GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source
blog.greg.technology
blog.greg.technology
I am. I enjoy making things, and it's even better when others enjoy them. Just because you have expectations that you should be compensated for everything line of code you write; doesn't make it ubiquitous, nor should your expectations be considered the default.
I'd argue If you're creating and releasing open source with the expectations of compensation, you're doing it wrong. Equally, if you expect someone creating open source owes you anything, you're also part of the problem, (and part of why people feel they deserve compensation for something that used to be considered a gift).
All that said, you should take care of your people, if you can help others; especially when you depend on them. I think you should try. Or rather, I hope you would.
Would it be chaotic? Sure, in the same way that open source or any other form of self-organization is. But boy it sounds a whole lot better than our current model of slavery-with-extra-steps…
There is effectively zero evidence suggesting a population on UBI will result in some sort of outpouring of creativity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori and it's not a phenomenon limited to Japan.
There will always be strivers who measure their self worth against superficial standards (Russ Hanneman “doors go up” hand gesture here), I just don’t see why everyone should be forced to play that game or starve I suppose. Giving everyone the option to settle for a life of basic dignity while caring for those around them, or going all in on some academic / creative pursuit seems equally valid investments for society.
The fact that these groups are not producing mass amounts of creative works in no way implies that currently-productive people would not produce significantly more creative works if they had the time and resources to do so.
Also, there is at least one example of UBI contributing to an increase in activity:
"According to the research, 31% of BIA recipients reported an increased ability to sustain themselves through arts work alone, and the number of people who reported low pay as a career barrier went down from one third to 17%. These changes were identified after the first six months of the scheme and remained stable as the scheme continued." [1]
[1] https://musiciansunion.org.uk/news/ireland-s-basic-income-fo...
Jazz and other music genres in the US came without government welfare, they came from struggle and oppression. Motivated artists will still work part time to fund their dream, they don't necessarily wait for welfare to start making art.
IF you were to give a lot of people free money today, will you get more and higher quality art in return, or will most people just drink and smoke that money while playing videogames at home?
Society, people and the world today are vastly different than back in the 1960s, so we need new polices targeting the society of today, not 1960s policies.
It's not like becoming famous back then was easy either. Plenty of good bands never got anywhere. The Mona Lisa wasn't a famous painting until someone stole it in 1911, before that nobody gave damn and now it's the most famous of them all. Survivorship bias and randomness in art is real.
Much of it is farther in the electronica genres that many people somehow still ignore the existence of but I haven't had to listen to the same song twice unless I wanted to in a number of years. Just on my youtube discovery feed right now I got multiple 1+ hour synthwave mixes, EBM/EDM, industrial bass, multiple forms of metal, filk, jungle and DnB, punk rock, old and new jazz styles, and more, 95% of which was made in the last 2 years.
How is that proof of "good music"? That's just background noise.
Maybe the genres people are creating more of don't match your personal preferenceThis reinforces others talking about the flaws of hustle and grind culture. The status quo create the conditions for the negatives and then point to that and say “see”.
>There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.
As it happens, the Japanese internet is absolutely rich with content created by individuals, most of it done for the sake of love for creative work rather than financial motivation. I spend much of my free time either consuming it or contributing to the pool of such work myself. The entire point of this discussion thread was about the potential for creativity if you were to unshackle it from the demands of financial self-sustenance.
As an aside, I believe this phenomenon manifested as strongly as it has in Japan because of the extremely low cost of living relative to the level of economic development; a studio apartment can be had for less than the equivalent of $200 USD per month, and many parents can afford to and are willing to pay this price to get the NEETs out of their house. In essence enabling them, not that they want to enable their adult children to depend on them but the burden is small enough that they can tolerate it.
That being said, I’m skeptical of UBI being workable as well.
A crappy sand castle from a eight-year old that will be torn down when the tide comes in is not really contributing to anything useful, but can be quite creative.
Surely this was a contribution even if not valued at the point of making it.
And you expect the voting public to be persuaded to support UBI because of the immense societal value of an tsunami of gooner fanart (yes, I do have some passing familiarity with the sort of output Japanese NEETs generate) and "trashy webnovels"? I'm pretty sure that when the person I'm replying to talked about "the incredible artworks [and] literature ... that would spring into existence", that's probably not what they were hoping for.
That you boil it down to "gooner fanart" reflects entirely on yourself and what you view. I believe this is known as "telling on yourself". The overwhelming majority of the artistic output is actually not lewd; somewhere in the region of 85-90% of what gets published is SFW. Not only that, a pretty considerable amount of output is in fact professional-quality; if anything keeps them from being professionals, it's merely the fact that they spend their time creating what they want to see in the world. Being an actually professional artist generally entails creating what other people want to see in the world; specifically what a critical mass of people willing to pay want, which renders commercially viable art to a limited subset of possibilities, mostly only possibilities that appeal to the lowest common denominator if you want to ensure the safety of your income.
You could indeed say that literature is a weak point relative to the very high quality art, music, games, etc, in the NEET cultural sphere, but it's because people aren't trying to be literary. There is simply a subcultural preference, among both creators and consumers, for easier-to-digest writing. The forms of creativity people take an interest in don't have to match the exact ones you value in order for them to have merit. People read and write trashy webnovels because they like trashy webnovels, and that's fine too. It is still an expression of creativity all the same. And some small percentage of those trashy webnovels do go on to be extremely commercially successful, so even if that's your cynical metric for creative value to society it would still be incorrect to say they don't have value.
Maybe there’s a feedback loop with societal expectations regarding the hikikomori / NEETs? The more they are demonized as unproductive, the less productive they become.
This seems a non-sequitur. People whose motivation is isolation are unlikely to try to generate anything for other people.
But your general idea is correct - is there group where motivated people don't need to worry about money?
Well yes - we see this in artist colonies and indeed in entrepreneurial retreats like https://www.recurse.com/
I personally know that some crucial open source work is maintained by people with schizoid-avoidant spectrum issues. I know a lot of them but I won't out them here. hikikomori are driven to be invisible because their extreme pathological avoidance of attention. You don't know them and their contributions because they don't want you to know that they still live at home, out of their car door dashing because no company ever hires them, are shut-in because of serious unhealed trauma, are still deeply in poverty in such a wealthy industry etc.
A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.
Many prominent pseudonymous devs have had hikikomori traits. _why practically inspired a generation of Ruby devs. visualidiot (RIP) was a crucial driver behind a lot of web dev culture in the 2010s. Heck, I made significant contributions to Joomla and WP themes back in the day -- you have probably used sites with themes or plugins I made. Also I ran a blog a decade ago that used to rank prominently in google and receive dozens of emails a month from people struggling with mental illness -- many people crediting me with saving their lives. Surely that is something of value to society.
Don't go around spreading bullshit like it is facts about a group of people we know little about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines#...
> Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about.
Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"?
> A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.
"likely", "might" - this is all speculation on your part too. There is no reason to believe that a lot of humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would, in fact, contribute more to society, nor that the contributions from those that do would, in fact, offset those that don't.
It's speculation on both sides of this particular argument I see no compelling evidence at all.
"A lot of these humans" was me referring the humans I personally know mentioned in the prior paragraph. And I was speculating on the effect UBI would have on them.
Because anecdotally my experience is that hikikomori are a hotbed of creativity and that financial assistance with no strings attached has helped us increase contributions. However, it is very possible I have a skewed sample point because of course I would only know the hikikomori that are hotbeds of creativity -- I wouldn't ever encounter those silently scrolling and never building community online. That said, it feels intuitively correct to me that people with no irl connections would be pretty motivated to build connections some other way. I certainly was. But perhaps that is simply outlier behavior maybe it is more typical for hikikomori to spend their lives watching anime. We don't know.
The thesis of my comment is that we don't know enough about the demographic of hikikomori to state absolutes about them -- to do so is to spread bullshit. I said "There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study." Which seems to also be the thesis of your comment. I suspect from your comment history that you are just being deliberately argumentative so you can pass reading off as new insight.
If we can't tell, the "they aren't" bit is of course made up. Are you not arguing in good faith, or are you just not paying attention to what you're quoting?
It's funny how you chose to frame groups as "NEET", but you somehow failed to refer to "aspiring artist" or "aspiring musician" or "aspiring novelist". I mean "aspiring artist" already implies engaging in an activity albeit not professionally or reaching success.
You also somehow failed to refer to "amateur artist". As if not enjoying enough success to live comfortably with your art to the point of requiring to hold a job to pay rent is something that would validate your argument.
I'm not sure you are even aware of the fact that most of the mainstream artists you see around are not even professional, in the sense that in spite of their success and touring they still need to hold a job to make ends meet. Check out any summer festival, pick any random non-headliner band, and see how many members hold jobs, and had to take time off to go touring. Even some music legends have a history of holding humble jobs at least up to the time they made it. See Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, who famously lost a couple of fingers in an industrial accident while working at a sheet metal factory.
It's not just music, either. Luminaries like Fernando Pessoa could very well be classified as the ultimate NEET as he spent years of his early life not in education, employment, or training.
UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off.
You need to impose a tax called the Land Value Tax to prevent landowners eating up the public money. Even then we got a long list of much needed public spending before we can even think about a Citizen's Dividend.
This is only true if there’s a static supply of rental units, which isn’t true in most places (despite new construction being constrained by regulation in many places). I support an LVT, but it is not a necessary precondition for redistribution.
Most libertarians I know (and I consider myself an on and off libertarian as I learn more about it) want the government to stick to making sure people's rights aren't being trodden upon and otherwise leave us alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advocates_of_universal...
I think it is important to differentiate between different kinds of projects that people might undertake, and 3 particular categories always come to my mind (you may have more):
* "plumbing" - all that infrastructure that isn't something you'd ever use directly, but the tools you do use wouldn't function without it. This work is generally intense during a "startup" phase, but then eases back to light-to-occasional as a stable phase is reached. It will likely happen whether there is funding or not, but may take longer and reach a different result without it.
* "well defined goal" - something that a person or a team can actually finish. It might or might not benefit from funding during its creation, but at some point, it is just done, and there's almost no reason to think about continuing work other than availability and minimal upgrades to follow other tools or platforms.
* "ever-evolving" - something that has no fixed end-goal, and will continue to evolve essentially forever. Depending on the scale of the task, this may or may not benefit from being funded so that there are people working on it full time, for a long time.
These descriptions originate in my work on software, but I think something similar can be said for lots of other human activities as well, without much modification.
https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
-- James Zawinski, 1995Very true. In a UBU world I have no doubt we’d have many exciting libraries, lots of pottery, and many books.
But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need
I think a bigger issue will be that the people who are passionate for a project may not be the most effective at accomplishing it, and without income you can’t motivate those more effective people into working on the project.
But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly. But I also think we're looking at things superficially. There's a lot of technical work that can't be casually done like plumbing or electrical that is currently moderately compensated. In an UBI world costs for this would likely skyrocket which would lead to an even higher UBI which would lead to even higher costs which would lead to Zimbabwe.
Pessimism aside I would probably actually support it, simply because I think it would be the ultimate expression of liberty - but you have to realize that you're not going to create anything like the same society we have, but with everybody being able to independently support themselves. You're going to completely destroy the contemporary economy and create a new entity that would probably be much closer to something of times long since past when the overwhelming majority of America was self employed. 'The Expanse' offers a realistic take on what UBI would probably entail.
You're letting your prejudice get in the way of making a rational argument. There is no difference between what you chose to call "urban" and any other place, be it rural, suburban or urban. You don't see people taking care of their surroundings because you only get to see a snapshot of it's current state, not what others have done in the recent and not so distant past.
Of course OP is silly in making the mistake of believing UBI will get all people working on urban waste management fired and out of a job. It's like believing that if a service provides a free tier, all other services will suddenly vanish. But presuming people don't care about their surroundings because they live in an 'urban' neighborhood reflects a problem that's about prejudice and not UBI.
I think that is what observation actually is, you get to see what others have done in the recent and not so distant past, or am i missing your point.
But what you learn living in these areas for years is that no - not everybody is like you, or even remotely like it. There are a significant number of people who are simply broken and beyond repair. It reminds me of this video [1] which is from a minister of the UAE speaking on a perfect analog. The one thing I'd certainly agree with you about is that prejudice is bad, but the direction of one's prejudice, good or bad, matters not. We should always form our opinions based on reality, and not ideals.
Interestingly, UBI would be compatible with ending the minimum wage. If survival is guaranteed, then there is no reason to insist that a low end job pay a living wage. As long as someone wants to pay for the work and someone else wants to do it, let them!
You're making the mistake of conflating UBI with "no one works anymore". This is a silly mistake to make. It's like believing that providing a universal healthcare service that provides basic care to everyone somehow meant supply and demand for private health services would be eliminated. In the meantime, look at pretty much any European country which already provides free universal healthcare.
Listen, UBI stands for Universal Basic Income. Universal means everyone gets it, Income means an inflow of cash, and Basic means it's not much, just enough to cover basic needs. Think of a kind of unemployment benefit for all that doesn't go away once you find a job. Once you get a job, you get paid an income that supplements your basic income. That's it. The biggest impact is that if you find yourself out of a job, you still get an inflow of cache that allows you to meet basic needs.
UBIs does change the economy. For example, most if not all poverty-mitigation policies can be effectively replaced by UBI. Instead of food stamps, use your income to buy food. There's no longer a pressing need for unemployment benefits if you already are guaranteed a basic income.
But what are these basic needs that are not much? Housing costs, medical expenses...?
But the major issue is that the progress slows down. Effects of slower progress accumulate with time. At first you are only a few years behind, then you are a few decades behind etc. Imagine inventions, cures being available decades or hundreds of years later (depending on what timescale we look at).
I think UBI sounds nice, but is far from an optimal solution. Wouldn't be better, if we could solve same issues UBI promises to solve in a more efficient way (with less negative side effects)? UBI is just throwing money at the problem, hoping it will solve itself.
No matter how many janitors, cooks, etc you have you'll never invent a rocket. Most hard working people are just doing societal plumbing not inventing. So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society.
But, I still think there's a flawed premise here. Loosing a janitor to UBI means that they can occasionally help their friend with rocketry or some other pursuit they have interest in. Providing UBI means that geologists don't need to hoard data because they won't starve if they don't get a cut from it's usage. The people involved in technological break through are often doing it for self-interest or fame and don't stop once they've hit some financial breakpoint.
We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody and at this point it's all gravy. For obvious reasons we couldn't feed/house everybody if they wanted to solely live in NYC but IIUC no UBI proposal is about that; UBI lets you live in below median-desired places without additional income.
You also don't balance equations in your examples. Your janitor goes to help a friend with rocketry, which seems like a net gain, but someone else now needs to stop helping a friend to replace that janitor's position. Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own. You call work cooks and janitors are doing worthless for progress, but researches (or children in school) need to eat, need to have functional workplace/classroom, etc. While they might not make progress directly, they enable other people to make progress.
> We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody
Why would we need UBI then? The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap, if that were really true. Value of anything is completely relative (which I find that many people have trouble grasping). If something requires very little work, then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.
Do you think that the people who do valuable research are doing it purely because of financial motivation, or is something else going on there? The point I was trying to make is that giving people a basic income so that they won't literally starve if they don't work isn't going to completely eliminate all motivation to work. Some people will be motivated because they want more money than what UBI provides (as I think there's pretty ample evidence that desire for more money is something a lot of people seem to have independent of how stable their situation is), and plenty of people will be motivated to work for the myriad of other reasons that already motivate them. There's an argument you can make that the money from UBI will be enough to change the decision some people have, but exactly how many people that will be and the effects that have on society will depend quite a bit on how much money is being given. To me, that means the question isn't a binary question of "would UBI be good", but a spectrum of potential amounts of money (with $0 being the choice of "no UNI" that's presented as half of the original binary). Maybe there's a compelling argument that the value should be $0, but I've yet to see an argument for it that actually engages with it as a spectrum in the first place, which is why none of those arguments end up seeming particularly compelling.
UBI is a high concept pitch, that is memorable and catchy, but AFAIK it's not well supported either by psychological models or by empirical economics data. It gives some social safety net. Problem is that it gives a rather weak safety net. We can actually do better.
Can I ask you why exactly does it need to be UBI? If another system (more complex, with less sexy pitch) could provide a bigger safety net and have a more positive economic impact, wouldn't you rather choose that?
Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.
> The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap ... then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.
We don't live in an ideal free market.
Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.
SROs not in say NYC are cheap as well. Everybody trying to live in the same major cities will never be cheap.
> Why would we need UBI then?
Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.
Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.
Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.
You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant. If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before? They were already motivated to maximize profits. Optimization is also an additional work which you are conveniently ignoring.
> Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.
Food prices sometimes fall below costs because agriculture is volatile. It's not proof that food is inherently "extremely cheap" to produce. Also, absolute prices cannot be easily compared between countries and low quality food has negative health effects.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-gd...
> Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.
If basic needs are so cheap that UBI can cover it, then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.
> Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.
Opportunity cost is the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how? And even with UBI they would still benefit, if they get that additional money.
> Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.
UBI fixes that issue how exactly?
We've added a change; of course the world will change! But yeah sure if we introduce UBI and hold the rest of the world the same then UBI will have an unobservable effect.
> If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before?
I mean people aren't actually rational so there's a million angles there. However, the cost of a janitor is going to go up with UBI as the opportunity cost has increased.
> then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.
No, I just don't think you understand the world around you. Have you never heard of remote nomads? Plenty of people work full-time for parts of the year or part-time all of the year.
> Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how?
Giving the information away for free costs you the money that you could've gotten for charging for it. When you need that money to survive then you have to restrict access. When you don't then you're able to volunteer it.
While speculating what might happen in some particular cases can be fun, the real questions that need to be answered are regarding the macroeconomic effects of UBI. Starting with what % of GDP will be needed for UBI that will cover all the basic needs (food, housing, healthcare, etc.)? And then focus, not just on what few good Samaritans might do, but on how households, firms, and governments would respond at scale: labor supply, wages and prices, inflationary pressure, taxes, effects on productivity, growth, etc.
But I think our discussion has run its course. While we clearly have different opinions, it was still fun and I hope we both learned something. Be well!
This reminds me of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide, where a civilization decides that phone sanitizers are useless, until removing them quietly collapses everything else. Declaring work “non-essential to progress” usually just means we don’t understand its role.
There has been several really nice personal accounting CLI projects lately.
2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything.
3. Now I'm really angry! I should have gotten some money from them!
4. The government must force my neighbours to pay a salary to me!
5. Continue to work for free making open source code for giant corporations, so they can profit.
How about instead?:
1. Don't work for free or give away your code. Instead charge a fair price for people to use your code or software.
2. If your code is good, people and corporations pay you for it.
3. Now you're really happy! You got money for your labour.
4. The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary.
5. You can continue to work for money and make more money.
FOSS zealots love to dunk on capitalism, but unless you're prepared to go off-grid and live in the woods, and try to convince other people to be poor along with you, you might be very lonely.
Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly that's it includes levying taxes, so that's pretty much a meaningless characterization.
Let's put it in more concrete terms: if the US government passes a law to raise taxes to fund UBI, that probably wouldn't even make the last of the top 100 most oppressive things it's done to innocent people in the past year. If the strongest objection to this policy would be "I don't want to pay taxes to fund things for other people", it's in pretty good company.
Yes, and that's why great care and respect should be applied to how the government uses the tax money which they have raised from oppression.
Paying somebody to work for free for a giant corporation is not a justified use of that money. Those corporations should pay for their labour themselves.
I can't think of any worse oppression than taxes, bare forced labour. When it's done to pay for an army to defend ourselves against enemies, for the justice system to protect all citizens, or for healthcare to save lives, then that's palatable. As well as for a myriad of other things. But to pay a programmer so that he can make server infrastructure so that Amazon doesn't have to pay him? That's not palatable.
Really?
For example, I am a very strong supporter of free speech. And many or most governments oppress free speech. But I still think that taxing labour is worse than suppressing free speech. I still think taxing labour is worse than oppressing the population with curfews, which is also something almost every government engaged in during the covid pandemic, and which I am against.
I guess we're just not going to agree on any of this then, because that's pretty much the opposite opinion of mine
1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.
2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything.
3. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.
If you can't go to step 3, then you are doing it wrong and need to change step 1 from "giving it away for free" to something like "giving it away for free to the common people and at a price for corporate."
Which you could say "but that's not open source!" and you'd be right, which is exactly my point here: I don't think you want to do fully open source software, you want to do software and get paid for it somehow. If you do open source and get paid eventually and non binding, that's a nice little bonus, but it's not the main goal, never was with open source.
I believe that's where the biggest disagreement ITT lies. There are currently good ways to do FOSS, proprietary closed-source and free closed-source software development. But if the OSS is worth charging for (commercial) use, devs are left with asking for donations, SaaS or "pay me to work on this issue/feature".
There arguably should be better mechanisms to reward OSS development, even if the largest part of an OSSndev's motivation is intrinsic.
I'm not saying going commercial is bad, go for it. I'm just saying that when we are talking open source, we are not talking money, that's all. Money is just one of many things in life, sure it's important, but not by itself.
Capitalism is not “slavery with extra steps,” it’s freedom in a fragile world repleted with conflicting goals. Just because people don’t agree with your goals doesn’t make you a slave.
IDK, this seems perfectly reasonable if the state also provides an old age insurance / pension system for retirees. Without a younger generation of people paying into the system (i.e. the children of parents) these systems collapse. It seems appropriate to support the people that keep the government functioning.
Of course, I’m guessing you oppose systems like social security too, given your comment. I just find it odd that you can’t imagine anything worse than giving money to parents, given most governments give money to a lot of people, most of whom aren’t opting into anything as noble as parenthood.
The only other way to be promised a big pile of cash from the govt there is a military contract.
If people find these things useful, they can actually pay for them. If you can't find people who value it enough to pay for it, then may be it's not as valuable as you think it is.
The error of your argument lies in the assumption that any participant in the market possesses enough money to pay the true "value-to-them" of a thing.
1) I'm not sure I want Github to be the arbiter of FOSS resource distribution (See: Spotify and small artists).
2) A second order effect could be creating a reliance on it which enables a future rug pull once the current framework is eroded.
TL;DR: I wholly agree with your overall vision of the future, but not necessarily this step towards it.
First of all, "baseline needs" are fluid. These days, electricity and internet are broadly considered baseline needs, but would have been unimaginable luxuries for previous generations. The future will inevitably bring new "baseline needs" we can hardly yet comprehend.
Secondly, the vast majority of people will never be satisfied with the bare minimum, no matter what that minimum is. If you have a friend who can afford fancy things, and you can't, then more likely than not, you will not be satisfied. It's also much easier to attract a partner if you're financially successful, for similar reasons. That's just human nature. Just because you don't have to worry about starving or succumbing to the elements does not mean people will stop competing with one another.
Isn't that a benefit for UBI? If everyone's basic needs are met and they want more, nothing would stop them from taking a job and making more money right?
The parent post was talking about how everybody would have more time for unpaid pursuits if only we had UBI. I'm saying that I don't think UBI would change that much. People will continue to pursue unpaid hobbies much like they do today, but making money will still be just as important.
I gather that the open source maintainers who have found themselves in this situation sometimes get very unhappy about it, and I can see why -- it's not like they woke up one day and suddenly had a critical component on their hands, it kind of evolved over time and after a while they're like "uhoh, I don't think this is what I signed up for"
But...
> the maintainer needs to have some self-restraint and accept that they don't owe them anything.
Assumes (especially in cases where "maintainer == original author" psychological capabilities that simply might not exist in the maintainer.
I don't know of a good way to deal with this, other than to be kind and try to notice potential signs of impeding burn-out before an implosion.
I meant - it’s unfair to consider that because this labor “fell from the sky”, you should just accept it - and as others have said, in the case of projects that become popular, that the burden should just automatically fall on the shoulders of someone who happened to share code “for free”.
If/when someone ends up becoming responsible for work they hadn’t necessarily signed up for (who signs up for burnout?) - it’s ok/necessary/mandatory to see how everyone (and or Nvidia/Google/OpenAI etc) can, like, help.
My insistence is on the opt-out nature of this so that people who would be ok being compensated don't have to beg.
Consider how the xz malware situation happened [0]. Or the header & question 8 from the FAQ for PocketBase [1].
"Open Source" is hugely conflated in terms of the reasons people write open source software.
There are people who truly don't care to be compensated for their work. Some are even fine with corporations using it without receiving any benefit.
Some people prefer viral and infectious licenses the way that Stallman originally intended and that the FSF later lost sight of (the AGPL isn't strong enough, and the advocacy fell flat). They don't want to give corporations any wiggle room in using their craft and want anyone benefiting from it in any way to agree to the same terms for their own extensions.
Many corporations, some insidiously, use open source as a means of getting free labor. It's not just free code, but entire ecosystems of software and talent pools of engineers that appear, ready to take advantage of. These same companies often do not publish their code as open source. AWS and GCP are huge beneficiaries that come to mind, yet you don't have hyperscaler code to spin up. They get free karma for pushing the "ethos" of open source while not giving the important parts back. Linux having more users means more AWS and GCP customers, yet those customers will never get the AWS and GCP systems for themselves.
There are "impure" and "non-OSI" licenses such as Fair Source and Fair Code that enable companies to build in the open and give customers the keys to the kingdom. They just reserve the sole right to compete on offering the software. OSI purists attack this, yet these types of licenses enable consumers do to whatever they want with the code except for reselling it. If we care about sustainability, we wouldn't attack the gesture.
There are really multiple things going on in "open source" and we're calling it all by the same imprecise nomenclature.
The purists would argue not and that the OSI definition is all that matters. But look at how much of the conversation disappears when you adhere to that, and what behavior slips by.
There are a lot of dumb and even disagreeable open source projects. Why should someone be de facto forced to fund those projects?
It's like this ass-backwards way of selling something because you're allergic to markets or something. Honestly, it's quite rude to go on and on about free software and liberation and all these things and then turn sour grapes years later because everybody took you up on it. Nobody is forcing anyone to maintain any of these projects.
And maybe if you wrote some software that forms the basis of a trillion dollar + company and you're still sitting in the basement you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.
> GitHub should charge every org $1 more per user per month
It's about org, not about every single person using Github.
The idea is basic and should have been written in the article. When a contributor release FOSS, it's fair to compensate if you business rely on it.
A contributor wouldn't like a free for personal use either. The ideal license is the Unreal one free for « Individuals and small businesses (with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue) »
> you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.
It happens so many times and no just about software (but then it's not a million dollar company). It's not that you are dump, you done the right thing and some companies with money/power/opportunity to capitalize on it, did it and didn't compensate you fairly.
Nope.
Put it in the license, sell the software, or work for free, but stop complaining about it.
It's nice if businesses who benefit from specific software packages want to pay or show support, but it's not nice to release something "for free" but then jump on a moral grandstand and demand everyone pay so you can feel good about your ideology at the expense of everyone else.
> The ideal license is the Unreal one free for « Individuals and small businesses (with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue)
Then make that your license?
I think it would be nice if there were a license that was more widely accepted that introduced a monetary component that could compensate the developer(s).
Yeah, maybe. Maybe if it wasn't released as MIT but released as GPLv3 you'd actually get compensated in the form of patches, bugfixes, features, etc in "your" software.
The whole RIIR movement is doing this - replacing as many GPL components as possible with rewritten MIT components. I find this completely disrespectful: trying to displace pro-user software with pro-business software.
What if we turn this from a rhetorical question to an actual question?
My totally unverified take:
1. Missing transaction / Payment infrastructure. The same reason why paid music streaming services were successful depite piracy being a thing.
2. Bureaucracy associated with earning money. In many countries, going from "unpaid" to "€1 per month" is a nightmare.
... and a suggestion to make both less dire: A transaction infrastructure that allows small projects (that wouldn't be a cash cow anyway) to forward all payments to another project of the project Author's choice.
Edit: See https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d2ic2e/krita_is_now_...
How to create more code I can enjoy using has been something that I've been thinking about for a long time. I've even advocated for a stance[0], similar to yours. While I don't agree it's correct to conflate the malign intent surrounding the xz takeover, with the banal ignorance as to why so many people don't want to support people creating cool things, (and here I don't just mean financial support.) I do acknowledge there are plenty of things about the current state we could fix with a bit more money.
But I don't want open source software to fall down the rabbit hole of expectations. Just as much as I agree with you, people opting-in to supporting the people they depend on is problematic. Equally I think the idea that OSS should move towards a transactional kind of relationship is just as bad. If too many people start expecting, I gave you money, now you do the thing. I worry that will toxify what is currently, (at least from my opinionated and stubborn POV), a healthier system, where expectations aren't mandatory.
The pocket base FAQ, and your hint towards burnout are two good examples, describing something feel is bad, and would like to avoid. But they are ones I feel are much easier to avoid with the framing of "this work was a gift". I have before, and will again walk away from a project because I was bored of it. I wouldn't be able to do so if I was accepting money for the same. And that's what leads to burn out.
I do want the world your describing (assuming you can account for the risks inherent into creating a system with a financial incentive to try to game/cheat), but I don't want that world to be the default expectation.
GPL is transactional; that's the whole point. What you are calling OSS includes GPL, true, but it also includes BSD/MIT, which are not transactional.
I also don't think all software needs to be free. I also don't think all software needs to be a gift. (But then I just said the same thing twice.) The part that I care about is which direction the default [default definition?] shifts.
In my perfect world, more code would be MIT not GPL. But in my perfect world, the GPL wouldn't be useful in practice. The world is far from perfect.
Well, yeah. I think we agree. That's why I said it is transactional - you get software in exchange for any future potential improvement you make to it.
It's a transaction.
MIT is not transactional, it's charity - you get software without having to trade anything for it.
If people make their software MIT or GPL, they should not complain when it is used in a way that they are unhappy with. With MIT, it can be used in almost any way the user wants, including closing it off, and depriving the community of improvements.
This is honestly the exact opposite of my experience. Though I may just have very different desires and frustrations
You're only responsible to the people who pay you to deliver something. It's not complicated.
> that the burden should just automatically fall on the shoulders of someone who happened to share code “for free”.
Exactly what burden?
In general, people's time is not free if only because they have rent/mortgage, food, transportation, medical bills, education, etc.
Urgent issue for whom? If there is some org relying on something you maintain voluntarily, in your free time, that seems like a "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine"-type situation to me.
At the risk of sounding like a poor man's John Galt: If you wouldn't like to get out of bed at 5am to work without getting compensated, then you should just not do that.
I think this is a little unfair, given that many (especially younger maintainers) get into it for portfolio reasons where they otherwise might struggle to get a job but stick around because of the enjoyment and interest. It still sucks that so many big orgs rely on these packages and we're potentially experiencing a future when models trained on this code are going to replace jobs in the future.
I think a lack of unionisation is what puts the industry in such a tough spot. We have no big power brokers to enforce the rights of open source developers, unlike the other creative industries that can organise with combined legal action.
I do think it would be nice to get paid anything at all, but that wouldn't change at all how I do things/release code. In fact, unless it'd be really no-strings-attached, I'd prefer to keep the current arrangement than being paid a pittance per month and then have extra obligations.
Yes it absolutely is. That is the exact social contract people 100% willingly enter by releasing something as Free and Open Source. They do give it as a gift, in exchange for maybe the tiny bit of niche recognition that comes with it, and often times out of simple generosity. Is that really so incredible?
The expectation of FOSS is that the users and maintainer work together to resolve bug fixes/features/security issues.
However many companies will dump these issues to the maintainer and take it for granted when they are resolved.
It's not a sustainable model, and will lead to burnout/unmaintained libraries.
If the companies don't have the engineering resources/specialization to complete bug fixes/features, they should sponsor the maintainers.
For the library to be secure, there needs to be funding, not by magic and expecting maintainers will do stuff on there free will.
The assumed base state we're looking to augment via open source software being: "Fully working software"(Augmented: free) vs "No software" (Augmented: yes software)?
Like, what you seem to want is business, plain and simple. Pay a guy, have your specs filled, get guarantees. That would be expecting open source to fill a role it just isn't made for.
And it leads to unmaintained libraries, since companies don't want to pay.
At some point, is open sourcing your work a liability?
And then they can shrug and move on with their respective days. If I open source something it's a gift to the commons, not a promise to work on it for free in perpetuity. I don't really care if someone tries to shame me for that, as there's nothing to be ashamed of.
Maybe you're overloaded, maybe you just don't feel like it. It's totally normal, and different projects have different levels of resources, some with none anymore.
My main concern is supply chain compromise.
That said, everything in my previous post still applies: a nonzero buglist is totally normal and widely accepted.
I argue that open sourcing your work is no more liable than making a comment on social media. The biggest risk to an open source maintainer is publicly losing their patience and/or being heterodox in their beliefs. Code isn't a requirement for that to happen.
What happens next is completely irrelevant. The maintainer can 100% decide to just ignore the issue or close it.
Opening issues doesn't create unmaintained software. In fact it helps.
You could perhaps add a clause in the license that restricts this behavior but then it would no longer be FOSS.
This depends a lot on the users, and then somewhat on the maintainers.
I have seen a lot of end-user facing software where people do not understand that features and fixes do not magically materialize - that there is a person on the other end likely working on this in their free time, with their own prioritization on how they will use that limited time.
If you have companies name and shame them, but often these are just hypotheticals or few entities.
I think the solution is for people to understand that open source goes both ways. Unlike what this post says, users don't owe maintainers anything, but maintainers also don't owe the users anything. If I build something cool and share it freely, why should users expect anything from me? Why should you expect me to maintain it or add the features you want? I think we need a mentality change where less is expected from maintainers, unless funding is arranged.
After all, it's free and open source. No one is forcing you to use it. Don't like that I'm not actively developing it? Submit a PR or fork it. Isn't that what the original spirit of open source was? I think that open source has been so succesful and good that we've come to expect it to be almost like commercial software. That's not what it is.
If they pay by popularity most of my $1 would go to javascript. I'd rather it went to libraries I actually use.
As suggested, I do think there should be room for grant funding, especially in the case of govts switching to open-source (LibreOffice, Linux, whatever) and open-source individuals and orgs can apply and granted each year dependent on actual use. Though, even then, govts should probably do more for funding, but I don't want a situation where the org just spends more money than they actually distribute for dev (looking at you Mozilla).
Personally I used to pay 7/month for personal use, then when MS bought it it went down to 4, and one day when my card expired I noticed I'm not using any of the paid features and private repos are now free... so now I'm paying 0.
Strictly speaking open source originally was not to do with whether you paid for something or not, it was that if you did pay for it, you got the code and had the rights to make your own changes.
Think Free speech, not free beer, or the software equivalent of right to repair.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2024/09/08/man-charg...
Yes this is uncomfortable, but the simple fact is that if you don't tell anyone you want to get paid, you probably won't be given any money. Standard seem to be maybe there's a donation link somewhere on the site, buried 4 clicks deep in the FAQ, more often than not something like a paypal.
The reality is that if you do ask for money, surprisingly often people will straight up just give you money if they like what you're doing. Like people get paid real money for screaming at video games on Twitch, meanwhile you're building something people find useful. Of course you can make money off it. But you gotta ask for it, the game screamers on twitch sure do. That's the secret. Sure there's a scale from asking for donations and doing a Jimmy Wales and putting a your face on a banner begging for donations; and while going full jimbo is arguably taking it too far, it's also probably closer to the optimum than you'd imagine.
If you have corporate users, word on the street is you can also just reach out to them and ask for sponsorship. They're not guaranteed to say yes, but they're extremely unlike to sponsor you spontaneously.
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d2ic2e/krita_is_now_...
Usage is not a good proxy for value or ongoing effort. I have a npm package with tens of millions of weekly downloads. It's only a few lines long and it's basically done - no maintenance required.
I'm skeptical that there exists an algorithmic way to distribute funds that's both efficient and resistant to gaming.
Showing high download numbers on your resume is more valuable than anything a fund like this could provide. There will always be a company who views high NPM download numbers as a signal of top 1% talent, even if it has become a game in itself.
For example, I am currently working with React, which was produced by Meta. I write the code using TypeScript, which was produced by Microsoft (and other corporate behemoths such as Google). I am writing this comment in Chrome (produced by Google). Etc.
You are still right that corporations found and contribute to countless open source projects though.
Which depends on a lot of code not produced by Google, like libxml2 which was on the news recently because the maintainer step down.
Which 8? In the control the world domain I see Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. In terms of Market Cap you would add Tesla, Nvidia and TSMC, but these three aren't any where close to "controlling" the world category.
imo corporations have more pull on governments than governments have on businesses at this point as far as long term culture goes.
But right now I see so many cracks in their game I am optimistic they wont control world and there will be new competition to challenge them.
Bad or borderline actors would be so much better at creating whatever metrics you're basing things off of that the actual value creators wouldn't stand a chance.
It's easy to predict what sort of incentives this would produce, and how bad they would be. Fewer users and way more spammy projects to say the least.
GH could easily end up having to spend more than it collected in fighting abuse.
s/thousands/millions/ the point stands that there are way more devs than commercial accounts, and even then, even if it's 1:1, you get $1?
> GitHub should charge every org $1 more per user per month and direct it into an Open Source fund, held in escrow.
Sure. It'll be some charity, then somebody gets paid $200k+ per year to distribute what remains after they've taken the majority, all whilst avoiding most taxes. To receive the money the person has to ID themselves, financial background checks need to be done, a minimum amount needs to be reached before a payment is made, and then after passing through multiple wanting hands, they end up with a fraction.
> Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie.
What even is "usage"? How many times it appears in a number of repos? How many users there are of the project? Is the usefulness and value of a project limited to the number of people that directly use it?
> Or don’t! Let’s not do anything! People’s code and efforts - fueling incredibly critical bits of infrastructure all around the world - should just be up for grabs. Haha! Suckers!
> Anyway, you all smarter than me people can figure it out. I just cannot accept that what we have is “GOOD”. xx
It's entirely possible you can make things worse by avoiding doing nothing. Sometimes in life you have to pick the lesser of evils.
I don't think Google needs a dollar every time I write a script in golang or run a container in kubernetes, and I would put a lot less trust in Envoy if I thought Lyft was building it profit and not because they needed to.
> Hence, a solution. Or an idea, really. Incredibly half-baked. Poke all the holes you want. It’s very unwrought and muy unripe.
Maybe economists could do what is ostensibly their job and try to prevent the “tetris game of software depending on the OSS maintained by one guy in Nebraska...” situation. In the meanwhile people who do things under no duress for free could stop doing it.
(Not that OSS is all hobby activities. There are many who are paid to do it. But these appeals only talk about the former.)
Unfortunately, the crypto angle made sure that mostly degens and speculators got into it. Perhaps if stabletokens were more established by the time they started, it would be easier to market it.
(I am not going to get into yet-another discussion about Brave as a company. I will flag any attempt at derailing the conversation.)
By paying companies like Red Hat, Canonical, Google and Amazon, who in turn spend massive amounts of money employing software developers to work on Linux.
Why? It's not crazy at all. It's the status quo with no sign of things changing. It is both possible right now and likely continue. Its not crazy.
If it's not worth maintaining people will stop. If people need it they will develop it. The current incentive structure has produced lots of open source code that is being maintained.
>It is not okay - it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments.
It is if there is no cost. You can always charge for it. But you can't make it free then pretend its not.
You can easily sponsor Iran or Russia killing real people by doing such things.
Powerful tools, once released, can be used by anyone, including those with harmful intentions. And let's be honest: much of open source functions as a way for large companies to cut costs on essential but non-differentiating infrastructure. That's fine, but it complicates the idealistic narrative.
With generative AI, these questions matter more. Maybe it's time to revisit what open source should mean in this context.
Meta has even demonstrated an alternative with the Llama 4 License which has exclusion criteria:
> 2. Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Llama 4 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights.
Go put such terms in your licenses.
This is particularly rampant in the Rust community and if I'm being honest this forced tithing church nonsense from people who want to be priests makes participating in that community less desirable. I don't even want to donate to the RSF as a result.
All the other projects I've donated to in the past have been much more reasonable. This kind of pushy nonsense is unacceptable.
I agree. Yet some of my comments here have been met with downvoting and explanations that GPL licensing is a moral imperative, so there is certainly a contingent who would disagree.
> This is particularly rampant in the Rust community
This is interesting. Do you have examples? I am not cognizant enough of interactions there.
Literally anyone could create a support and maintenance organization that takes MIT license projects into an AWS like split and only get paid if the support they provide remains valuable to people who pay for the value of the support and maintenance.
As others have noted, there are a few areas to watch out for, and:
- some ecosystems have more dependencies over fewer, and so we need to consider how to apply a careful weighting in line with that - how do we handle forks? Does a % of the money go to the original maintainers who did 80% of the work? - how can companies be clever to not need to pay this? - some maintainers don't want financial support, and that's OK - some project creators / maintainers don't get into the work for the money (... because there is often very little) - there's a risk of funding requirements leading to "I'm not merging your PR without you paying me" which is /not problematic/ but may not be how some people (in particular companies) would like to operate
[0]: https://www.jvt.me/posts/2025/02/20/funding-oss-product/
OK, what about those of us who aren't writing libraries?
As a personal anecdote, the amount of opportunities that have been opened up to me as a result of my open source project are worth way more than any $1 per mention or user.
The problem for some people is that they want to get paid for their work and just aren't; or not enough. I won't judge that. Writing software is hard work. Whether you donate your time and how much of your time is a personal choice to make. But of course a lot of OSS gets paid for indirectly via companies paying people to work on them (most long lived projects have paid contributors like that) or in a few cases because the companies behind these projects have some business model that actually works. Some people donate money to things they like. And some projects are parked under foundations that accept donations. That's all fine. But there are also an enormous amount of projects out there and most of them will never receive a dollar for any of it. OSS wouldn't work without this long tail of unpaid contributors.
I have a few OSS projects of my own. I don't accept donations for them. I don't get paid for them. I have my own reasons for creating these projects; but money isn't one of those. And people are welcome to use them. That's why these projects are open source.
MS and Github make loads of money. There's a reason they give the freemium version away for free: it funnels enough people into the non free version that it is worth it to them. Charging money to everyone might actually break that for them. I happily use their freemium stuff. I did pay for it a long time ago when private projects weren't part of the freemium layer. Anyway their reasons/motivations are theirs. I'm sure it all makes sense for them and their share holders.
If people feel guilty about not donating to each of the thousands of projects they rely on (or any, because why cherry pick?), you can pay back in a different way and try to contribute once in a while. Just pay it forward. Yes you somebody put a lot of work in the stuff that you use. And you put some work in stuff that others get to use. If enough people keep on doing that (and the success of OSS hints that they do), OSS will be here to stay.
OSS literally runs the modern infrastructure... https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep...
[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
In my personal GH account there is a "sponsor" button that shows me what dependencies I have that I could sponsor. Unfortunately the list is empty.
My _organisations_ have hundreds of repo's, but there's no "sponsor" option at the org level in GH that says what dependencies the orgs use and then set up batch transactions at that level.
The dependency data already exists in dependabot for a lot of stuff, so it wouldn't be starting from scratch.
Corporations who use and benefit from software should be made to pay for their use of that software, but they don't want to, which is why they'll happily spend money promoting the use of corporate-friendly and maximally exploitable open source licensing among the passionate individuals who maintain the lions share of their dependency tree.
I don't, and I spend a lot of my time and efforts encouraging others not to, and doing the work to prove out alternative models :)
https://lgug2z.com/articles/normalize-identifying-corporate-...
https://lgug2z.com/articles/komorebi-financial-breakdown-for...
Maybe, but also maybe they just fork internally and fix the bug internally and don't publish the bugfix. And maybe it's never in their best interest to pay for it, maybe it's in their best interest to just freeload forever.
> If you make open source software that just works they are unlikely to start writing checks nor should there be any expectation that they do that.
I think it's good when we expect corporations to write checks to the people that write the open-source stuff they rely on. "A rising tide lifts all boats" is not automatically true in software, we have to choose to make it true. I think a world in which we make that choice is a better world. I'm not convinced we currently live in that world.
Then you jump on to a place like Reddit or HN and you have people mostly supporting the status quo. Of course people are going to do open source more than they should. And then if they complain later on, you will say they chose to make it open source. Reinforcing the status quo by blaming the individual.
Corporations should start paying their fair share, they've scammed society enough.
If it helps, voter sentiment against big tech is quite high and the profit margins that big tech has means there's a lot to plunder for the public.
The only question is who do you want to do the plundering?
Such a weird thing to reply to someone who very publicly disavows the use of open source licensing for individuals
Checks out
https://docs.github.com/en/sponsors/sponsoring-open-source-c...
It doesn't work well in practice. Because then people like https://github.com/sindresorhus?tab=repositories&type=source would get a shit ton of money because of the pure number of dependencies. And yes our stack also contains his code somewhere in a debug UI but our main product is entirely written in a different programming language with way fewer dependencies but if one of them goes away we'd be in trouble. In other words: Dependency count is not a good metric for this.
GitHub actually offers something in that direction: https://github.com/sponsors/explore
My "idea": Lots of companies will have to create SBOMs anyway. Take all of those but also scan your machines and take all the open source software running on there (your package.lock does not contain VLC etc.) and throw it in a big company wide BOM, then somehow prioritise those using algorithms, data and just manual voting and then upload that to some distributor who then distributes this to all the relevant organisations and people and then (crucially) sends me (as a company) an invoice.
We've tried doing the right thing but sponsoring is hard - it works differently for every project/foundation and the administrative overhead is huge.
The reality is that "we" as an open-source community suck at taking money and I believe this is partially on us.
More broadly people suck at giving money for things they can get for free. That’s just the reality of how most people out there behave.
The only “solution” is to educate people but that is completely unfeasible.
It is always people who make a thing for free then people find it useful and start using it then they start using that free and open source thing at work instead of writing a copy and that’s when the original person starts asking for donations and money.
The reason your project is popular is because it is free. If it wasn’t free we would have probably written our own or used something else.
Microsoft, a $3.4T company, should charge people for open source they didn't even write?
Hell no. Hell no.
Naturally this comment isn't a "fuck yes!" to the idea of Microsoft-as-tax-collector but if we're discussing TFA, let's not be needlessly cynical to the idea presented.
> redistribute the collected tax back to the community---the money will not add to Microsoft's $3.4T-worth coffers!
Ummm, yeah, no.
Microsoft is a contributor to many open source projects, so it could, in fact, directly add to its own coffers.
And, the onus to pay for what was nominally free software could make paid software look more attractive, so it could indirectly push people to, e.g., office subscriptions.
Could have worked before LLMs.
Also, funding by popularity would mean alternatives would have a harder time to emerge and get the funding they need to compete against the established popular projects.
Being an Open Source project doesn't mean that it provides the best solution to the problem it's supposed to solve. Diversity is important.
license A is GPL or MIT for academic and free applications
License B is for commercial use, with a fee
The license is literally whatever you want to put into it.
IMO the issue is with the open source community gatekeeping these policies. Shaming developers for proposing commercial licensing, then shaming corporations for properly using the IP according to the free license (e.g. MIT)
It is also kind of crazy to want Microsoft to manage FOSS taxation and funding.
If you want to support a project, submit a PR or send them a check. Don't force me do it for you.
Also, not all programs use package.json and requirements.txt, so that won't work anyways.
It'll never happen; open source doesn't have the legal team of Disney [1].
(this holds true for all of the other times this idea has been suggested, too).
And this does not take into account the various fees, taxes etc, that will be removed before any money gets into an OSS developer's bank account.
GitHub charging its users, who themselves are mostly OSS developers (and not end users) doesn't seem like a sensible solution.
If anyone is making money off the code they should pay annual fee which goes to contributors. Github can setup an escrow, manage licenses and distribute the money to contributors.
So this is a weird statement to me, like you always want more.
However it is opt-in aka "Launch a page in minutes and showcase Sponsors buttons on your GitHub profile and repositories". That's effort & friction and only simplifies the "begging" aspect that I am (strongly) reacting to.
https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/commands/npm-fund will also "list all dependencies that are looking for funding in a tree structure"
I want the step (or 5 steps) after that. Charge first, then distribute.
Not sure how open source got bamboozled into paying rent to Microsoft of all companies.
Goodbye 90% of open source software I guess then
What is "the biggest theft in tech history" that GitHub did?
Instead, why not accept the reality that 1) projects may charge for their offerings and 2) users may have to pay for such offerings? As a user, if a project's offering is useful to me, then I should be willing to pay for it. As a creator, if I want to get paid for my offering, then I should be willing to ask for it. An upside of such a change could be that we start being more focused and prudent about what we use and create.
Without such delegation, projects will have to do the heavy lifting in terms of collection of funds; features such as sponsorship in GH or setting up e-payments via Stripe or Paypay may help reduce this brunt.
greg just proposed sanctions, more sanction. without disriminating that for some kids 1 is too much or impossible.
greg why do you want more suffering to people?
The REAL problem becomes, who gets funding? ouch
Payment could solve lots of problems, but there is no real and meaningful cash-equivalent payment system or method. This isn't a tech problem either, governments allow cash payments, but if it is digital, they won't allow any means that preserves privacy. Money laundering is their concern. You can't solve this without laws changing. Even if I don't mind buying crypto with a credit card, I still have to go through proving my identity with my id card, as if my credit-card company didn't do that already.
payment is a huge barrier to commerce these days, people think LLMs will change the world, but payment tech/laws will have a bigger effect in my opinion.
Let's say HN mods go a little crazy one day and want to let us tip each other for good posts and comments, imagine if all they had to do is add an html tag in the right place and that's it. All we had to do is click a button and it just works, and there is no exposure of private information by any involved party, and you could fund that payment by buying something (a card?) at a convenience store in person, just as easily as you could with a crypto payment, moneygram or wire transfer.
I __want__ to pay so many news sites, blogs,etc... I don't mind tipping a few bucks to some guy who wrote a good blog, or who put together a decent project on github that saved me lots of time and work.
It isn't merely the change in economics or people getting a buck here and there, but the explosion in economic activity you have to look at. The generation of wealth, not the mere zero-sum transferring of currency. This is the type of stuff that changes society drastically, like freeways being invented, women being able to ride bicycles, airplanes allowing fast transport, telegrams allowing instant messaging,etc..
Everyone being able to easily pay anyone at all, including funding private as well as commercial projects would be more disruptive than democracy itself, if I could dare make that claim. There is freedom of movement, there is freedom of communication and last there is freedom of trade. these are the ultimate barriers to human progress. Imagine if everyone from texas to beijing could fund research and projects, trade stocks in companies (all companies in the world). You won't need governments to fund climate change work, I think eventually taxation itself will have to suffer, because people would be able to direct exactly where their funds went. Not just what department in the government gets a budget, but exactly what projects they spend it on. being able to not just talk or meet each other instantly (and even those have a long way to go) but to also collectively or as individuals found each other, governments and companies, that'd be the biggest thing that could happen this century.
This could be done, but again, we don't need better tech as much as we need a change in attitude. For people to actually believe this would result in a better world for them.
Having a native way to send micropayments on the web without having to pay a huge % of that transaction to Visa/Mastercard and Stripe and Co would be such massive game changer when it comes to this stuff.
As a silly example, every time I collect 1$ for my 1$/month club I actually get ~70c which is wild.
I agree with you, if there was a better way to directly send small amounts to people running interesting sites or projects the whole landscape could change.
And I also agree that a change in attitude is needed. I appreciated your comment.
Have Microsoft charge people $ for their repos, and then take their code to train their LLM for more $.
And they can use the surplus $ to fund open source projects to produce more code to train their LLM for even more $, and reduce their taxes thanks to the charitable donations.
Everyone wins, right?
Thankfully we still have Codeberg.
Government grants can be used to cover infrastructural open source. Not every open source wants money, so this scheme has ro be opt-in. Further, entitled "paying" users[1] will make things much worse for small projects. "I paid for this package, so you need to fix this show-stopper bug before we ship on Friday"
Having a passion project is great, having it gain traction is even better, but that is not sufficient to make it a job / company. The utility of open source projects range from "I could implement the bits I use in under an hour" to "It would take 100-person team years".
Is that not what most of open source is? Things people make for themselves because they either found it fun or solved their own problem, then published it for others to use for free. Most projects are not worth the bureaucratic tax related headaches the income from them would bring (maybe that's just my EU showing).
What's not okay is demanding new features or to fix something urgently. That's paid territory.
Honestly this post is such a shit take it's borderline intentional ragebait.
People would milk the system as much as they could, only to become the most popular library, only to get most of the "pie".
I guess Python/JS devs would get the most of it. Because their ecosystem is most fragmented. C++ or assembly devs? Nothing.
I don't think this idea is thought out. Money corrupts things.
There already is a "market" for stars. But if stars would indicate how much someone earns, it would be morbid. Well, in some way, I guess they already do, but it's linked at least indirectly.
But if they really wanted to do what the article says, create a project and people can donate what the want. For example, if M/S sends me $5 per month, I can redirect it to various open source projects instead.
When I was on GH, I did donate a little per month to 2 projects, it was a nice way to do that. But I moved off because I do not want to give M/S more personal information (like my Cell #), so I send a few $ to them using other means.
This is a common anti-pattern of utopian, this will work this time(tm), improperly-educated dreamers who are much too comfortable with totalitarianism like taking money, property, and rights from others without asking for their consent.
Robbing peasants to build palaces and pet projects. Maybe start with "demanding" every big company fund them than taxing average people.
This is so dumb.
Open Source Software underwrites everything. It makes the largest human endeavors work. It makes silly ephemeral games little notes apps and digital art run. Turning maintainers into a kind of digital landlord that charges a fee is both insultingly low bore and enough to squeeze the life out of computing as a hobby.
Individuals and companies love open source software, but the current donation models don’t really work.
I thought this problem was bad for programming libraries (e.g. the recent Tailwind stuff), but after using Linux desktop open source—which has much less incentive for companies to donate or sponsor—oh boy, it’s bad.
Open source evokes a lot of emotions, but at its core, to me, it’s two things:
A collection of “features” (depending on license / governance):
* You can use it for free, no matter what
* You can see how it works
* You can modify the software
etc.
These are genuinely valuable features, which is why open source has won.
But these features are unavoidably coupled to business models and incentive structures for the developers who create this value.
Right now, open source developers and companies can only extract a relatively small percentage of the (considerable) value they create. As a result, only very large or strategically important projects become financially sustainable.
I agree with the article that the solution likely involves a different business model or incentive alignment—but this is a very hard problem.
We’ve seen major business model shifts outside open source during my career:
- SaaS software (used to be one-time payments)
- Microtransactions in games (personally dislike them, but they radically changed incentives and revenue)
These shifts are often counterintuitive and closely tied to human behavior.
I don’t agree with the specific solution proposed in the article, but I don’t have a clean answer either.
My best (very rough) idea:
Create a non-profit that builds tooling and infrastructure to measure open source usage (tricky!).
Loosely, you run something like:
oss-usage
'tailwind': 5 # units TBD
'npm': 8
'haskell': 1
'stripe': {
usage: {
'tailwind': 5,
'npm': 40,
'haskell': 1,
'ruby': 60
},
totalDonationDollars: 100000,
donationBreakdown: {
'ruby': 10000,
'haskell': 100,
'tailwind': 5000
}
}
'oracle': 'not yet claimed'
'dave': {
usage: {
'svelte': 20,
'pnpm': 40
},
totalDonationDollars: 100,
donationBreakdown: {
'svelte': 20,
'pnpm': 40
}
}
Companies can claim (or not) their usage. Developers can claim (or not) their projects and funds.
Donations are aggregated into one transaction per month, solving the microtransaction problem.
This creates a public, open record of who is funding open source. I think that could be a strong incentive for larger companies—engineers will notice when choosing where to work.
Bad actors who under-donate or refuse to disclose won’t be invisible; we’ll know where they stand.
Anyway - if you’ve read this far and are interested in working on or funding this idea, come find me: https://richardgill.org
In principle it sounds like a grand idea, although there are a bunch of corner cases like how it works cross country borders, and de-anonymising maintainers.
If it was opt in for opensource projects, and there are strong guards against people forking/hard takover-ing then yes, it seems like a good idea in principle.
I will leave the AI enthusiasts to chime in about the future, and how we don't need OS anymore.
in particular, there's repos with extremely high activity where funding doesn't help anyone and repos with low activity where funding ensures continuity for key components we all depend on but which are under-funded for various reasons.
obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Profit incentives like the one suggested is what brought us enshitification.
And the code is a free gift, unless the licence says otherwise. What's wrong with letting developers choose what to bill for?
The article: "I expect open source maintainers to maintain their codebases and add new features. I have unilaterally decided that $1/package is a suitable amount, universally applicable to all packages and maintainers." <--- this is entitlement
The comments here: "Open source maintainers don't owe you shit."
So yes, we can laugh at the proposed mechanism but I feel the world would be a better place if we could funnel more resources to OSS creators rather than just take because that's an easier path.