Should I Work for Free? | Hacker News Reader

Should I Work for Free?

shouldiworkforfree.com

283 pointsareski127 comments

Last submission was 2 days ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9787328

I learned this the hard way in my early days of freelancing as a web developer. The main reason I think it's important not to work for free isn't the fact that you're not being compensated for your time (which of course sucks) but that your client doesn't actually feel comfortable giving you honest feedback about the work your producing because they know you're doing it for free.

So what happens is you end up with a sub-par delivery because the client often feels too guilty to look a gift horse in the mouth and you're not properly motivated to make it better than you might if you were being fairly compensated on top of it.

Good point

However, it's often better to work for free than for peanuts. The client who's paying you a few tens or hundreds of bucks will often treat you like garbage, AND give you poor feedback. Stick with your rate (if you don't have one, decide what you're "comfortable" charging... and triple it) and explicitly provide a "one-time discount" for the client to land on what they can pay. Clients treat you better the more "expensive" you seem — which seems to hold true even if they aren't actually being charged all that money.

I learned this early on in one of my side businesses: "The one who pays the least complains the most". Charge enough to communicate that you are a professional. Don't take clients who are low bidders. Let your competition take those and watch them suffer.

It's worse than that, most people value things by their cost, if they aren't spending any money then how much will they value your time.

Exactly, it's enjoyable working with people who value my time, not wasting it on boring calls or long emails. With a high rate, clients are VERY careful not to dick around.

> that your client doesn't actually feel comfortable giving you honest feedback about the work your producing because they know you're doing it for free.

I call this the "friends moving your furniture" problem. You aren't going to complain to your friend that he's damaging shit because he's volunteering with a tedious task for free. You need all the help you can get, right?

Of course, in your friend's case, he's not making a business out of moving furniture. But in a web developer's case, the bad habits you'll inevitably create but won't get corrected will end up hurting you later when you do decide that you're going to charge for your work.

This is very on point. I will also add that client who is not paying is usually care way less. Also, if client can not pay this quite often in my practice meant that what they are working on is not good idea to start with (there are exceptions of course!)

It all boils down to client should have some stake in the game.

25 years of experience as a small business owner here. Always start high, and only lower your rate in exchange for a guaranteed amount of work. Also consider charging different rates for different types of work as part of your agreement. Always get everything in writing, and keep relevant communication.

All I'll say it is almost a law of physics that lowball clients will abuse you, constantly change the scope of work (after all, you're cheap!), and generally treat you like a cheap whore.

Don't be a cheap whore, be a high class and expensive escort!

OT: If you're ever in Auckland, NZ or Vancouver, CA let me know. I'd like to buy you a beer.

i have a one hour free for (early stage) startups.

and it's great. i give them all the input (i'm a consultant, so basically i talk smart) i can in one hour. hold nothing back. sometimes it's all they need. a push in the right direction. i don't want to sell them anything (yet). sometimes i don't hear back from them for months, years. sometimes never.

why do i do it:

reason 1) data - (in my case access to their google search console and google analytics). this helps me to adjust my benchmark of how i see the different verticals / businesses.

reason 2) leads over time

2a) most startups fail. the people move on. this is how i got a "foot in the door" to germanys biggest media-houses.

2b) some startups succeed. if they do, the usually come back to me. quite often for very different topics than the one we actually talked about.

reason 3) ideas

it's great to talk to people with a fresh perspective. it's a give and get. they learn something from me, most of the time i learn something from them.

all of this together is worth something. in my case: 1h of my time, 1h of their time. so is it really "1h free" well, more like "1h non monetary" but that doesn't sound as catchy!

is there a second-hour free? no

is there a one hour free for big companies? no, because it costs already lots of time to sell big companies anything.

is there a one hour free for assholes? no

This makes a lot of sense but I would argue that having access to their data no longer makes it an hour for free.

Data is a major currency.

Yeah, but so are experience, connections, and ideas - and they're all of varying values depending upon one's lack of (and ability to utilize) each.

I really like this and have thought about doing something like this myself. Not really to drum up new business, but to have an inspirational chat about what they are doing and help them get pointed in the right direction.

Free isn't free in your case. You're doing presales engineering plus learning stuff that would be difficult otherwise.

Streamlined version:

Should I work for free? -----> No.

Not even if they're your bestie, a charity, or your mother - unless you want an unpaid support gig from here until the end of time, or want to never speak to them again.

Free is not a sustainable dynamic for non-transient (I.e. Serving soup) tasks.

Imagine if you were to work in a soup kitchen as a volunteer, but the terms were that you'd be liable for any food poisoning, and you have to come in at 3am on Sunday because the stove isn't working, and someone there thinks you looked at the fridge once, which is close enough.

This might be a cultural thing, but I think everyone should help their close relatives with computer problems.

Sometimes when their relatives need help, people literally give up everything and live with them and help them with everything. Spending 20 minutes to sign them up for email is not the biggest investment.

Basically if you think of yourself and your family as one entity, it makes sense to minimize overall wasted time. Since you are most efficient at computer-related things, it makes sense to do those things for them.

I think the problem madaxe_again is underlying is that the 20m task often leads to the person assuming you're the culprit of any possible problem the computer might have in the future.

I still help friends and family with computer problems, but I try to avoid friends-of-friends and such.

By the way, the idea of considering myself and my family as a single unit is bizarre to me, unless you're talking about just the immediate relatives. Each branch of my family has at least two "sub-branches" who don't speak to each other :)

Well, I understand where he's coming from. But if you follow this line of reasoning further, you basically say that you should never help anyone - including your immediate family - with anything because they might think you ruined it for them.

I'm not saying you should be Mother Teresa, or even help people you don't like, but iff you like someone and they need help, just help them out.

They might help you out later with something else they can do better than you.

They might help you out later with something else they can do better than you.

Unlikely, because they won't see what you've done as help - you just end up associated with the computer, and viewed as part of the problem.

I'm not saying never help anyone with anything ever - just not with technical tasks - don't build someone a website, don't set their computer up, don't uninstall their malware - you will just end up beholden, and nobody will thank you.

By all means, however, mow the lawn, do the shopping, bake a cake - just nothing which requires ongoing support.

> Unlikely, because they won't see what you've done as help

So many times this.

It is peculiar how people view computer janitory as "simple" activity, despite not being able to do it themselves. Is that because all you do is press some buttons here and there? It is in fact perceived to be so easy that you get people complaining for your free work.

I've been asked by literally total strangers to "fix their PC" for them; would they ever consider asking a random plumber for a favor like that?

- "Oh so you do something with computers, could you please fix my laptop?"

- "Eh what are you doing for a living?"

- "A mason"

- "Cool then, we long wanted to change tiles in the bathroom"

[awkward silence]

I admit, I've never gotten this from total strangers. That would be a very strange experience and I'd probably make a joke about it, as you describe. Relatives have occasionally asked me for computer help but those questions have typically been very specific, time-and-effort-bound, and nobody expected me to deliver on a follow-on "service contract".

I'd guess the scenario is more like a social setting where you know some of the people and don't know others. And you're having a "what do you do?" kind of conversation where you respond with "computer stuff" and then the person you're talking to, or someone in earshot, says something like "Oh, maybe you could help me with mine...".

That's happened to me several times. I've also had people do a similar thing in work settings--people who weren't even direct coworkers.

I don't get much "service" work for the relatives either, save for immediate family. Somehow it's more distant acquaintances (most of my close friends are in IT).

And yeah that conversation was quite out of blue: we were standing in slow grocery queue, think I was wearing my keycard and it came up.

Roughly nobody is going to come up to you after you've helped them put in a fence and say it must be your fault the animals got out last night because you helped them put in the fence six months ago, and you need to come fix it right now. Nobody is going to come up to you after you gave them some chicken soup while they had a cold and say it's your fault they now have cancer and you need to come fix it. But for some reason, a lot of people will do this with computers. Not everybody, and if you have a user who is actually reasonable about it then by all means help them. But be wary about it until you see how they act with computers (which will not necessarily be how they act for anything else) and be ready to cut them off if they start abusing you.

I always teach them what I am doing and why. Results have been better than expected but of course the person being helped has to be open.

> assuming you're the culprit of any possible problem the computer might have in the future.

I learned this the hard way with my girlfriend's grandmother. After I fixed a whole bunch of stuff, all complaints became "Omegaham monkeyed with my computer and now it won't work."

My mom is a lot better about this, though... and my grandmother has been programming since the punch-card days. So it's not all bad.

> if you think of yourself and your family as one entity

That's nice if you have a nice family. A lot of people have really shitty families. I don't see any reason to treat people special just because they are family. I do things for my parents, but I actually like my parents. There is no way in hell I'm doing anything for most of my aunts, uncles, or cousins, because they are bad people.

My solution to family tech support has been to buy an iPad for anyone who gets in touch asking which purple gorilla they should trust.

A child response to you refers to my point - which is that if I uninstall bonzi buddy for you, you then decide it's definitely my fault when you install malware next time, and instead of "please can you help?" it's "fix my fucking computer, why did you break it?".

No good deed goes unpunished. Introduce a financial exchange into the mix and it ceases being a good deed and becomes a commercial transaction, and peoples' assumptions and expectations accordingly change.

Once, I told my mom that she should install a hard drive herself. She has since moved on to setting up routers and at least one security DVR. By convincing her to empower herself I've freed her from the crappy support at the store, which has saved her lots of money.

I'm in a similar position - I'm notoriously slow to answer emails and check voicemails, which is fantastic. After a few instances of this, my mom just started learning how to Google the answers to her problems. These days, if she needs help with something, it's usually something that I end up needing to ask someone else for help with.

I can't even make her write down what I tell her, which she will forget in a minute... or she wants me to install her new laptop but refuses to migrate away from her crappy desktop (and I refuse to set up 2 backup set-ups).

but she gives me money to study while not having a good pension saved for the future, so who am I to complain!

I think there's a difference between working for free and doing occasional favors if you have the time and it's a two way street (no need to keep score, just in general).

Work often implies responsibilities and demands. There can be none in a favor.

> it makes sense to do those things for them.

I try to "teach them to fish", not just "give them the fish", though. Unless it's too complex or we're too pressed for time.

"Computer-related things" isn't a thing, any more than an evolutionary biologist who works with fruit flies is well-qualified to work on a particle accelerator (despite both being "science"). I'm an engineer. I'm not a Microsoft help-desk staffer, a GMail support center, or an Acer repair technician. If my family members don't use the same equipment, software, and services that I do, I'm unlikely to have any special knowledge that will help them more than what they'll get from tech support (bad as it often is). Half the time I can't even understand what they're talking about and just end up reading the manual to them until everyone is too angry to continue the conversation.

If you work on a consumer e-mail app, sure, by all means get them using that and help them with it. But many (most) of us don't work on products that are targeted at consumer needs, or have any special knowledge about the products our family members use. Let the people who do, do their jobs; everyone will get a better outcome that way.

I think it is about respect. Like my grandparents who will copy any error message down by hand and ask me about them later, but who actually listens and care what I have to say. If they kept asking the same thing and didn't listen I would feel very different about what I am doing.

I usually help close relatives and long-standing friends with computer problems. I felt funny charging them money, but a nice compromise I settled on after a while was asking for food as payment. They felt good about giving me something (many good people will actually feel guilty about getting something for free), I felt good about getting awesome food (often homemade), and it discouraged the worst leeching.

When I used to repair computers, my starting rate was a six-pack and went up to a case for virus removal.

Both my grandmothers are nurses who have given me and my parents remote medical advice for years. I actually really wish that I was better at remote computer support.

Ah, but when you get ill, do you phone them up and ask why they made you ill, and fit in three or four digs about how the medicine they told you to take last time is definitely causing this, and potentially also your dog's illness?

That's the difference between computers and pretty much anything else... For some reason all ration just goes clean out of the window.

Eh - my parents are pretty good. I'm not going to let them pay the Geek Squad $700 to remove viruses from their computer (again). I can do that. You do have to draw boundaries - like I'll say "yes, I can help you, but I'll have to block out 2 hours next week." So if it's really an urgent problem they'll get the message and go pay someone, begin to understand that what I do isn't trivial, and become respectful of my time. YMMV - my parents are dope.

In the 90s in my first business I did support at home for people who thought they could get unpaid support from their friends, neighbours and neighbourhood kids. We were expensive and never lacked clients who had gotten unpaid support which had only made things worse.

Misses a huge point, if you're doing a startup with friends, typically you're all working for free.

Keep your day job, do some work on the side, retain all rights to your code. Make sure the person or people you're working with are equally dedicated. Have clauses that cut people out for non-delivery on their parts.

A startup is only 25% the code in my experience, it's the most critical part (unless you're selling vaporware) but it's just ahead of sales which then quickly takes over. Unless you're doing the facebook model (which I've never been able to grasp personally).

The company (because there is a legal entity, and not just three guys hacking in a garage, right?) absolutely needs to retain ownership of the code. If the CTO decides he'd rather work for Microsoft 6 months in you can't have a legal structure that allows him to take all the code with him and dump everyone else back to square one.

If you've got two or more people working on a business/startup/project, everything done toward that goal needs to belong to that entity, not the person that created it.

You have licenses and contracts for that.

I think the original article deals with working under contact for a start up, not as a founder. The context seems to be people with specialised skills who are approached by start ups for specific items of work (graphic design projects), with an expectation of free our cheap labour.

I agree with other commenters that if you are a cofounder, the situation is different. Since you are getting equity in consideration, as soon as it matters to get these legal protections, you must provide a license, and preferably, attribute ownership of the software to the company.

The context seems to be people with specialised skills who are approached by start ups for specific items of work (graphic design projects), with an expectation of free our cheap labour.

What's the potential benefit to the contractor, to do free work for a startup? Is it an actual thing to ask service providers or solo practitioners to work for no cash and no equity?

Yes.

The benefit is "exposure" or "portfolio pieces" and it's terrible.

> Misses a huge point, if you're doing a startup with friends, typically you're all working for free.

Working for shares is not "free". It's a gamble (if it busts you get nothing), and if you want to gamble that's your call, but whatever the deal is for your compensation, get it it writing.

At times, it feels like, the more someone is paying you, the more they will respect you. Don't work for free unless they have a good respect for you otherwise you will be used. My own experience was trying to help out two non-profits with some IT work and they ask you for the world and treat you like shit.

He who works for free, never gets thanked, as a wizened truck driver once told me.

Your work and your input will not be respected without a consideration.

Spot on.

The higher I push my rates, the more respect I get. It's been a surprising finding coming from a programmer that came from a pretty broke family.

But it gives me courage to constantly push my rates higher and higher. Courage in that single negotiation moment seems to generate professional respect that even great work doesn't generate.

"Here's my rate. It's non-negotiable. <blank, cold stare accompanied by dead silence until the client decides to speak>"

I've always found this list incredibly useful when preparing to negotiate with a potential new contract. http://note.liudas.eu/v1/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Negotiat...

In an age of where an half-way descent engineer is thrown a job offer, you should be able to generate enough leads to continuously try out new rates.

Prepare like hell for the negotiation. Know their favorite sports team. Know that they graduated with honors from Caltech. Tell them exactly how you're going to help their company, unapologetically give them your rate, and then be absolutely quiet waiting for their response. "First person to talk always loses", so STFU. Don't flinch.

There's one huge thing that the author missed: working for free on an open source or creative commons project, as well as the advantages of just getting your work out there on those licenses even if it doesn't directly benefit you financially immediately.

I think that's covered in the non-profit branch.

Not really. The non-profit branch implied that the completed work will belong only to the non-profit. With open source and creative commons, ultimately the intellectual rights still belong to you; you're just letting other people use your work for free.

You also don't have to release open source or creative commons work for someone else. If you look on github, most projects are the work of individuals, and released & maintained primarily by them and not a separate non-profit entity.

TDLR the author has forgotten that you can also work for yourself for free and not just other people

The author is in the field of graphic design. It's not unreasonable that they wouldn't have much exposure to that.

I agree that open-source is definitely missing from this if it is considered from the perspective of a software developer. "Should I work for free?" is a simple and easy to remember title but it is an oversimplification when the author actually intended on it being something more like "Should I do design work for free?" That said, this was also made in 2011 and I think a lot has changed since then.

That's reasonable, but it still doesn't detract from my point that her chart is missing a really big piece.

One of the first bits of advice my old boss gave me: never work for free. I was surprised because I'd never even considered doing that. But it must be common enough for him to have mentioned it.

Depends where you are. In creative fields in NY, there is tons of free labor, or people getting paid on a scale of Net-180 to Net-Never (proportional to how many times you say "Fuck You, Pay Me"). As well as a load of illegal "internships". Outside of finance, businesses here are often extremely cheap to the point of being dishonest.

I really don't understand why people put up with it. Nobody has any ethics either.

Seriously? Six months to pay? :-O

Considering what all of the young animators I know went through after looking for work here out of SVA, six months was if they were lucky.

It has gotten a lot better over the last 5-7 years though.

As a note of perspective, this comes from a graphic designer (Jessica Hische), and their work has an even greater tendency to be devalued by potential clients. Just spend a few minutes browsing the Clients from Hell tumblr to get an idea their typical business relations…

Many graphic designers consider a little free work in exchange for future work or references as a good way to get one’s foot in the door. This usually backfires.

To clarify, this was lawyer work? And if so, doesn't the ABA recommend some pro bono work every year?

No, when I was working as an engineer. Charity work is of course different regardless of your profession. Nobody is making money off your labor.

The model "never work for free" doesn't capture that nuance, which is the whole point of flowcharts like the linked one :-p

You're right. You should also work for your mother for free. I also fix my wife's computer for free, bu

You're right. I also fix my wife's computer for free, but not anyone else's.

And that's why I don't throw around "never work for free" as actionable insight :-p

I thought this was going to be one of those websites that just had NO in big letters on it. Sadly it's not.

There has been only one time I was willing to work for free, to establish some credibility as a freelancer when reaching out wasn't working that well and I didn't had anything to show in my portfolio, plus I didn't want to go on bidding wars on Odesk, Elance. I think that (desperation) might be one of the major reasons why someone might want to work for free.

Funny how one of the branches leads to nothing but 'no' and still has a whole bunch of extra questions to ask. That could be optimized!

You should work for free as in freedom, not for free as in beer.

I notice that once you go down the "is it for a legitimate business" branch, the answers are all "NO". They could have omitted all the follow-ups.

Ah, but then you'd lose the explanations for why each scenario is not appropriate to work for free in.

I was thinking this was going to be one of those websites that just says NO in big letters. Sadly it's not.

One branch that isn't covered here is joining a non-funded startup as the technical co-founder.

But then it's not free. Just because most equity is worthless doesn't mean the work is done for free.

True, but you still bet your future and work many many hours for no pay, and in some cases it never even gets seed funding, so you end up just wasting a ton of time, even though no one profited from your work.

Also it should be mentioned for young/inexperienced people, that you do this only if the equity is significant (don't join if they have 5 non technical founders, no product and offer you like 5%), and if the founders are not idiots, assholes and/or dodgy.

The pay doesn't have to be in cash. If you're joining as a co-founder and aren't offered at the very least a decent chunk of equity with a nominal non-zero value, then you probably should say no.

Mine is simpler: Is it a project, that you would start by yourself anyway, you do now with partners, who bring value, you trust and give you enough equity? Everything else is a no.

what I find much more important: don't work for too little money.

I help friends for free and do a quick and dirty job, telling them what I have time for and what not. But getting a little money gets you all the responsibility, less thankfulness and still no real money.

I wish they expanded the family / "mom" branch a bit.

Right!

My brother has never let me work for free for his business, but there were times where he way overpaid me and I made sure to make it up to him.

At this point in world history, the money flow goes from me to my mom, I'm not going to accept any cash from her.

The real answer is (Fuck you, Pay me)[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U]

the z-indexing on this is maddening!

no.

Here's a simpler flowchart:

Start -> Should I work for free? -> No

Well that was a bit pointless, the whole chart can be summed up as "No, but you may want to consider making an exception for a relative, a close friend, or a non-profit you support".

A lot of things can be summed up in a boring way. That doesn't make the boring summaries the things.

My point is that there's no information the chart is adding to that.

There's useful reasoning in there beyond your summary. For example, the fact that "it's a good portfolio piece/exposure" is a big pile of BS is useful to know.

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. -John Galt (Ayn Rand)

Did John Galt use free software?

Free software in its current state is basically communism.

You are mixing up economical and personal benefits, here's what Linus has to say about this philosophy: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18419231

To me Ayn's philosophy fits perfectly to this graph, it all boils down to this: Is there anything to gain for me (or my loved ones.) Imo Ayn's one-liner captures the essence of this graph.

Edit: Of course loved ones or just 'a good feeling about yourself' are perfectly good reasons (the best?) to do something for someone else. This is not selflessness. Going to Africa to help children while every fiber in your body hates them, that is selflessness: the total disregard of what you yourself desire.

You can view communism in terms of "selfishness" like this too. Everyone selfishly wants bread and the only way they can get it is by contributing their labour.

I think "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" fits much better.

Everyone is contributing what they can for free to the common knowledge base and can use everyone else's stuff also for free. You can view it as "prestige" currency too, but that doesn't break the paradigm.

You can't extrapolate conclusions like this out of a political slogan. Free software doesn't have any inherent slant, it's a way of using copyright law to ensure a given set of terms favorable to contribution and research propagate. You can certainly observe that it operates in a dynamic similar to a gift economy, and that it has an ethical position as well, but not a political ideology with all its baggage.

The FOSS market is determined purely by individual interests of programmers and the people sponsoring them. It doesn't really hit any equilibrium of utility, only what authors want to work on.

I wasn't talking about free software as in GPL. Just the free as in beer kind that sometimes happens to also be open source and/or GPL.

If you ignore past attempts of implementing communism and limit the discussion to just what its goals are, we can see open source software as a microcosm of communism.

The only thing that doesn't fit very well is "ownership of means of production" but this is already assumed to be free, because people have to have a computer to begin with to participate in it. There is no food or water involved so those don't apply.

Everything else is almost exactly communism.

Absense of social classes: check

Absense of state: check

Absense of money: check

Obviously it is not what Marx was describing, because it wasn't meant to be a mini-society that depends on capitalism for its existence, but I didn't mean to take it that far.

Absence of social class is debatable as most projects are structured hierarchically, and then being a FOSS celebrity does give you advantages. Not that those contradict anarchist principles, necessarily.

Absence of state is true for all software development until it isn't. Computer networking enables you to do things unfavorable to nation states up to a point, but at the end of the day there are various ways it can intervene to enforce copyright, patent or other form of law.

Absence of money isn't true. It's simply utilized differently than simple per-unit consumer transactions, though those aren't out of the question either.

> Absence of money isn't true.

The fact that this thread sit under an article titled "Should I work for Free" is a pretty big hint...

Communism does not stipulate that there is no organizational hierarchical structure.

Absence of state is true because within the microcosm, you can contribute from anywhere in the world and receive the software for free as well. Basically you don't even know where the people you are dealing with even live most of the time. This is no state by definition.

Let's say you contribute to "NSA open source repository". Still there is no state because you can contribute from anywhere in the world and get the code as well.

Absense of money is true by definition. We are talking about free as in beer software here.

I always thought communism's classlessness necessitated at least some form of flat hierarchy or syndicalism where worker's collectives hold decisions democratically and directly. On the other hand, hierarchical organizations are still fine by some schools of anarchism.

Right, but then absence of state is true for anything involving wide area networking.

Like I said, you're simply listing an absence of per-unit sales where "free as in beer" is concerned. The money is still there in the form of sponsorships, fundraisers, consulting, premium versions, dual licensing, corporate contributors and so on.

And then FOSS has nothing like syndicalism, unions, worker collectives or anything like that.

"absence of state is true for anything involving wide area networking" I agree, but I think we are talking about different things.

Regarding money, you can be paid a thousand dollars every day for writing FOSS and putting it on github. Still there is no money within the FOSS community because everyone in the community gets it for free. And the person writing it contributes it according to their ability.

Also, if Redhat sells their software to companies under a different license, again it has nothing to do with money within the community. It has to do with the larger capitalist society within which they exist.

How about political slogans like:

Linux is only free if your time is worthless.

Free software: more expensive than money.

We make free software affordable.

(That last one was Cygnus Solution's slogan by John Gilmore [1] [2], which answered the previous ones.)

[1] https://books.google.nl/books?id=bjMsCKvV9I4C&pg=PA78&lpg=PA...

[2] https://rapidminer.com/we-make-free-software-affordable/

Political slogans usually aren't worth entertaining in any serious debate, that's the point. Nonetheless, I'll bite:

Linux is only free if your time is worthless.

That time has value is an idea that has been exploited to create so-called time-based currency and time banking.

Free software: more expensive than money.

The amount of man hours put in some projects means the costs of a from-scratch rewrite is probably higher than to simply bite the bullet and go by licensing terms. This may or may not be true depending on the project, though some may indeed have a utility and COCOMO score that makes it so.

We make free software affordable.

Pure marketing slogan, not worth discussing. Probably Cygnus' way of saying they had great support and contract development services (which they did, they're responsible for a large part of making GCC what it is today).

My point is that Cygnus Solutions deftly channeled the doubts and problems raised by the first two slogans (which they didn't originate, but were going around at the time), into a successful service under the last slogan (which they did originate, in response).

One problem is the question of who gets to decide "ability" and "need" - since in that totalitarian world this is not voluntary & self-asserted.

Communism has nothing to do with totalitarianism though.

EDIT to clarify: Here is a good link: http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/difference-be...

Basically they are so different that totalitarianism is considered far right while communism far left on the political spectrum.

"has nothing to do with totalitarianism"

So it just hasn't been done right yet ...?

"totalitarianism is considered far right"

This passive-voice definition is unauthoritative and wrong. Check a dictionary instead.

I think you are conflating the two because of the case of Soviet Union.

A) Soviet Union was not communism. Communism never happened. Communism/communist society is an ideal.

B) Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, yes.

C) One of the main concepts in communism is that there is/should be no state. Totalitarianism assumes that there is a state. This is in every definition of communism and totalitarianism. Here I'm going to quote it from the first line of each from Wikipedia:

"Totalitarianism is concept of a political system in which the state holds total control over the society"

"Communism ... absence of social classes, money, and the state."

"Communism ... absence of [...] state."

So yeah, "hasn't been done right yet". Could you hypothesize who in a true-scotsman communist non-state would regulate people's output ("ability") & input ("need")? Who would enforce the laws? If "everyone and anyone" is an enforcer, then claiming there is "no state" is sophistry.

So it just hasn't been done right yet ...?

That's right. You know how scientists had this theory that there is a particle they haven't observed yet, but should exist? They called it Higgs boson and constructed a lot of expensive equipment to try to prove that it exists.

You have to make a distinction between theory and practice. You can criticize communism as a concept or you can criticize existing and past communist states, but those two are not the same thing.

Dismissing communism solely because of Soviet Union, Cuba or China would be the same as dismissing democracy solely because of Richard Nixon or Condoleezza Rice.

"You can criticize communism as a concept or you can criticize existing and past communist states, but those two are not the same thing."

True. And yet I'm happy to criticize each.

I would amend that to say, "From each according to his ability, to each if someone with the ability cares to provide it for free."

If production of free software was directed by need, there would be a lot more free toolkits for the healthcare industry and a lot fewer free games and software dedicated to distributing free porn.

I agree, but two points regarding need:

a) people make stuff that they need themselves and share it so in a way it is need-based.

b) yes it doesn't work in situations where there is need but no ability. I am guessing such situations are rare, because projects in many cases are willing to make modifications to help a large portion of their users. Also because there are usually enough people able to do these things to fit most needs. Finally, if you are a part of this microcosm, you can probably code yourself.

a) "need" in the Communist/Marxist sense is definitely not the same as "want". I know that need and want exist on a continuum, but most software development is pretty firmly in the "want" neighborhood. When Marx used the word "need", he was talking about safety, food, shelter, clothing, etc. Porn and video games aren't the modern day equivalent of those things. That's part of the reason why the Marx philosophy doesn't necessarily match up with FOSS.

b) Even ignoring "need" vs "want", tell that to my mom's quilting club. The venn diagram of quilters and coders has an extremely small intersection. The same can be said for tons of activities that old ladies and women in general enjoy.

>Everyone is contributing what they can for free to the common knowledge base and can use everyone else's stuff also for free.

Not necessarily. In reality the flow of IP-value is largely one way.

Many corporations have done incredibly well out of FOSS without offering much in return. Just because Famous Router Company puts up source code of firmware it has glued together from various FOSS projects doesn't mean FRC has made a significant contribution. (Some corps do, of course. But even there they don't share other core IP as they would in a genuinely flat FOSS economy.)

In fact FOSS is about commodification, not innovation or invention. If innovation happens, it's usually in developer-land. FOSS culture doesn't seem all that interested in solving new classes of problem in user-land. So "according to his (her) needs" is very limited and partial.

Just because we have this conversation and there is some indignation over companies not contributing back to the projects they use shows that we expect them to contribute according to their ability.

I agree that it isn't perfect like every other implementation of communism because some people don't contribute back. But we can just pretend that their ability is zero. Then it still works.

>without offering much in return

This is why strong copyleft licenses are so important. As you've said, most companies will do the absolute minimum required of them.

Please elaborate how.

elaborated above.

Please see page 129,473 of your copy of Atlas Shrugged.

Logical proofs and reason have historically been highly ineffective at convincing people with this axe to grind (perhaps a paid for axe...).

A strategy that MIGHT be more successful, or at least a new strategy, would be to set up an actual communistic free software ecosystem and then demonstrate that no one uses it and it has basically no overlap with the existing non communist ecosystem.

"The world is flat" "Well OK if you're so sure, then we'll build something that depends on it being flat" "Well that didn't work, I wonder what that implies about the world being flat?"

You could consider it a performance art project. I would.

I am serious although I have the wisdom to know I do not have the ability and skills at this time to do it. And if anyone wants to pick up the (red) banner and run with it, I'd cheer them on.

Historically going back 10-20 years there were linux distributions from communist countries, but I'm talking about real commie software, as in a commune of devs with an explicitly communist license.

If nothing else is accomplished, writing and publishing the official explicit CPL Communist Public software License would tend to take the hot air out of some sails...

One problem is I'm not a communist. Finding one might be an excellent first step for the project. Its going to require deep domain specific knowledge.

There have never been any communist states. In western countries communist state refers to states with Leninist-Marxist ideology that some would argue are in fact not even socialist states.

My argument is that we don't have to create a communist software ecosystem because the current FOSS one that you probably use yourself already is very close to communism.

Probably as close as it can get given that it exists within a capitalistic society.

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