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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

Per survey I read, majority of open source is created by people who are paid for it. The unpaid volunteer working full time on something is effectively a myth.

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I’ve contributed a huge amount of opensource code over my career - almost all of it entirely unpaid. I don’t know the statistics, but I know many other people who have done the same.

I think there are a lot of high profile opensource projects which are either run by corpos (like React) or have a lot of full time employees submitting code (Linux). But there’s an insanely long tail of opensource projects on npm, cargo, homebrew etc which are created by volunteers. Or by people scraping by on the occasional donation.

npm was a company for years now. It was initially created as a volunteer one person project, then they create company 10 years ago and eventually sold to Github which was sold to Microsoft. It has spent more time being developed as a paid thing then by unpaid volunteers doing it on the side.

I'm not talking about npm. I'm talking about the 3.1 million libraries hosted on npm. And the ~150k libraries available in rust's cargo, 187k ruby gems, 667k pip packages, and so on. For every React ("brought to you by facebook") there are thousands of tiny projects made for free by volunteers.

I have some there, two of them made on the clock on the job. For others I am 100% ok with them being used in the scope of the license. I would find it incredibly absurd if someone called users "leeches" for using these things.

There are some mammoth projects where that's true, but the FOSS ecosystem has a very long tail where quite important and powerful libraries are maintained by individuals in their free time.

"unpaid volunteer working full time" also doesn't sound like something that someone would believe. Full time and unpaid rarely go together.

I don’t think that is correct. VS Code developers and the TypeScript team is paid by MS. Core of React is paid by Meta, or was. Java language is paid by Oracle as is the LiberaSuite and MySQL.

Most of the Linux foundation projects, which includes Node are volunteers. Most of the Apache foundation software is from volunteers. Most NPM packages are from volunteers. OpenSSL is volunteers.

There is also a big difference between the developers who are employees on salary versus those that receive enough donations to work in open source full time.

> Linux foundation projects, which includes Node are volunteers.

The survey found that specifically linux code is dominated by people who are paid for it.

> Most of the Apache foundation software is from volunteers.

Large Apache project specifically are backed by companies per Apache rules. Each project must have at least three active backing companies. They contribute the most of the code.

> The survey found that specifically linux code is dominated by people who are paid for it.

Yes the kernel code, but the Linux Foundation projects (mentioned in the comment you quote) are MUCH more than the kernel.

See the list on https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects

Most of those "voluneers" are also developing those projects as part of their paid job in a form of company contribution back to OSS though.

It depends on the domain. There are a lot of critical utilities in the systems space maintained by volunteers. The “xz” compression library was one recent infamous example where an exhausted volunteer maintainer was social engineered into a supply chain attack that briefly compromised OpenSSH.

Not a lot of applications being maintained by altruists, but look under the hood in Linux/GNU/BSD and you fill find a lot of volunteers motivated by something other than money.

Yes, but even in those domains those projects are minorities and in many examples they make it effectively impossible to legally fund or contribute to them from the side of corporations.

Yeah I’m not buying it. If the corporations wanted to, they would.

As soon as you have more than one shareholder, unless it’s in your charter to support OSS, you need some justification. Corporations only “want” to make a profit unless they have another explicit mission at the highest level of governance.

Why is it legally impossible to fund or contribute? Do they turn down contributions from paid developers? Do they refuse donations or just have no no mechanism for accepting them? Do they not have any form of commercial services or licence?

I think there are very few projects that do not accept support in any form.

In most cases they need to be able to issue a commercial invoice in a region compatible with company accounting.

For a lot of single developers that's not a thing they're ready or able to do. Those that can, usually have companies established as a revenue source for their OSS project.

> In most cases they need to be able to issue a commercial invoice in a region compatible with company accounting.

The need for this invoice is because companies cannot justify irrational spending. The have no process for gift-giving. There is almost nothing that will make spending on OSS not irrational, unless you're paying for specific bugfixes or customization work. You can't issue an invoice for nothing. How much would the invoice be for?

edit: that being said, please continue to make up any pretense to get OSS contributors paid if that's working for anyone.

It briefly compromised the custom patched Debian version of OpenSSH. The issue had nothing to do with OpenSSH itself.

Thanks for the correction.

I'd be keen to see that survey given how many projects I see with so few GitHub sponsors that I can't see how you'd derive a full time wage.

A lot of FOSS is developed by people who do it as part of their paid employment, that is what the GP is referring to, not Github sponsorship (which is tiny by comparison).

Which survey?

Post the survey please, that's an extraordinary claim

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