Tarsnap has given 2^18 dollars to open source
daemonology.net
daemonology.net
> If you're at a startup which relies heavily on open source software, please take a moment to ask yourself: How much does your company contribute back?
And this deserves emphasizing.
Shareholders. Tarsnap enjoys the benefits of being a privately-owned company.
Aside: I think for a public company it might even work well if ESG stared incorporating Open Source contributions.
Remember that it's a common -- incorrect -- trope that public companies are legally required to seek maximum profit, etc. It's a lot more complicated and nuanced than that.
It would not go unnoticed, but say if the CEO is >50% shareholder, he could just say “if you don’t like the way I run the company, sell the stock”.
Now that I'm self-employed again, I can simply donate some of my profits, and am more able to contribute patches.
Sponsoring contributors to build features for your org is probably the best way to go. Your org will get an invoice, you'll get a feature. The project will be happy, and the developer will be happy.
TIL, thanks! Found this: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2227761/a-tithe-for-ope.... Looks like the original blog post is gone. Wonder if Gabe wants to revisit. :thinking:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1890574
https://www.technologyreview.com/2010/11/15/120320/should-co...
I don't find the original in archive.org or archive.is. :-/
The busker is there doing his thing, he's not asking for money to play. He's working though, and payment acknowledges the value of his work.
Charity, on the other hand, is supposed to expect no work in return. You help people whether they did some work or not.
The fact that the OSS dev didn't charge for the software in the first place doesn't mean paying him for that software is charity. It's acknowledgement, and a possible investment if you depend on the software he provides.
As someone working at Sentry my running theory of this is that we're not a YC funded startup and the posts are removed for marketing. Removal in this sense is that the post is still there, but it's pushed down in rankings artificially to be removed from the first two pages.
//EDIT: the explanation given last year was that it "wasn't interesting": https://twitter.com/chadwhitacre_/status/1716947994338021885
I expected this again and thus kept monitoring the index page actively. The post stayed on there for quite a while and suddenly dropped off to the second page and then a while later completely.
It feels like we're being treated as a sales funnel when they pull tricks like that.
Arguing about whether the submission meets the guidelines is pointless when it ignores that users downvote what isn't interesting in their own opinion. The moderators are never going to artificially keep a submission active after users have downvoted it just because it meets a definition in the guidelines.
That doesn’t seem appropriate for something that’s simply uninteresting, based on the site guidelines:
> If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
I regularly come across a submission on the front page that looks interesting, read the article, then come back and notice it's been pushed to the 2nd or 3rd page. My assumption is that it was downvoted by a bunch of people, but it's still annoying. I wonder if there are any sites that track these movements?
Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate the thought and effort that went into this, and I really hope more companies that use open source software follow suit, but I wish they would adjust their formula to not bother with the payout if it's less than a certain amount. It's just more hassle than it's worth, and the nice gesture can easily be mistaken for something else when it gets that low.
It's $15 per month so $180 allocated overall. Would it be more worth it for you if it were paid out in one lump sum for the year vs. doled out monthly?
I don't mind it being spread out monthly. I think it would help if the process made it a bit more clear what to expect (in terms of the total payout and timeline) in the initial message and/or the UI.
Again, I really appreciate the thought and work that goes not only into this program but also into getting other companies on board.
Off topic: if you extrapolated that math, it should be hugely encouraging to aspiring indie/solo developers that you can earn a fantastic income as a 1-2 person business.
$300,000/year for 14 years is $4.2m
If you’re making $1m in profit after 14 years it doesn’t take long to catch up even if your first few years were slow. You also are sitting on a business you could likely sell for $5-10m on top of that.
To answer the rhetorical question: I can tell you that. I wish, though. ;-)
Reality is somewhere between those two hypotheticals. The past few years, my now-2.5-year-old has been taking a lot of my attention and I haven't really been focused on Tarsnap's growth.
Just because it's less than a FAANG doesn't mean it's not a fantastic income. I make less than this, in a HCOL area, and I think I have a pretty fantastic income. $250k/yr is 3.3x the median household income in the US ($74,580 according to the 2022 Census).
Shoutout to Tarsnap, who's already doing awesome stuff like this.
seldom good ever happens in ... the universe
Goodness is a human invention, and a rather young one at that.
Profit drives innovation, and more importantly makes technology accessible at scale. Do you think most of the world would have access to washing machines (which are of ridiculous utility, especially when you factor in their price with profit margins and all!) if it were not for some schmuck wanting to line his or hers of pocket? Because it would not.
At its heart, capitalism is a (greedy) solution to a planet-scale resource allocation problem, and there are no viable alternatives (give or take some modifications/variations).
Tl;dr: Economics 101.
But yes, people make the most incerdible stuff without being paid to do so.
I am pretty certain we had economics for millenia before capitalism has emerged about three hundred years ago.
Local agent behaviour may be greedy, but this could still result in something approaching a global optimum - the economy could work like Ant Colony Optimisation in aggregate.
Isn’t this Adam Smith‘s theory?
Yeah, like US cable and telco companies like to remind you every time they do an anticompetitive move.
And despite that, who is helping move the telco world forward? Pointing to one mediocre example is certainly not proof that profit doesn't drive innovation.
More interesting is what people would achieve if their time wasn't dedicated to profit seeking. The measure of success then may be the subjective usefulness of someone's contributions. It is a big subject but waving it away as you have isn't a satisfactory answer at all
My personal take is that in practice most of the innovation we see in tech comes from the universities. E.g. the tech in search engines, smart phones, the internet, LLMs and AI etc.
The tech is then, in practice, given to the private sector. There the profit motive is used to commercialize rather than innovate.
Commercialization does often require some innovation around the edges, which companies often get by hiring talent from academia.
I realize this is unlikely to be a super popular opinion for some HN readers. But to me it's the one most defensible by evidence.
100% false, normally the people that created the tech while in university are the ones that create the business using the test (see facebook, google, etc), it is their tech to begin with it was not given to them
In most cases the University is also either paid a fee, or is part owner in the company as a startup, cashing out when funding starts.
Nothing is "given away"
now I personally think anything developed using Government Grants should be Public domain, non-patentable, non-copyright, 100% public domain, but ....
Yes, a lot of discoveries (not "most innovation", but besides the point!) happens at Universities. But so what? Universities are either for-profit themselves, or they are financed through taxes which depends on the profitability of businesses in the economy which they exist in and contribute to. And like a sibling comment pointed out: Researchers are often the ones commercializing a discovery. Moreover, I specifically stated that "[the commercializing actor] makes technology accessible at scale."
Your statement that "the profit motive is used to commercialize rather than innovate" is a half-truth, because the profit motive is very much present once you consider more than the first-order effects.
I 100% agree that commercialization of new techology (again, innovation is a lot more than bleeding-edge research) e.g., search engines, smart phones, the internet, LLMs and AI, is optimally done through some kind of interaction between univiersities and commercial actors – but to the mutual benefit of a spiderweb of stakeholders affiliated with both academia and commercial actors, and not some quasi-altruistic act of sacrifice on the part of the university.
Alas, me having the business acumen of plankton means I'm easy calories for the vulture capitalists. Sigh.
Sadly, they are both extinct beasties, these days...
> Which is why seldom good ever happens in the land of profit-driven business.
Many responses disagree with this comment. My knee-jerk reaction is the same.
OTOH, there is truth to the comment in that many examples of "good" are examples in which a business is driven by vision or value, not by profit first.
Apple bought CUPS (printing) and now owns it and hired the original developer (who left at some point):
10^10 / 31 / 24 / 10^6
To beat Sentry's 500k, they'd need to spend about 2 minutes and 20 seconds worth of December profit.
The only organizations that provide free services are, like, donation driven charities. Or hobbyist groups.
Maybe somebody could argue for government funded organizations, but I don’t want to get into that whole can of worms.
Let’s not kid ourselves, by now we know that data is gold and we hand it to these corporations without ever getting paid for it.
One of the main reasons they can “incur losses” on co-pilot is not only future monopolization by market share but also by being provided endless amounts of golden data through usage.
So yes, hosting “social git” with some fancy UI and CI and spinning up GPUs (they will constantly need to ramp up on anyways) is peanuts in comparison to the upside.
Yes, open source developers as well as co-pilot users should get paid for their labour. Directly and by MSFT.
Looking at the dates, it seems they sponsor a few people each month? Or some variation of that.
GOOG, AMZN, MSFT really?
Obligatory:
Something like an SOS License.
Support Open Source
...
All development on this project will cease to exist if dev fund does not meet "DOL Software Dev CPI adjusted Blah Blah Salary" * Number of active/approved devs.
Bugfixes will stop if dev fund falls below Y amount or something
...
Lots to consider here, but it's weird that no popular licenses have this as a clause in there - almost like it's frowned upon to ask for money?
Not sure what is your source for that? At a quick glance most contributions come from Red Hat, Google, VmWare, Microsoft, Amazon. Lot of independent contributions are done independently but as part of employment, which I guess is not free labour?
- https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/9/companies-table?orgId=1
It is opensource so there is still a lot of volunteer work going on there but the infrastructure (CI/CD, image hosting, etc) is also paid for by corporations and not by the community. Its millions of dollars a year in contributions.
So this is literally taking money that would otherwise go to grandma and giving it to open source.
Money that would go partially to hedge funds, sure. But money that's also partially going to grandmas.
How about you let individual shareholders themselves decide if they want to donate to open source personally, since the profit belongs to them? They can take their dividend and they can transfer it to open source. But not have Apple force them to.
I mean, I personally just don't like other people donating my things for me. And if I want to donate my money, maybe I want to donate it to something else like fighting poverty or disease?
It's awesome for a privately-owned two-person company to choose to donate to open source. It would not be cool for a publicly traded corporation to take a twelfth of the dividends I receive and send them to a charity that is not of my choosing.
[1] https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/finance/average-net-worth-...
Second -- if you're 65 your savings have got to last you for the next 20-30 years. Including often expensive nursing home care. Suddenly even a million bucks... isn't that much.
So no -- in general, they can't spare an entire twelfth of an investment. But more importantly, even if they want to, it should be up to them. Not somebody deciding for them.
They can decide to move their money out of Apple whenever they like...?
Because the moment Apple announced that they were going to implement a policy like that, the value of the stock would drop by a twelfth. Instantly.
So by the time you found out about it, the damage would be done.
But you're missing the bigger picture anyways: business is business and charity is charity. The job of publicly traded corporations is to make money, not to give to charity. Then individual people can take the money the business made, and give to the charities of their individual choosing.
Having to choose which stocks to invest in based on their charitable giving portfolios just mixes everything up. The profits are all the same in the end, but charitable giving decisions around those profits should be in the hands of individual people, not corporations.
If your company uses open source software, please contribute back, financially. For large projects, there are foundations, for smaller projects there are other ways (like Github Sponsors).
There are some ecosystems where this is becoming commonplace (I mostly live in the Clojure world), which is a great thing!
This matters, even if the amount of money isn't huge. What is important is for it to be recurring: a subscription. If you use the software and rely on it, keep contributing to ensure continued maintenance and development. Far too many people associate "open source" with "free".
I have been trying to do this for the last two years, and while the amounts are not huge, I try to increase them along with my SaaS revenue growth.
Joking aside, this is awesome. It's great that supporting Open Source is just baked into your business plan from the start!
This[0], however, is uniquely Canadian…
[0] https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/two-solitu...
But again, good on you for baking it right into your business plan!
But am I reading this right? 274k is 1/12th of tarsnap profit over 14 years, so tarsnap has made 274 * 12 / 14 = 234k profit annually? That's only 234,000,000,000,000,000 picodollars!
But also it's safe to assume Tarsnap's December profits have been steadily growing over the past 14 years (or at least for some of those years), so the number is probably a bit higher than $275k/year. $275k/year is more like the average profit for the past 14 years. (Even then, that assumes that the profit numbers are roughly the same every month, which may not be the case.)
in most countries, it is basically impossible to write off donations as expenses. this means the company have to pay taxes for money that isn't even there anymore.
if people want companies to support good causes, the first item on the agenda should be to lobby for changed tax laws.
Just ask the author for a proper onetime invoice. Maybe not all OSS authors will do it, but I woud be happy to make a quick PDF for a nice buck. :)
Now the real reason that doesn’t happen more often: Our financial departments and/or bureaucracy inside the org are actively hindering frivolous acts as being nice to others.
In personal income taxes, I have always seen the deductibility of charitable donations and (in the US) mortgage interest as being a form of social engineering -- donating to charity and home ownership are individual behaviors that the government wants to promote, so it effectively subsidizes them for most people.
Businesses are generally run to maximize profit so you could assume a deduction for charitable giving would be immediately weaponized by creating a charitable arm of the company and donating most profits to yourself, or something equally repulsive.
I don’t want the net financing costs for a rented property to be significantly lower, which would serve to help a landlord outbid an owner-occupant.
(Yes, there is also a social engineering component, but there’s a practical economics-based argument for it as well.)
> Businesses are generally run to maximize profit so you could assume a deduction for charitable giving would be immediately weaponized by creating a charitable arm of the company and donating most profits to yourself, or something equally repulsive.
Aren't there a bunch of groups like for example Mozilla which have both company and non-profit arms? And yes it could be abused, but is a scheme that just donates money to a charity that has the company owner for a CEO and does nothing but pay high salaries is already forbidden?