[HN Gopher] Loadsharers: Funding the Load Bearing Internet Peopl...
___________________________________________________________________
Loadsharers: Funding the Load Bearing Internet People (2020)
Author : felurx
Score : 90 points
Date : 2023-09-29 12:53 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (esr.gitlab.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (esr.gitlab.io)
| cpach wrote:
| I know that ESR considers himself to be an "LBIP". Not really
| convinced that the claim has merit...
| hollerith wrote:
| ESR explained free-software licensing in a way that made it
| appealing to executives and other decision-makers. In 1998,
| when Netscape released the source code for its browser on open-
| source terms, "Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale cited Raymond's
| 'Cathedral and the Bazaar' essay as a major influence upon the
| company's decision":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar#c...
|
| (The Mozilla Foundation was created to act as the custodian of
| the source code released by Netscape in 1998.)
|
| Although I can certainly understand why people do not like ESR
| and although he might not have made any significant
| contributions _lately_ , you cannot deny that in the past he's
| had a positive profound effect on the industry.
| tptacek wrote:
| Alternate take: ESR wrote a very long effortpost at a time
| when effortposts of any kind were, like, "get an ISBN number
| for it" novelties, and so found himself in a privileged
| position with respect to communicating about an open source
| movement he himself had practically nothing to do with
| creating. That post doesn't hold up well today (it's most
| famous claim has become a running joke). If CATB hadn't been
| written, some other effortpost would have served precisely
| the same utility, and open source would have continued along
| the same timeline. Mozilla didn't happen any faster because
| of ESR --- even if there are Mozilla people who disagree (I
| don't know that there are).
| tptacek wrote:
| It pretty clearly does not, and given his role in this program,
| his placement of himself in it makes the whole thing pretty
| dubious.
| neilv wrote:
| This would seem consistent with his pre-Web thinking.
|
| For example, IIRC, he tried to organize a contest on behalf
| of the Internet/Usenet, in which all the computer companies
| would compete to see who could assemble the best "dream" Unix
| workstation. IIRC, the unusual thing was that, for his part
| in facilitating this, he would receive one of the dream
| workstations personally.
|
| (Which, at the time, rubbed me the wrong way, because it
| seemed like other Internet/Usenet projects were done more
| volunteer-like. But in hindsight, or at least in today's
| cultural conventions, someone being upfront about wanting a
| consideration for their effort on a project seems perfectly
| reasonable. It just seemed unusual to me as a kid, in the
| hard separation at the time, between the techie non-
| commercial Internet altruistic utopia we could imagine at
| times we were creating, and whatever different world the
| stereotypical MBAs would like so that they could grab wealth
| and power disproportionately.)
|
| Regarding this new thing, ESR might not need the money today,
| though he might like to be more back in the center of things,
| and/or to have a positive impact. In early Web times,
| business wanted to pick up Linux, etc., and he became an
| "influencer" for open source -- maybe a figurehead, like
| "here's the counterculture perspective, and you can work with
| him; now go at it, business types" -- helping to adapt RMS's
| mission in a way acceptable to business. So he got a windfall
| when the Linux IPOs were happening:
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-
| writes-...
| elcritch wrote:
| Given ESR was very wealthy by most any standards, it seems
| very disingenuous to list himself as an LBIP. His need
| "high". Seriously did he waste his fortune in which case I
| don't feel bad for him or want to support his wasteful
| ways. Alternatively he's still well off and just greedy.
| tptacek wrote:
| There's a folkloric belief that ESR got very wealthy,
| because he wrote a blog post about how wealthy he
| believed he had gotten on VA Linux, but I don't think
| that really panned out. If you paid attention to his
| blog, while he was writing it, the last couple of years
| the narrative was instead that he was on the edge of not
| being able to do open source stuff anymore because he had
| no income; some of his friends/fans even wrote comments
| complaining about him asking for money, when everyone
| else just solves this problem by getting a job.
|
| I don't know any more than anybody else who reads blog
| posts about this stuff, but I strongly suspect that he
| did not in fact blow a giant fortune, but rather, like a
| lot of people who briefly had a lot of paper wealth at
| that time, it never really materialized. It's an
| embarrassing blog post to write, "I thought it was rich,
| turns out I'm not", so there isn't the matching post.
| likpok wrote:
| Based on the lockup alone he can't have gotten that
| wealthy. LNUX had a 180 day lockup, after which the price
| had fallen to $40-50 (https://itsfoss.com/story-of-va-
| linux/). That'd be around $6 million based on the blog
| post (36 million at 274/share).
|
| That's of course assuming he sold as quickly as he could.
| LNUX IPOed right before the dot com crash, a year post
| IPI it was 9/share (at that price, ~1 million to ESR).
| gregw2 wrote:
| I suspect there's no way he even got $1 million.
|
| 1) ESR was on the Board of Directors of VA Linux and
| subject to the 180-day lockup so there is NO WAY he could
| sell under SEC regs until after 180 days so he couldn't
| get that $274/share ($36 million). I agree after 180 days
| his stake would be $6-7m "on paper" and 1 year out as you
| say ~$1million. 2) Per Wired article the day after the
| IPO covering Eric making foolish comments (
| https://www.wired.com/1999/12/open-source-rich-opens-
| mouth/ ) ESR had options on 150k shares with a strike
| price of under 4 cents but there was a four year vesting
| schedule. I don't know his vesting schedule, but there's
| no way he had vested even half of that amount during the
| timeframe when the shares were still $40+. 3) Some
| ironically less-connected open source contributors were
| able to put their own money at risk and buy up to 100 (or
| 140?) shares @ $30 each pre-IPO. They were able to sell
| on day 1. See Chris DiBona's comments at
| https://slashdot.org/story/99/12/09/1324204/va-linux-
| systems... ("Everyone who was in the program and faxed in
| thier forms is by default confirmed for 100 at 30$. To
| change your share allotment to 50 or 140 , you must call
| and tell them. .... You can sell now if you like. " and
| bgdarnel quoting from the "VA Letter" describing how
| eligibility in the "friends and family" allocation to
| open source contributors worked. But the limits of that
| allocation limited the upside to < $30k. Nice but not
| making-you-rich. 4) Other clients of the IPO
| underwriter(s) (e.g. Deutsche Banc, etc) who got larger
| allocations were able to make more money... if they
| flipped quickly enough. There were SEC probes around all
| this back at the time: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sec-
| probes-ipo-of-va-linux-500...
| tptacek wrote:
| 2 years after "Surprised By Wealth", he wrote a
| commentary about VA Linux's layoffs where he more or less
| said outright that he'd never cashed out, which wouldn't
| be surprising, since he was a director of the company.
| One assumes he managed to get something out, but since he
| doesn't seem to have had a full-time job after VA Linux,
| it's easy to see how one could have burned through it. It
| feels weird doing kremlinology on this stuff; what I feel
| like I understand about his situation is, wherever he was
| then, he isn't anymore.
|
| Whatever else he was at the time, he was certainly
| employable. This LBIP thing is comical because regardless
| of his economic circumstances, he is practically the
| textbook case of someone you'd want to recognize as _not_
| load-bearing. That, by itself, is not a dunk; I 'm a
| similar textbook case: loud, but not anywhere on the
| Internet's critical path.
| elcritch wrote:
| Thanks y'all for the context. I was mainly going on the
| context from that one slashdot link.
|
| If he waited too long to sell and only got a ~$1 million
| that could quickly become $500k after taxes, especially
| in CA. Just another case of options/equity being
| worthless until there's cash in the bank.
| neilv wrote:
| That's sad; I wasn't aware of that. I didn't fully
| understand or agree with everything he did back then, but
| I didn't wish him any misfortune.
| Sesse__ wrote:
| He pretty clearly isn't, although he probably believes himself
| that he is. E.g. he claims about giflib: "This is the library
| that renders GIFs in your browser [...] Without it the modern
| Internet would be unrecognizable." Except that no browser that
| I know of uses giflib (e.g. Chromium uses Skia's GIF decoder,
| which is WUFFS-based), and GIF clearly isn't an important
| format for the modern Internet anyway. Besides, giflib's latest
| release was in 2019, so how load-bearing is his maintainership
| anyway?
|
| Similarly, he somehow seems to believe Android uses his gpsd
| and thus is "essential for Google Maps", and it hasn't done so
| for at _least_ ten years, if ever; it was in one vendor's
| third_party directory at some point, but I don't think it was
| ever in Android proper.
| vitus wrote:
| Also note http://www.catb.org/esr/loadsharers/ as ESR's initial
| list of proposed loadbearers; he additionally links to Dave
| Taht's loadsharer page: http://flent-
| fremont.bufferbloat.net/~d/lbip/
| varjag wrote:
| One on that list is not like the others.
| Roark66 wrote:
| I'm not sure about this. On one hand the idea sounds good on the
| other it raises lots of questions. For example, who will decide
| who is a "worthy load bearer"? Then once people are funded who
| will manage their workloads?
|
| Also, I'm dubious the whole thing is actually needed in the first
| place. No examples of "load bearers needing funding" were given.
| DNS was mentioned, but what part of it exactly? Root TLDs are
| doing pretty well financially from what I heard by selling all
| the sub domains in their TLDs, so what are we talking about
| exactly reverse DNS? Things like .org or edu? These are funded by
| governments.
|
| Network wise we have telcos paying for sub sea cables, Internet
| exchanges like the one in London are self funded (by connection
| fees). Routing is managed by same telcos and IXs.
|
| What are these individual "Internet Load Bearers" that keep the
| entire Internet afloat without making a dime from it? Usenet
| admins? I might have paid to keep Usenet alive, but Google bought
| it all, didn't they?
| luma wrote:
| > What are these individual "Internet Load Bearers"
|
| Unsurprisingly (if you know his history), the author suggests
| himself: http://www.catb.org/esr/loadsharers/
|
| This dude has been a "hanger on" since the 80s and has
| continuously pushed to put himself in the spotlight of the free
| software movement.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> who will decide who is a "worthy load bearer"?_
|
| If you decide to contribute, you do. You contribute directly to
| people you think are worthy load bearers.
|
| _> once people are funded who will manage their workloads?_
|
| They do. They're already doing that anyway. If you decide to
| fund someone through this program, you're saying that you think
| whatever they are already doing is worth supporting.
|
| _> What are these individual "Internet Load Bearers" that
| keep the entire Internet afloat without making a dime from it?_
|
| The very start of the article explains this.
| tptacek wrote:
| It makes a series of claims, but I wouldn't go so far as to
| say that it "explains" anything.
| pdonis wrote:
| It explains the theory under which the "load bearers"
| initiative operates. If you don't agree with that theory,
| then of course you're not going to buy their explanation.
| But for someone who does agree with their theory, the
| explanation given looks fine to me.
| burkaman wrote:
| Examples are on the adviser pages:
| http://www.catb.org/esr/loadsharers/, http://flent-
| fremont.bufferbloat.net/~d/lbip/. It seems like there will be
| more advisers and more candidates soon. My interpretation is
| that this is not about funding organizations, it's about
| funding independent open-source developers who maintain
| critical software.
|
| A couple interesting (to me) candidates:
|
| > Simon Kelley. (Simon promises a Patreon link soon) Maintains
| Dnsmasq, the most widely-used DNS implementation in the world,
| essentially solo.
|
| > Paul Eggert. Maintains the IANA timezone database. Ubiquitous
| in key open-source projects for decades.
|
| I don't know anything about Eric S. Raymond but it seems like
| everyone in the thread so far has pretty negative opinions of
| him, and I agree it's not a great look that he listed himself
| as a candidate here.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Of the five people listed, Paul Eggert is the only one I
| would consider candidate for "LBIP", although I also note
| that he's the only one listed with "Need: Unknown" (which to
| me suggests the answer is actually "no"). Admittedly, I am
| simply not knowledgeable about the projects the other people
| work on.
|
| ESR listing himself is... egotistical (to say the least),
| especially since there's only one of his projects that I've
| ever tried using (cvs-fast-export). A look at his software
| page (http://www.catb.org/esr/software.html) indicates
| nothing that's in wide use (contrary to his assertion, giflib
| isn't actually the GIF decoder used by any large web
| browser). The other person he actually links to mentions
| inhabiting ESR's basement periodically, which doesn't give me
| vibes of impartiality.
|
| It's also interesting to note that the list doesn't appear to
| have changed for over three years.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The one that was in wide use to my knowledge was fetchmail,
| and that was back before Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP.
| cpach wrote:
| _"It seems like there will be more advisers and more
| candidates soon"_
|
| You sure? http://www.catb.org/esr/loadsharers/ hasn't been
| updated in nearly four years.
| burkaman wrote:
| Oh no I didn't see the updated date, I just figured this
| was posted here because it was new. I guess it is already
| dead.
| ak217 wrote:
| FYI there is a company called Tidelift that funds essential
| infrastructure project maintainers using subscriptions by
| companies that depend on them and information about dependencies
| that the subscribers provide.
|
| In my experience, Tidelift has provided the most consistent and
| meaningful support to maintainers I know, and based on that
| experience I trust their model and judgment more than ESR's.
| the_biot wrote:
| The Linux Foundation used to have a project to do this (Core
| Infrastructure Initiative), but it looks like they closed it down
| in 2021. Not sure if the LF is the right sort of organization for
| this.
|
| But I'm very sure that ESR's involvement is the kiss of death for
| something like this.
| silviot wrote:
| Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
| luplex wrote:
| There's also Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund, which was set up with
| a similar goal. It funds curl, for example.
|
| https://sovereigntechfund.de/en/
| stuaxo wrote:
| They should fund the libjpeg-turbo guy.
| [deleted]
| bitwize wrote:
| ESR: Opposes communism and all things left with McCarthy-esque
| fervor.
|
| Also ESR: Tries to reinvent Kropotkin's mutual aid from first
| principles.
| BryantD wrote:
| It's funny but if esr actually read Kropotkin without bias I
| suspect he'd find a lot to agree with. I don't know if he'd
| realize how much he's been co-opted by what Kropotkin would
| call "the crushing powers of the centralized State."
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Someone else taking your stuff and deciding what to do with it
| is different to you choosing to give some of your stuff away.
| FireInsight wrote:
| Classic "communism is when you share your toothbrush" except
| it's "anarchism is when people steal from you".
| jancsika wrote:
| Ooh, I've got one:
|
| Classic anarchism is when I share knowledge about how to
| make your own toothbrush.
|
| Communism is when I get stabbed in the back because I
| didn't help them take over the toothbrush factory.
| TOGoS wrote:
| As a commie who feels bad about Kronstadt, I got a
| chuckle out of this. That kind of back-stabbing has
| happened too often.
| gremlinunderway wrote:
| [flagged]
| robertlagrant wrote:
| This doesn't seem appropriate for HN. If you calmly explain
| what you mean, as I did, then that would be great.
| Aloha wrote:
| Essentially crowd-sourced Bellcore?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-09-29 23:01 UTC)