The things nobody wants to pay for in open source | Hacker News Reader

The things nobody wants to pay for in open source

lwn.net

64 pointspabs311 comments

Lets be honest, the world needs these unpaid labors for it to properly function. Had he not have them the past few decades, we would be living in proprietary hell and productivity would drop significantly.

The way I see OSS funding situation is something like this: My Ferrari is broke so I was languishing on the side of the road when a poor mechanic with shabby clothes was walking by. He fixed my car and when I asked for a payment, he said "Its all good!". "Oh really!?" I said, as I turn of my voice recorder and drive off into the sunset.

Of course I am completely in the right here, he did say he didn't need any compensation and it was all recorded (or in writing). But I can't help but feel some humanity is missing here.

In my mind this scene ends with the mechanic saying "-Just give me a lift!" over the sound of a rapidly leaving ferrari.

In my experience having worked on some popular OSS projects, the scene actually ends with the Ferrari owner flipping off the mechanic before peeling out and splattering him with mud.

The part you are missing here, is where you have insulated yourself financially and legally; and they don't have the means to.

Maybe they are an undocumented immigrant, but happy to help others. Maybe they think they will be sued by someone with money if they take any money for the job (and create a larger mechanical issue).

The problem with your analogy is the Ferrari. It's a closed system requiring a delicate relationship with the company to acquire.

I find it sort of ... misguided? ... when people try to fit open source into some business model or payment/profit mindset.

The people who wrote this were not doing it for compensation. Trying to fit compensation into the picture doesn't always make sense.

This is like saying children consume all the time and energy of their parents and then leave them behind to move on to prosperous and successful lives without proper compensation.

I also sort of wonder what happens if payment systems are set up for open source software. Are the original authors even involved and properly respected?

Children might not be the best parallel : consider social expectations (and even legal requirements !) for children to take care of their parents (up to paying off their debts after death).

It’s a shame that there aren’t more university programs that encourage contributions to open source. There’s a lot of senior capstone projects that just go to benefit some random company. If we’re going to pay these students with a grade instead of cash, it would be nice if it benefitted the open source community instead. Plus, it works out well for the students, because their work is entirely public for prospective employers to review.

> There’s a lot of senior capstone projects that just go to benefit some random company.

That's a solid advice, I think. Your mileages may vary, but I remember a saying from a HR representative about having a good "entry" in GitHub being more valuable to students than having some random company entry in a CV.

In a rather similar vein, that's why things like Google's Summer of Code may be more valuable in the long-run than direct monetary support.

There's plenty of open source projects that derived from an university thesis, project, collaboration. Redis and Ceph quickly come to mind -- and somewhat the original Linux kernel, too. But they where very good ideas of a sole student that gained traction, not really "encouraged" by the university itself.

After 10 years as an educator myself, I think the main problem is laziness in evaluation methods. It'd be hard, time consuming but totally doable to assess the competency of people contributing to one or various open source projects, even if each one works on a different problem.

But if I make everyone build a small operating system or a database, I can evaluate, assess and score all of them with the same method, at the same time.

I've seen that laziness taken to the extreme by old tired professors, and it ain't pretty.

This is a dupe discussed yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138755

Reply on news.ycombinator.com