Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access | Hacker News Reader

Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access

theregister.com

66 pointsbeardyw76 comments

Please, just pick a side.

"I want to be the selfless craftsperson giving away work for free to anyone, but I'll also pressure profit-maximizing evil mega-corporations to give me money from the good of their heart, despite the fact that I've explicitly stated in the license they don't have to" is just not a smart position to hold.

If you want evil corporations to have to pay money in exchange for using your software, add that as a condition in the license. Ah, but then it's not "free software", sorry.

There's so much unexplored space in licenses that achieve better outcomes for both the developers and their non-giant-evil-conglomerate users, but nobody is willing to touch that subject, because then they're not writing "real free software" and the "FOSS community" will not use it.

> There's so much unexplored space in licenses [...]

Am I wrong that this is orthogonal to "pick a side"? It sounds like you're suggesting that the sides themselves are inappropriately drawn.

If the issue is that large entities are using the software without contributing back in a way that goes against the "spirit of the law", the only solutions I can see license-wise are ones that restrict usage, which marks them squarely in the not-FOSS camp.

I do believe the line is inappropriately drawn, but I also have a lot of respect for what the open source/free software movements have achieved and won't spit in their face by trying to move the line or highjack the labels.

Yeah, and that they are always searching for ways to get out from under even their minimal obligations.

For example, the practice now of "AI reimplementation" (ie. uncopyrighting) free software using AI, and training LLM models on free software without respecting the license while simultaneously claiming that the same is absolutely not allowed on their software.

Oh and not only can you not train AI on their software "without permission", you can't even use their software through AI (Microsoft)

I suspect github might be preventing some price discrimination. If you got feature request from @amazon.com you could point them to your commercial support offering or something. Some namehandle filing an issue on github makes it less obvious who's asking for it.

Personally I don't trust companies not to rip me off regardless of the licensing.

We definitely have to experiment a lot more with the licenses of OSS but keep in mind that it's going to also require time for projects to use the new licenses and figure out what side effects they have.

The tip jar is fine, the problem is that most corporations have no process to drop anything in the tip jar without purchase orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.

The same process is why open source is such a hit among the developers that actually accomplish real work in such corporations.

This is why I'm so glad when I find an open source project that has a book or similar that I can buy - I can expense a 50/500 book easily, getting a $5 expense for software approved is a PITA.

Maybe FOSS products should offer PDFs of the documentation as a "tip jar".

Format the documentation as a PDF, enable it on https://www.lulu.com/ and sell it for $100-200 (and a hardcover at some stupid high price).

You’ll collect a few.

I’d do that even in my personal capacity. Buy a new copy every major version release (where that’s applicable).

At least the new edition would be a worthwhile expense.

It would be great if all open source required payment of at least 1 dollarcent for enterprises, to make sure the purchase accounting layers are working in case anyone wants to send more money.

For 1 cent, we can still call it "free" even as in beer, the amount is small enough for that to be fair.

And if the penny isn't paid, no source? Then it's not open source. And practically speaking, no one will pay that.

If the penny isn't paid, they can still have the source.

But their legal department will have a problem.

I hope you understand the point now.

Going after them with legal claims is an odd definition of "can".

Nobody is going after them.

And remember this is only for enterprises.

This does require large players acting in good faith.

Or, at best, competently.

Sometimes both of those, or neither, are in evidence.

But I like the way you think. Make it a contract performance issue for legal teams to police internally.

And in order to pay that 1 cent, you have to pay 23 cents or so to a payment processor.

It's only for enterprises. They should have no problem with that.

If all they need is an invoice and some papers, then it seems like a business-opportunity? Offer the service to manage their donations to OSS-projects, maybe offer some additional software for managing which OSS they are using and how much those need in donations. Seems like something the FSS should offer.

You just described Github Sponsors, Tidelift, and a couple other less well known competitors. It's a business opportunity, but not a great one from what I can tell.

That may work for some businesses, but IME, the people who hold the purse strings generally aren't ok with just giving money to a project without getting something in return. Especially if it isn't a 501(c) non-profit they can get tax deductions for. I think it is actually a bit of a gap in tax law, because I don't think such a donation would count as a business expense either if you don't get something concrete in exchange.

I highly suspect that these people who push for paid open source are NOT open source maintainers.

If I wanted to get paid for the software I make in my free time, I would put a price on it.

If someone likes what I do personally, they can donate on my Patreon or kofi or whatever.

If I want my project to only be used for other free software, then I make it GPL or AGPL. That's it.

If someone uses my software and works for a company and needs support, we can talk about a support contract.

Some definitely are, but I think you're right to keep an eye out. I don't think that the thing open source needs is more foundations with compensated presidents and community managers and fundraising departments

We shamefully hear too much about the bad foundations (especially Mozilla and Wikimedia).

The good foundations remain working quietly in the shadows.

Much of the article is about getting people to pay for services around open source, specifically package registries. Big users paying to use a package registry hardly sounds unreasonable.

its not actually clear what the article is about, and it has the usual journalistic conflation of concepts (market cap is not the same thing as income!).

I don't expect to get paid for the open source work I do in my free time. But I would also really like it if I could work on open source software full time (or for the software I work on at my day job to be open source), but to do so I would need a source of income from somewhere.

Indeed, by definition, someone trying to charge for "open source" is not an open source developer. They're a for-profit developer.

> I mean, after all, they've made billions from this code.

As someone whose dream job is to just build open source software and have a comfortable life, I'm highly sympathetic to open source sustainability and I do hope we continue to seek for solutions.

But this type of statement is ridiculous. There is a hell of a lot more to business than just the code, despite what many of us software engineers want to think. It's also quite rare for a commercial company to airlift an open source project and make billions on it. There is also a massive spectrum/range of open source, from tiny nearly throwaway libraries up to massive applications.

Turning open source into commercial software is NOT the solution. Commercial software has existed forever, and continues to (try doing something non-trivial with PDFs if you want a modern painful example). If open source becomes commercial software, we'd be losing out on a mountain of greatness. Imagine if downloading a Linux distro required paying for and receiving a license? And if you want to make a distro, be prepared to buy licenses for OpenSSL and every little thing that makes up that system, and set up your accounting books and what not so you can properly distribute all your revenues to the thousands (or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands) of sub-projects. And don't forget that you also have to have technical/legal apparati capable of enforcing, maybe auditing, etc.

Nothing is stopping you from spinning your open source project into a commercial operation right now. Plenty of people do it (it's usually called "source available" because you largely have to, by necessity, restrict redistribution, which makes it no longer "open source" according to most definitions of said term). The great thing about freedom and choice is that you can go whichever direction you want.

Copyright is a bundle of rights and copyright licenses don't have to license all of the rights in that bundle under the same terms.

You could make a license that makes copying and distribution not cost any money but charges for use. People who make distributions would then not have to pay anything for including the software in a distribution.

That seems like it would leave a lot of projects without any revenue, which doesn't seem fair in this hypothetical new world of charging for all your open source code. How many people are actually compiling and installing systemd themselves rather than having it come with their distro?

I've long held that open source is one of the world's biggest anarchist experiments. Anarchism, as understood by the likes of Kropotkin, largely believed that we can self organize towards working for the wellbeing of all, that s self organized groups will genuinely build useful and high quality tools.

Rather than turning open source into just another commercial effort, I'd love to explore going the other way. Why do we need to pay open source developers? They need housing, food, etc. Maybe the better answer is to figure out how to make those things freely available to open source developers.

It's possible to imagine a world where everything works like open source -- share what you have in excess, take what you need, work on something you enjoy for the betterment of all.

They also need a future for their children, to sock some money away for retirement and healthcare as well. These are all much more expensive.

Sure. But if we took care of everyone, we'd need less individual effort to secure futures for children. Because the community has broad responsibility for that.

Thats interesting im sure the Billionaires would love a little open source company town that takes care of everyone's needs that contribute to open source. Plays right into their network state idea

> I've long held that open source is one of the world's biggest anarchist experiments. Anarchism, as understood by the likes of Kropotkin, largely believed that we can self organize towards working for the wellbeing of all, that s self organized groups will genuinely build useful and high quality tools.

The paradox of this kind of "anarchism" is that it works really well when it isn't being consciously pursued, i.e. when the "well being of all" is an emergent effect of people pursuing their own well being locally, trying to speculate about "the well being of all" at the macro level. The moment people start trying to consciously work toward specific outcomes at the macro level, it all starts to fall apart.

So it's really more aligned with Hayek than Kropotnik: spontaneous order as a product of human action, not human design.

> Why do we need to pay open source developers? They need housing, food, etc. Maybe the better answer is to figure out how to make those things freely available to open source developers.

And that's exactly where we begin to falter. Sitting here on HN speculating about how to make the world, as a single unit of analysis, rather people at the micro level observing and replicating what actually works in practice individually, is a recipe for creating obstacles and mechanisms of centralization which will inevitably be abused.

I've sometimes wondered what it would be like now if some of the big names early in open source and free software had decided to take a detour of a couple decades to work in commercial software with the goal of making as much money as possible, and then retire and use that money to endow a foundation to promote free/open source software development by paying developers.

Imagine if Stallman had gotten the IBM work instead of Gates, and now it was the Free Software Foundation with billions instead of the the Gates Foundation. With those resources their endowment would be generating enough income that they would be able to pay around 10000 programmers a year $100k plus full benefits to do free software work.

That would have meant less free software for those decades while there amassing their fortunes, but then an explosion of free software afterwards.

I deeply dislike this framing of mega corps vs volunteer devs. It conveniently ignores the huge amount of open source being developed by regular salaried devs as part of their job. Imho that is what we need more of instead of trying to redirect some money to these individuals which to me seems inherently unstable approach.

To make that happen I think companies should be more willing to develop and publish their own patches instead of relying on upstream for anything. Overall I think in the open source world the idea of (centralized upstream) "project" has gotten way overinflated.

no, I work on open source because I want it to be freely available to all, without conditions

I view it as a type of charity. I know not everybody can afford to use their time without compensation. that's ok!

but I will personally never charge, and I oppose this commercial mindset

I admire this mindset, and this is what I try and do as well with my projects.

But for larger projects, on which the giants rests, (I'm thinking cURL, ffmpeg etc.) it most likely stops becoming/feeling like charity. Especially, since a lot of people do not see it as charity, and thus tries to force the maintainer(s) to do even more unpaid work.

The onus is on the maintainer(s) to work on the project as much as they can and want to, if people are creeps who try to socially manipulate maintainers to do free work, I think we need mechanisms to help mitigate that. For example, I think maintainers should be encouraged to delete GH comments they find offensive or harassing. It's their domain, they should keep it in a way they find enjoyable.

But turning open source into a job? No thank you! Adding money to something, overwhelmingly almost always in my experience, makes it that much worse and stressful. Money is not the answer!

I think one has to go clear eyed into freely licensing one’s software. It’s hard to declare you’re giving up all rights and that the IP can be used in any way, only to later say “no not like that!”

If you want a cut of your licensee’s revenue then it’s ok to say so in your licensing terms.

But also does it even have to be a construed as charity? Why do we need to put it in economic terms? Why not just -- something you do because otherwise it wouldn't exist? And you want it to exist?

In any case, +1, I find these posts to be pretty tiresome, and honestly, at this point irritating. Open source is open source, it's code we build in the open, together. If you don't have the time or energy to contribute, please let other people take over. It's not open source if it feels like work you should be compensated for. In my opinion, you should save that mentality for your job.

This seems more about infrastructure than open source itself. It seems fair to let them pay for the additional unnecessary costs they create, especially when they can do better.

ultra rich corporations generally reach their status thru direct harm. why are you ok with them using your product for free?

This article conflates multiple issues:

Paying for hosting costs seems straightforward. Sonatype has decided to host Maven Central and treat it effectively as a marketing expense, and they are free to change that if they want. Same for the hosts of PyPi, RubyGems, etc.

Developer labor is a separate issue and what most people (including the article author) seem most confused about. Open source developers generally fall into one of a few different categories: Hobbyists looking for enjoyment, aspiring professionals looking for experience, startups looking for exposure and adoption, and corporate employees maintaining software their business relies on.

Contributors to vast majority of usable software fall into the last category, yet all of the focus is on the subset of people in the first category that attract a userbase that is meaningful enough to theoretically warrant some support, which is probably the smallest faction of open source developers by a large margin.

I do not understand the angst over this. If a hobbyist gets tired of their hobby, they are free to move on. If they feel exploited by some big corporation, change the license going forward, make the repo private, push harder for compensation until they feel properly compensated, or take whatever other action resolves their internal issue.

All the other categories of developer are fine as is, and the dissatisfied category could be as well if they took more agency over the situation.

> 82 percent of Maven Central demand comes from fewer than 1 percent of IPs

This is interesting, and the author goes on to say that 80% comes from the largest cloud providers. But I wonder how much of that is coming from CI pipelines and how much is actually the cloud provider's usage?

Almost 100% of it. If Sonatype or the PSF want to start charging the major cloud providers for bandwidth because they can't be bothered to cache the content, that's not unreasonable but any associated costs will be passed along to consumers (which is also not unreasonable).

If new (and existing too!) projects use the AGPL, isn't that sufficient to deter the worst offenders ?

When looking at the OpenBSD Foundation list of donors, I can see Microsoft has giving a decent amount to OpenBSD over the years. I assume for use of OpenSSH. I have to give MS credit for this.

Now for a different company, IBM is completely missing and they use OpenSSH everywhere, even on AIX. And now it is even more glaring since they own Red Hat.

Yes this is a small "survey", but it shows not all large companies donates to projects that are really critical to their products.

So yes, at the very least, if your company depends upon a Open Source Project, you should throw a bit over the wall :)

https://www.ibm.com/opensource/community-involvement/

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-...

MIT license + a standard rate.

Something like " If you require customizations or enhancements we bill at 1000$ an hour, 8 hour minimum."

I don't particularly care if someone working at Microsoft or whatever sees my open source project and decides to use it. That's fantastic. But I'm absolutely not going to work for Microsoft for free, so they need something for one of their use cases they need to pay up.

This is pretty much what Richard Stallman did. He acted as a consultant on GCC for organizations/businesses and charged $250/hr in 1990s dollars for the privilege of his time and expertise. If Mr. Free Software himself put a monetary price on his brainpower, why don't you?

Your implication is that RMS was spending that money on himself for luxuries.

Are you sure the money wasn't being charged by his foundations (or given indirectly - e.g. used for his living expenses)?

Hard to know what his intentions were unless there's a link to something where he explains himself e.g. he could easily just be valuing opportunity costs.

I didn't specify or imply what he spent the money on, only that he demanded compensation for his time and energy, and at quite a hefty (well-deserved) price. Whether he did that as himself or under GNU Project or FSF auspices is also immaterial for purposes of this discussion. People both for and against open source seem to believe there's an implication that developers' time is free as well, and I'm just showing that the most dogmatic advocate for free software of all believed otherwise and put those beliefs into action.

Open source will be bigger than ever, but not necessarily for the right reasons.

IMHO, as coding agents mature, we will see a surge in open-source projects. Most will remain obscure due to poor discoverability and growing competition for users' attention. But the same forces driving that growth in volume will likely erode quality and it most certainly raising ethical concerns. A company can now perform a clean-room reimplementation of an open-source project and potentially maintain it going forward with more resources and polish than the original.

For the most successful, high-impact projects, this creates a real problem that they risk losing momentum to well-funded clones.

At that point, what is the incentive to keep building in the open?

> We must realign how businesses work with open source so that payment is no longer an optional charitable gift but a cost of doing business. To do that, we need an organization to create a viable, supportable path from big business to individual programmer. It's time for someone to step up and make this happen. Businesses, open source software, and maintainers will all be better off for it.

Congratulations, you rediscovered commercial software - where you are legally obligated pay to use software.

Yep, and the whole "this comes with absolutely no warranty" isn't going to fly anymore. You will also need at least some support system too. Yeah, no thanks, that's not why I do so much open source stuff.

The 50th anniversary of Bill Gates' "An Open Letter To Software Hobbyists" was a couple of months ago and the letter was literally about developers deserving to be compensated for the hard work put their code. Now that much of the FOSS community is starting to say the same, it's time for them to finally admit that Bill Gates turned out to right in the end.

"An Open Letter to Hobbyists", 1976 (he was 20).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

In short it says: I can't make you pay me, but I'm calling you a thief, so you should pay me anyway, or else I'll call you a thief again. Other people get paid, so I should be paid too because I like money.

Change "thief" to "free rider" and it's exactly what the shared source / post-open license folks are saying.

I like Cryptomator's solution: donate to get a pretty banner.

Also, it didn't work -- Mountain Duck is closed source.

Personally I donate €50 every now and then when the average of the donation goes below a certain value (varies by project) but it requires tracking in a Spreadsheet.

This is fine as long as everything actually stays FOSS, rather than becoming fauxpen source. The best way to do this is to license everything under AGPLv3+, which the megacorps are all allergic to, and then sell exceptions to them.

True open source is dead. Ai and big tech will eat it instantly. Dual licensure is ok (AGPL+paid). You can disagree but then don’t whine when someone instantly repackages and markets your tool and gets paid when you don’t.

> True open source is dead. Ai and big tech will eat it instantly.

What does it mean for open source to be "eaten"?

What do you make of all of the traditional FOSS projects that are still going strong?

Maybe providers of these services should start randomly return 402 return code. At least for those request which do not have sufficient authentication linked to existing payments.

Please just use the AGPL or shut up. If you release under a license that encourages freeloaders, you will get freeloaders.

When i choose GPL for my code, it's exactly because I do not want it to be encumbered with payment terms.

FLOSS is a tool for efficiency, for sharing automation and knowledge; just like knowledge itself, it cannot be commercial, it cannot have paywalls. Simply put, everyone must develop what they need, publishing the code from day zero, from the very first commit, this is what creates the community on a larger scale.

The problem isn't Open Source, it's the commercial organisation of knowledge which is simply unsustainable. It is society that needs to change.

> Anyone building modern software depends on language registries such as Maven Central, PyPI, npm, crates.io, and others

So, who's going to tell Linus Torvalds (among many others) he's not writing modern software? I have a feeling I know exactly what the author considers "modern" software...

This is absurd, it's not open source if you charge for access that's just a product.

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