Comment by h2s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by h2s | Hacker News Reader

Software engineering is one of the more well-paid professions available. And yet occasionally on Hacker News there seems to be somebody who doesn't feel they have quite enough money yet. Usually they manifest this by trying to top up their bank account with some underhanded Amazon referral link couched within a blog post. Today it's another "open source software should cost money" plea.

Last time I saw it manifested in this particular form, it was Zed Shaw's "Premium Branch Manifesto" (http://premium-branch.org/) in which he breathlessly warned of impending doom:

    > If this balance of power is not corrected I
    > fear FLOSS will actually die.

I think it's kind of sad that so many people apparently don't see one of the main things I find so amazing about free software. We're a community of people who give stuff away to others for free often for no other reason than the fact that building it is fun enough in itself. This is simply not a thing on this kind of scale in most other professions, and I feel a little defensive when somebody says we should put a stop to it.

But wouldn't it be nice if it were easier to make a living as an independent developer, working only on open source? Don't you think a lot more good stuff would get written?

I get that it's more fun to just hack for fun and just throw stuff out there than it would be to be doing it for a living. But we all have to make a living somehow. Are you better off with a day job that leaves you a little time for open source, or spending all your work time on open source but having that be more like a job?

I'm sure different people will answer that question differently, but I think there have to be more people out there that would like to get paid for OSS work than have currently managed to find a way to do that.

Yeah, look at all the 99 cent crap splayed across google play that we are missing?! Giving incentives is a sure way to increase output but we are not short on low quality alternatives for every task.

I'm sure there are a lot of people who would like to get paid (and feel they deserve to get paid) for making OSS in whatever area interests them. But the vast majority of them should mostly be solving specific tasks for specific people for money and practice. Their occasional bug fixes in OSS that affects them is more valuable then whatever project they may create if they were given money.

It is the nature of learning, expertise (and human self deception that is needed for growth?) that if you think you are the best person for the job then you are probably a beginner.

See, I think it's a bigger problem that it's such a taboo topic within the open source community.

Not all developers have (or want) regular-paying jobs. Many of us want to work on open source projects full-time, but cannot afford to because there's a general assumption that their software will be beer-free.

Now I agree that giving stuff away for free is awesome and is a huge reason why so many open source projects have a large, sustaining community to keep them alive, but I don't think we should poo-poo developers who believe they could do a better job if they expect (EDIT: some of) their users to pay for their software.

What about this? (Shameless plug:) https://bountyoss.com/

I'm glad to see more things like this popping up (https://www.bountysource.com/), but it's hard to know what "the answer" is. Time may tell.

If you expect users to pay for your software, then (literally by definition) you're not a part of the open source community.

Full stop.

You may be a wonderful person who creates amazing software that you deserve to be paid top dollar for. But it is proprietary software, not open source software. And trying to call something open source when it is not just confuses people. Don't do that.

I am also wary of people suggesting that software whose users are "required" to pay a per-user fee could be open source. Open source software could not come with a universally enforceable requirement of this kind. "The license may not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software..."

But the prospect of open source developers being paid other than per-copy, per-user is plausible. Alex Tabarrok demonstrated in 1996 that it should be possible to do it even without altruism given enforcement of contracts and someone with sufficient information about demand. (I don't know if that kind of information is often achieved in practice.)

Karl Fogel just ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund creation of the second edition of Producing Open Source Software, which will be distributed on terms closely parallel to open source software (all recipients of the book can redistribute and modify it, and nobody is required to pay a per-copy license fee). The payment to Karl happened up front and ahead of time. The same structure might have worked if Karl were to apply this funding to software development instead of to writing about software development -- and indeed Joey Hess did that a while ago with his git-annex-assistant Kickstarter, which as far as I know has worked out quite well.

In the Kickstarter case there is a significant potential free-rider problem; for example, I didn't personally fund Joey's project but I might still benefit from his work on git-annex. Kickstarter seems to use various aspects of social norms and psychology to address free riding, often with good results.

I think we need more work on this even as we continue to insist on not diluting the meaning of open source.

There are lots of models for how open source developers can be paid.

The first person that I am aware of to be hired exclusively to develop open source software (though he of course called it free software) was Brian Fox in 1985.

The first company that I am aware of to establish a successful commercial business exclusively around open source software (though of course again it was called free software) was Cygnus in 1989. The business model is that people developing new chips needed a compiler for their chip, and would hire Cygnus on a contract to port GCC for them. (The resulting port then got folded back into GCC.)

There are thousands of people today whose paid job is developing open source software. Are there more people who want this type of work who don't get it? Absolutely. Are there a lot of useful projects that don't get funded? Of course. But there are a lot of these projects out there.

Open source has nothing to do with cost. It is entirely possible to do it for cost, but of course adoption may suffer.

Open source has nothing to do with cost.

Item 1 of http://opensource.org/osd disagrees with you. You may charge anything you like for open source software. But once someone gets it, they are free to redistribute it for any price that they want - including nothing. If your software does not have that property, then it is not open source.

(That web page has been up for nearly 15 years, with only minor modification, and the principles of that definition go back farther than the creation of the term "Open Source" as a marketing campaign for free software almost exactly 15 years ago. I've been personally using that term for over 14.5 years.)

No, it doesn't. The fact that someone can redistribute it doesn't mean you don't have the right to charge for it in the first place. This works particularly well for some software when it comes to distributing binaries against cost.

I don't know what you think I said, but your response makes no sense in light of what I said.

Please re-read what I wrote, without skipping the sentence, You may charge anything you like for open source software.

People get paid for solving problems, not writing software. Solve a problem with your software, then it's not terribly difficult to make money.

The reason that people push back on the idea that you should get money because your git origin is a public GitHub repo is that that in itself does not solve any problems.

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