Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
joshbeckman.org
joshbeckman.org
The problem being that as a maintainer, I refuse most contributions. Not only because they are low-quality (it happens), but also because they are often out of scope, or I just disagree with the direction. It's my project, I maintain it, I choose what goes in it. But you're free to fork it with your changes, that's exactly why I made it open source. If you make an interesting fork, I may totally import some or all of your changes! And if you first ask in an issue, I may offer you to open a PR directly.
I almost always use copyleft licences: it makes it mandatory to share the modified sources with the user, who can then upstream them.
Many times in companies, if I need to patch a permissive dependency, my company will not allow me to spend time upstreaming my patch. Whereas if it is a copyleft licence, I can tell my manager that I am obligated to open source my changes (which is not correct, but managers usually don't know that, don't care so much about the nuance, and anyway it's a win if we follow the copyleft conditions to the letter).
But my experience has been that most managers are not competent in that regard. If you have a good manager that understands that, then that's great. But it's rare. Most of the time, it works better to bullshit them with the legal consequences of not allowing you to upstream your changes.
Again, that's my experience.
the argument is though that repatching is work, and especially it's the kind of work you do not want to be stuck with while you upgrade, because if you forget to do it ahead of time, which is likely to happen, you end up with a potentially large downtime or an unexpected delay in the upgrade process.
in other words: the actual truth is: we can't upgrade unless we reapplied the patch to the new version. basically, it is about making the re-patch process appear as dramatic and disruptive as possible.
the leaders can't deny the possibility, because the code that is patched could change dramatically, to the point that you have to redo all the work from scratch.
i am actually stuck in such a situation with one of my projects. i need to merge two branches that were created some time ago causing a divergence that would have been easy to deal with, had i properly merged the branches at the time. now the merge will take as much effort as the original development.
as developers we all know this of course. the challenge is to explain this to the leadership in ways that they can understand.
It takes a _lot_ of time for someone to meaningfully contribute to a project, and would just result in maintainers having the overhead of training that many new people on a project
I'd much rather figure out a way to finance those open source projects in a sustainable way where those projects can decide to hire full time employees.
An alternative take I'd rather see is "Employers guarantee 8 hours per week of time to work on open-source projects, including ones I start myself". Employer gets no IP stake in the project, and it's done for public good + a means to allow employees to upskill.
Otherwise it just becomes a case of another grindset. You're expected to do more, with the limited free time you have.
It’s like the strategic difference between relying on a volunteer army vs conscription
System: "Contributing to Open-Source Should be Required, Like Jury Duty"
> No One Understands Software Because No One Understands Time
> All Programming Languages Converge to English Eventually
> The Best Database Is Just Two People Talking
> Stop Writing Code. Start Legislating Software
And my personal favorite:
> AI Safety Is Just the New Gluten-Free
Companies actually want a kind of vendor relationship, but they don’t want to pay any money.
Devs want something dev focused, and open source is usually code for being dev focused.
I don’t think either truly wants actual “open source”
Contributions to the documentation, translations, or helping managing the community are also extremely valuable and do not require the same technical skills.
A jurist has an extremely narrow role: deciding whether the defendant is guilty. The jurist has zero input on the laws or court procedure or sentencing or anything else. The judge is supposed to explain how all those things work to the jury, and hold their hands pretty much the whole time up until the part at the very end, where the jury go off to deliberate and deliver the verdict. The jury is completely passive even when it comes to examining the case itself, which is the job of the lawyers. It's a pretty good system because essentially the whole process is handled by seasoned professionals, except that one crucial part of saying guilty or not guilty.
That's fundamentally different from contributing to open source. Nobody's holding your hand from start to finish, because that would kinda defeat the point of contributing.
But if you take the government out of the equation, and instead mandate contribution via project licenses, that might be worth a try.
Forced labor is typically a last ditch effort to prop up a system that is inherently unsustainable.
Any mandatory service will result in at worst malicious compliance and at best in low quality work. And I'd rather take quality over quantity.
Then again, according to the Supreme Court, even forced, unpaid road duty (chain gangs anyone?) is an inherent power of the government, so maybe this is ok.
> In view of ancient usage and the unanimity of judicial opinion, it must be taken as settled that, unless restrained by some constitutional limitation, a state has inherent power to require every able-bodied man within its jurisdiction to labor for a reasonable time on public roads near his residence without direct compensation.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/240/328/
(spoiler alert: according to the ruling, the US Constitution, including Amendments, does not limit this power; and this is in fact cited as justification for upholding the draft)
But the Court chose not to use those arguments, perhaps because they are less absolute and don't apply as cleanly to the draft.
Personally, I think that jury duty as it is today (no real pay, sometimes very long trials, "hardship" completely at the discretion of the judge) is actually a substantive violation of the principles of liberty that the 13th Amendment (along with the rest of the Constitution, notably the 5th Amendment) was meant to protect; (though I myself would likely enjoy actually being on a jury, and am fortunate that I can afford it/my work would likely pay).
And I don't think it would've been crazy to require an Amendment to institute a compulsory military draft, or better yet interpret the 13th Amendment to allow the draft (and jury duty) on narrower grounds but use it to better protect soldiers against various abuses inherent in the current military power structure and lack of exit option.
I do think that mandatory road duty is about as direct a violation of the purpose of the 13th Amendment as anything else the state could do. I think the (explicit) argument that the takings and due process clauses protect your money but not your labor is patently ridiculous.
Let me make sure I'm getting this right. You're making a serious claim that if the state required you to, say, clean the road by your house every morning, you'd feel like your experience would rival those of 19th-century slaves? You genuinely think that was the kind of thing the amendment was written for and do not see a meaningful distinction between the two?
Obviously the experience wouldn't rival one of a 19th century slave and nobody is making that claim. However, forced labor for no compensation is slavery, by definition.
This was literally the comment:
>> I do think that mandatory road duty is about as direct a violation of the purpose of the 13th Amendment as anything else the state could do.
The state could bring back 19th-century-style slavery, too. Wouldn't that be a more direct violation of the purpose of the amendment? Because eliminating that sort of thing was kinda the purpose of the amendment, no? The purpose of the amendment clearly wasn't to prevent the government from requiring you to maintain the road around your home... right?
This isn't my interpretation, I'm reading what you guys are writing as-is. You're trying to add more context and explanation that wasn't there, weakening (and frankly contradicting) their argument.
It's especially ironic given you're both simultaneously trying to read the amendment so blindly and disregarding the context or purpose (the original purpose emphatically was not to prevent you from having to do a bit of upkeep around your neighborhood), yet somehow you don't like it when your own writing is read literally?
It's like trying to argue that a little murder is fine because really, the laws are set up to prevent mass murder.
Eh? Violence? For refusing mandatory upkeep around your home and neighborhood? Are you writing this from North Korea or something? How is fining you such a foreign concept where you live that your government has to resort to violence to get you to do some upkeep as a homeowner?
> but both are de facto slavery and both are direct violations of the amendment. If you wanna argue that there is a concept of a "lesser violation" and that it makes some forms of slavery OK, be my guest but even children don't buy arguments like that.
This was the "strongest plausible interpretation" of what I've been saying this whole time?
Children buy perfectly well the idea that requiring homeowners to do some upkeep around them is not even remotely "slavery". Just like how they understand perfectly well that making them clean their rooms is not "slavery" either. They understand it's not only ridiculous, but outright insulting to human dignity to suggest that these are comparable to slavery. Adults on HN are the ones who somehow struggle with this, not children.
What happens when you don't pay the fine? What happens when you resist the armed men at your door?
> outright insulting to human dignity to suggest that these are comparable to slavery
What's outright insulting to human dignity is authoritarians justifying slavery on the basis of "other forms are worse".
Garnish your wages? Freeze your bank account? Put a lien on your house? I don't know, I've never been blessed with the urge to die on this hill. They sure as heck have a million options besides injuring you, and they won't injure you unless you do something other than merely refusing labor or payment. "He didn't pay the fine, let's go beat him up till he does" is not how things work in my part of the world.
Unlike, you know, actual slavery.
"political power flows from the barrel of a gun" - Mao
I'm pretty sure my Federal grand jury duty was compelled.
I have written a small open source package that became hugely widely deployed without my knowledge — a really very pleasant surprise — but hadn't done an awful lot more in terms of open source contribution for a long period of time until two or three years back when I began to contribute in various ways to a project that has really changed my life for the better.
I now feel a whole lot more ethical about the amount I get out of it personally, because I am putting in about ten hours a week of my own time.
I maintain some stuff, I report bugs and contribute to several projects (with a varying degree of activity), you maintain some stuff and in the end we all benefit from it. And yes, of course some people do a lot more, but even more people do a lot less. And if you like donating money to people who like to accept money, sure, go ahead. (I think I received something from an Amazon wish list once, and we ordered some swag for some collective donation money once - which is overall not a lot for over 20 years of occasional open source work. Not complaining here, just for reference - I prefer not to be paid for doing my hobby stuff in my free time.)
I constantly use FOSS for the commercial gain... Of someone who isn't me.
The toil of dealing with low-quality, half-assed first-time contributions is often higher than the effort of implementing the same features or bug fixes from scratch. And that's if you agree the features or fixes are useful in the first place.
I've already seen college students forced by their teachers to contribute to open-source projects and it's almost always just sad. The patches don't follow your project's practices, they usually have an array of subtle bugs to diagnose... and on top of that, you're dealing with a person who probably doesn't want constructive feedback in the first place. They just want a good grade on their assignment (or, in this proposal, want you to sign off the completion of their "OSS duty").
If you compel 100x as many people to submit half-assed contributions, you'll just drown in noise. Nothing good will be accomplished this way.
On another note: There's very little substance in this post. It comes across as a lazy, shallow, "hot" take! Which is fine. It's your blog and you should write however you like on your blog. But is this really a good fit for HN? It's frustrating to see shallow posts with no substance like this rise to the top but higher-effort go unnoticed.
But the note in the article is getting at something that feels interesting. I think there's a more fruitful conversation around "how might this work in spirit?" instead of "would this work literally?"
People should have choice and freedom in what they want to spend their time doing. I respect the open source community and some day I’d love to find the time to contribute at my own will, not because I’m called to.
"don't go being a twat now!"SHOULD a person do it? Yes.
SHOULD they be forced to do it or go to the Gulag? No.
Save jail for violent criminals, not this white collar BS.
So you think that, for example, every single person who uses LibreOffice is morally obligated to contribute code to the project? Even though the vast majority of them don't even know how to code?
But in general, yes. One receives and one can give back.
And contributions can be way more than code. Documentation, testing, good bug reports, moderating forums, hosting events for a coding session, ... or just money.
Addendum: Particularly when the forum has gone sour.