commercial Internet altruistic utopia we could imagine at times we were creating, and whatever different world the stereotypical MBAs would like so that they could grab wealth and power disproportionately.)

Regarding this new thing, ESR might not need the money today, though he might like to be more back in the center of things, and/or to have a positive impact. In early Web times, business wanted to pick up Linux, etc., and he became an "influencer" for open source -- maybe a figurehead, like "here's the counterculture perspective, and you can work with him; now go at it, business types" -- helping to adapt RMS's mission in a way acceptable to business. So he got a windfall when the Linux IPOs were happening: https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-...

Given ESR was very wealthy by most any standards, it seems very disingenuous to list himself as an LBIP. His need “high”. Seriously did he waste his fortune in which case I don’t feel bad for him or want to support his wasteful ways. Alternatively he’s still well off and just greedy.

There's a folkloric belief that ESR got very wealthy, because he wrote a blog post about how wealthy he believed he had gotten on VA Linux, but I don't think that really panned out. If you paid attention to his blog, while he was writing it, the last couple of years the narrative was instead that he was on the edge of not being able to do open source stuff anymore because he had no income; some of his friends/fans even wrote comments complaining about him asking for money, when everyone else just solves this problem by getting a job.

I don't know any more than anybody else who reads blog posts about this stuff, but I strongly suspect that he did not in fact blow a giant fortune, but rather, like a lot of people who briefly had a lot of paper wealth at that time, it never really materialized. It's an embarrassing blog post to write, "I thought it was rich, turns out I'm not", so there isn't the matching post.

Based on the lockup alone he can't have gotten that wealthy. LNUX had a 180 day lockup, after which the price had fallen to $40-50 (https://itsfoss.com/story-of-va-linux/). That'd be around $6 million based on the blog post (36 million at 274/share).

That's of course assuming he sold as quickly as he could. LNUX IPOed right before the dot com crash, a year post IPI it was 9/share (at that price, ~1 million to ESR).

2 years after "Surprised By Wealth", he wrote a commentary about VA Linux's layoffs where he more or less said outright that he'd never cashed out, which wouldn't be surprising, since he was a director of the company. One assumes he managed to get something out, but since he doesn't seem to have had a full-time job after VA Linux, it's easy to see how one could have burned through it. It feels weird doing kremlinology on this stuff; what I feel like I understand about his situation is, wherever he was then, he isn't anymore.

Whatever else he was at the time, he was certainly employable. This LBIP thing is comical because regardless of his economic circumstances, he is practically the textbook case of someone you'd want to recognize as not load-bearing. That, by itself, is not a dunk; I'm a similar textbook case: loud, but not anywhere on the Internet's critical path.

Thanks y'all for the context. I was mainly going on the context from that one slashdot link.

If he waited too long to sell and only got a ~$1 million that could quickly become $500k after taxes, especially in CA. Just another case of options/equity being worthless until there's cash in the bank.

He never cashed out. He got nothing. Just the royalties on his books and the occasional consulting contract.

I suspect there's no way ESR even got $1 million out of VA Linux.

1) ESR was on the Board of Directors of VA Linux and subject to the 180-day lockup so there is NO WAY he could sell under SEC regs until after 180 days so he couldn't get that $274/share ($36 million). I agree after 180 days his stake would be $6-7m "on paper" and 1 year out as you say ~$1million. However...

2) Per Wired article the day after the IPO covering Eric making foolish comments (actual comments: https://lwn.net/1999/1216/a/esr-rich.html Wired coverage: https://www.wired.com/1999/12/open-source-rich-opens-mouth/ ) ESR had options on 150k shares with a strike price of under 4 cents but there was a four year vesting schedule. I don't know his vesting schedule, but there's no way he had vested even half of that amount during the timeframe when the shares were still $40+. Per his resume (http://www.catb.org/~esr/resume.html) , he was a Director from November 1998 to April 2002 so not a full 4 years.

3) Confirming that further, per SEC filings required from insiders on the Board as he was, he has no registered sales while he was before he left the VA board, ie no sales in 1999-mid-2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20030201132729/http://biz.yahoo.... https://web.archive.org/web/20010615000701/http://biz.yahoo.... https://web.archive.org/web/20000815055303/http://biz.yahoo.... He is shown in that last link as having, in addition to the 150,000 shares "Initial Direct Holdings Statement" as having on Dec 31, 1999 "Acquired via Exchange" 12,952 shares with a then-market-value of 2,676,207, but he is not shown as having sold any shares. I am not sure what the taxable implications of whatever happened in that "Exchange" (if there were some, then could actually have lost money on the whole thing!) but I don't see that he sold them while he was a Director. He rode the stock the way down. Purely speculatively, I wonder if the grief he got about his comments at IPO time made it harder for him to sell while he was a Director. His sales must have been on the open market after he wasn't a Director, ie post April 2002.

4) Let's say he sold on the open market post-April 2002 sometime within the following 5 years. Per LNUX stock charts at: https://web.archive.org/web/20051208024613/http://finance.ya... https://web.archive.org/web/20020223103417/http://finance.ya... the stock bobbled between $1 and $6 from April 2001 to Jun 2007. $6 at (maybe) 162,952 shares is $977,712 max. Worst-case he had quarter vesting at IPO which he exchanged for 12,9k shares outright. And worst-case he had two more (but not the final year) years of options vested (75k) which he then sold for at a bad time for around $1 which was ~$87k. So somewhere between $100k and $1m (pre-tax!) seems likely to be what he made; the truth is somewhere in-between.

5) ESR has actually publicly answered some questions on this topic. Per http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=556#comment-228165 :

"[Q:] If I remember correctly, you've made a fortune on VA Linux's IPO. Didn't you sell those stocks while they were up?

[A:] Nope. Didn’t sell before the bust. Too busy worrying about other things, like changing the world."

6) Some ironically less-connected open source contributors were able to put their own money at risk and buy up to 100 (or 140?) shares @ $30 each pre-IPO. They were able to sell on day 1. See Chris DiBona's comments at https://slashdot.org/story/99/12/09/1324204/va-linux-systems... ("Everyone who was in the program and faxed in thier forms is by default confirmed for 100 at 30$. To change your share allotment to 50 or 140 , you must call and tell them. .... You can sell now if you like. " and bgdarnel quoting from the "VA Letter" describing how eligibility in the "friends and family" allocation to open source contributors worked. But the limits of that allocation limited the upside to < $30k. Nice if you got it (and kudos to VA for doing that!) but not making-you-rich.

7) Other clients of the IPO underwriter(s) (e.g. Deutsche Banc, etc) who got larger allocations were able to make more money... if they flipped quickly enough. There were SEC probes around oddities surrounding the IPO allocations back at the time: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sec-probes-ipo-of-va-linux-500...

Sorry for this long research project. I don't care that much but I got curious and I kept finding more tidbits as I dug.

VA Linux was quite generous in selecting their "friends and family" beneficiaries. I was one of them (and made enough money to pay cash for a used car), despite not really having contributed to Linux at all (I made some contributions to Perl related to a different OS).

I later learned that the first day pop of VA Linux was deliberately engineered — large allocations were contingent on buying more shares at market prices on opening day.

One of my great sadnesses about the long term support of FOSS was that the great redhat experiment of letting open source contributors into the IPO´s strike price, has never been repeated. For a tiny amount of re-investment into the commons like this, it would have been a better, far less scary and undermaintained world.

I really felt then, that misunderstood, and underappreciated, complicated, dedicated creators of really great code, would have a floor under them from all the companies that used it and did not understand it.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/late-ipo-change-left...

RHAT going public and sharing the IPO strike prices with the devs they based their success on, was a great day for the prospect of an indirect financial return on years of craftsmanship and care.

I hope one day, the idea finds new life.

Thanks for the research. I did similar (but less extensive) calculations a few years ago and came to the same conclusion that ESR probably got negligible money from VA Linux. Also, having your net worth drop from $36 million to ~0 can kind of mess someone up.

ESR's (slightly smug) post "Surprised by Wealth" at the time when he had $36 million on paper makes very interesting reading now: https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-... He implied that he was going to cash out in 6 months when his lockout expired, but that apparently didn't happen. Ironically, he said that he had much more faith in VA Linux than the U.S. economy over that 6 months. Also ironic in light of Loadsharers is his statement "Anyone who bugs me for a handout, no matter how noble the cause and how much I agree with it, will go on my permanent shit list."

That's sad; I wasn't aware of that. I didn't fully understand or agree with everything he did back then, but I didn't wish him any misfortune.

He pretty clearly isn't, although he probably believes himself that he is. E.g. he claims about giflib: “This is the library that renders GIFs in your browser […] Without it the modern Internet would be unrecognizable.” Except that no browser that I know of uses giflib (e.g. Chromium uses Skia's GIF decoder, which is WUFFS-based), and GIF clearly isn't an important format for the modern Internet anyway. Besides, giflib's latest release was in 2019, so how load-bearing is his maintainership anyway?

Similarly, he somehow seems to believe Android uses his gpsd and thus is “essential for Google Maps”, and it hasn't done so for at _least_ ten years, if ever; it was in one vendor's third_party directory at some point, but I don't think it was ever in Android proper.

ESR explained free-software licensing in a way that made it appealing to executives and other decision-makers. In 1998, when Netscape released the source code for its browser on open-source terms, "Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale cited Raymond's 'Cathedral and the Bazaar' essay as a major influence upon the company's decision":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar#c...

(The Mozilla Foundation was created to act as the custodian of the source code released by Netscape in 1998.)

Although I can certainly understand why people do not like ESR and although he might not have made any significant contributions lately, you cannot deny that in the past he's had a positive profound effect on the industry.

Alternate take: ESR wrote a very long effortpost at a time when effortposts of any kind were, like, "get an ISBN number for it" novelties, and so found himself in a privileged position with respect to communicating about an open source movement he himself had practically nothing to do with creating. That post doesn't hold up well today (it's most famous claim has become a running joke). If CATB hadn't been written, some other effortpost would have served precisely the same utility, and open source would have continued along the same timeline. Mozilla didn't happen any faster because of ESR --- even if there are Mozilla people who disagree (I don't know that there are).

I strongly disagree that esr´s books are irrelevant. You had to be there, in 1998, I guess, facing the prospect of being fired for working on free software, as many were, or facing down the might of the legal apparatus of microsoft, and admiring his rhetorical skill at facing down the suits, as many did, then. He traveled all over the world, giving many inspirational talks.

He books were highly influential on me, and if it were not for his encouragement, and support, there would not be, oh, 10B copies of fq_codel running today, cake, or sqm, or better wifi routers, or libreqos.

We had fun, too!

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4162

I did learn from his lesson - when he told me I had to be a front man for the bufferbloat effort, in 2013, for at least 5 years - he quoted the original of this:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” at me... and muttered under his breath,

"... and then you become a pariah."

I learned from his example.

So far, by staying on topic, and keeping my political and personal opinions out of any engagement with anyone on the web, and not writing controversial blogs (I know he has at least 3 he regrets)... I have largely escaped being a pariah, but, have also been working on fixing the same darn thing, for 7 years longer than I ever wanted to.

I found "The Art of Unix Programming" quite instructive and applied some of the advice to my work.

I would not consider ESR a Load Bearer by any means, and I dislike what his politics have turned into, but he did have a way with prose.

I have just taken the time to point out a few things he did more quietly, later in life, with enormous impact.

It's an excellent book. I hope he's remembered more for that than for CatB.

I was there in 1998. In fact, a year prior, I think I briefly had FreeBSD commit privileges†. I stand by what I wrote: if he hadn't found an audience with CATB, someone else would have found an audience with some other effortpost.

I'm not writing about his politics. I've written at length here about CATB, on its own merits, with none of the surrounding problematic context of what latter-day ESR became. It's not a good post. What's true about it isn't novel, and what's novel about it isn't true. In particular, "Linus's Law" is --- again --- a running industry joke.

† This isn't a Linux vs. FreeBSD thing, I've been a Linux person for going on 15 years now.

There's also Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund, which was set up with a similar goal. It funds curl, for example.

https://sovereigntechfund.de/en/

I just heard about that recently! I am encouraged! I hope they put some dough under OpenWrt. NLNET has also been a consistent and easy to apply to funder.

Also note http://www.catb.org/esr/loadsharers/ as ESR's initial list of proposed loadbearers; he additionally links to Dave Täht's loadsharer page: http://flent-fremont.bufferbloat.net/~d/lbip/

One on that list is not like the others.

I should totally take that down. Nobody cared. I got, oh, perhaps 70 dollars a month more into my patreon via this idea...

... but I like to think, that the awareness of the problem itself has propagated all the way up to the highest levels of many governments.

ESR: Opposes communism and all things left with McCarthy-esque fervor.

Also ESR: Tries to reinvent Kropotkin's mutual aid from first principles.

Someone else taking your stuff and deciding what to do with it is different to you choosing to give some of your stuff away.

Classic "communism is when you share your toothbrush" except it's "anarchism is when people steal from you".

Ooh, I've got one:

Classic anarchism is when I share knowledge about how to make your own toothbrush.

Communism is when I get stabbed in the back because I didn't help them take over the toothbrush factory.

As a commie who feels bad about Kronstadt, I got a chuckle out of this. That kind of back-stabbing has happened too often.

It’s funny but if esr actually read Kropotkin without bias I suspect he’d find a lot to agree with. I don’t know if he’d realize how much he’s been co-opted by what Kropotkin would call “the crushing powers of the centralized State.”

I mean, he does in fact identify as an anarchist, though from the individualist anarchist tradition: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/anarchist.html

He's a right-libertarian/ancap, which is not real anarchism. Real anarchism considers capitalism and private property as forms of control that must also be abolished.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/

They should fund the libjpeg-turbo guy.

Essentially crowd-sourced Bellcore?

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