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Comment by armini | Hacker News Reader

You know GitHub sponsors is a broken experience when you find out GitHub only supports 7 people on their own platform https://github.com/github companies really need to fund their dependency tree…

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GH could be doing more but they are also hosting open source, and closed source, repositories for free.

Not exactly for free nowdays since they teach their AIs on the repos.

Yes, that's still exactly for free.

Free doesn’t seem like a great name for situations in which profit is extracted from a user in a sort of nebulous fashion.

you could say the same thing about ad based businesses. how else is the company supposed to cover its costs if it has a free service?

They aren’t free, they are ad funded. You pay for the service by viewing the ads.

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.

Yes, perfect training grounds for your future “solo-pilot coding agent”.

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.

I recently learned that Kubernetes is running on a lot of free labour. The main draw and ever increasing underpinning for lots of services provided by the behemoth infrastructure entities…

GOOG, AMZN, MSFT really?

Software labor is so funny. Here we are, with software engineering salaries some of the highest of any profession in the US. While at the same time much of the most critical and commonly used software was written completely for free. It’s an interesting juxtaposition.

> While at the same time much of the most critical and commonly used software was written completely for free.

Obligatory:

* https://xkcd.com/2347/

That little block is curl.

I wonder if there's a license pegged to some meaningful metric (a hard problem unto itself), that prevents usage if the dev fund/devs are not compensated an X amount in a specified interval.

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

    ...

Just some half baked thoughts, many conditions can be added or removed depending on the project structure/goals, but the underlying thought would be that Devs Get Paid is a key requirement in there somewhere.

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?

> I recently learned that Kubernetes is running on a lot of free labour.

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?

I think you are confused here because kubernetes is heavily subsidized but the kubernetes providers:

- 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.

i wouldn't really call $400k/year in total "heavily subsidized", that's around the all in cost of a single developer at one of these sponsoring companies

Almost all of the top Kubernetes contributors work for Kubernetes service providers...?

> github is sponsoring 7 organizations and maintainers and has sponsored 958 in the past

Looking at the dates, it seems they sponsor a few people each month? Or some variation of that.

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