[HN Gopher] The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is ...
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The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
Author : pjmlp
Score : 223 points
Date : 2023-11-17 10:33 UTC (12 hours ago)
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| rini17 wrote:
| This is psychological problem you cannot solve by technological
| means. As a wee lad I actually made some pocket money from a GPL-
| licensed software I maintained. That part was surprisingly easy,
| the skill is highly valued. But I avoided making it a career, it
| all felt so overwhelming (how to balance fun, demands from
| customers and contributions???), inappropriate("you must not be
| doing money from GPL!!!!11"), weird (even harder to explain what
| I'm doing than typical IT job) and lonely.
| vikmals wrote:
| The problem is that you ask for money on OSS. Companies use OSS
| because it is free. If you try to force them to contribute or pay
| money, there will always be someone who has more passion than you
| to do it for free. At this point, just pass on your OSS project
| that is highly demanded but you have no passion for.
| benj111 wrote:
| Do companies use open source because it's free?
|
| Cost may be a component. But not the only component, and cost
| doesn't have to be binary. You can charge and still be less
| than the alternatives.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| The main benefit of using open source in a corporate
| environment is that there is usually zero paperwork involved.
| As long as the licence is approved, have at it! As soon as
| you pay money for something, either a fee or a donation,
| you've got to email someone. Almost certainly someone outside
| your team.
|
| Companies don't make decisions on individual OSS
| dependencies. Individual engineers and engineering teams do.
| That's if anyone actually spares a thought at all (eek)!
| pjmlp wrote:
| Only if they don't care about liability.
|
| Those that care, CI/CD only fetches from internal repos,
| and stuff is only uploaded into them after an audit.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > Those that care, CI/CD only fetches from internal
| repos, and stuff is only uploaded into them after an
| audit.
|
| It would be really interesting to do a survey about this,
| so that we can get some stats and breakdown by industry,
| language, size, etc about where this happens. I gather
| some places do this, but I've never met anyone, or worked
| anywhere that does this.
| bee_rider wrote:
| One way to not include any unaudited open source code is
| not to include any open source code!
|
| I think when people point it out--that open source code
| is great, but comes with no strings attached and no
| guarantees, so you need to audit it to use it safely--
| they are often trying to say something about the
| ecosystem. That dependency growth is out of control. That
| it isn't really as simple as git pulling the code in.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Relatively common in industries whose main purpose is not
| to sell software, and tend to have restrictions in place
| that fortunelly are coming to everyone via the
| cybersecurity bills of several governments.
| IshKebab wrote:
| This 1000%.
|
| It's not my money. Why would I particularly care if we have
| to pay for some software?
|
| But it _is_ my time and effort. If I have to go through a
| lot of red tape and politics just to use some library then
| ... screw that. Doesn 't matter how much it costs.
|
| That's one of the reasons it generally makes no sense to
| offer enterprise software for a low cost. Even if it only
| costs $1, your users still have the red tape to deal with.
| You may as well make it cost $1k, so you actually make some
| money from the few users who fight the tape.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Also proprietary software often is has protections
| (DRM/NDA/License keys) which add their own hassle.
| seydor wrote:
| It's not just open source, it's open everything. You either work
| for bigTech or you work for free. Entire generations of people
| have been conditioned to create content for free and behemoths
| monetize it. It feels like a 21st century Marx hasn't been born
| yet
| albertzeyer wrote:
| Why don't you pass over the maintainer role to some of the users
| of the project?
|
| Or share the maintainer role with some other users. Just select
| one, two, or three people who seem to be responsible and give
| them all the necessary write access.
|
| Or maybe configure the repo in a way that all PRs need at least
| two (or so) reviewers from a selected group of reviewers.
|
| Then this would greatly reduce the effort on your side, and
| development should continue on its own.
| eschneider wrote:
| I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's perfectly ok to
| charge folks for software and if you're OSS project isn't
| motivating you like it used to, it's perfectly ok to charge users
| for support/updates/bugfixes.
| kawhah wrote:
| Yes, the main reason why people don't do this is because they
| aren't psychologically ready to find out that the thing which
| cost them a lot of effort has very little monetary value.
| hahn-kev wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment. But if anyone has ever contributed
| now you're in a bad place because you are making money off
| their work which they probably didn't consent to.
| bogwog wrote:
| A CLA could fix that, but that should be done early, and you
| need to be prepared to ignore people that try to pressure you
| into not doing it.
| eschneider wrote:
| Only if you change the license and you don't need to do that
| to charge for support, etc.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yes exactly. You can say "I don't have much time to work on
| this project I'm afraid, but I am available for consulting if
| you really need this fixed."
| chlorion wrote:
| This is really important.
|
| A lot of people think open source is about not paying for
| software, even some open source devs think this.
|
| You are allowed to sell your software even if its GPL'd or
| whatever. You are not obligated to give the source away for
| free, you can charge people for the source and for binaries,
| you just have to provide the source when someone does buy it. I
| would like to see more people try this out.
|
| The most common counterargument here is that someone can pay
| for your source code, and then upload it to github, or even
| sell it themselves, allowing people to circumvent paying (you)
| for it. This is true, but most software needs to be maintained
| in order to be useful, and you are not obligated to provide the
| updates to people who haven't paid you, and I think you could
| charge for access to the updates, even for people who have
| purchased your software before.
|
| You can also use trademarks, anyone who would attempt to resell
| it would not be able to use your "marks", which could be the
| project name or logo for example.
|
| Maybe there are reasons nobody is doing this, maybe its not
| viable, but I haven't seen any cases where someone has at least
| tried this.
| eschneider wrote:
| I expect quite a few people do this, or a variation on this.
| lakpan wrote:
| The annoying part in this debate is people spending their lives
| on a project and demanding to be paid for it.
|
| Don't do it! Who's asking you to work on it?
|
| I say this as a minor OSS developer who receives some donations.
| I love the money, but it would be pretty dumb for me to say _they
| oughta pay me,_ because the only reason I work on it is addiction
| /compulsion/procrastination of real work.
|
| If it bothered me that people use it for free, then I could just
| stop working on it and let it rot, just like lodash' maintainer
| did for a few years. You _always_ have the option.
|
| I keep reading from project leaders like ESLint's things like
| _"if only they paid $1 each..."_ as if that made any economic
| sense at all. If they paid $1 each, you would not hand thousands
| let alone millions of users.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Who's asking you to work on it?_
|
| All of the people who demand things from the maintainers are.
| Very few of them are willing to sponsor or pay consulting fees.
| If you give up they complain loudly, _and then often pay a
| contractor to do the work they wanted_.
|
| _If they paid $1 each, you would not hand thousands let alone
| millions of users._
|
| You could though, if the mindset of open source software
| consumers were to shift to 'pay for things you get value from'.
| Even if it was $1000 and only companies that paid, the
| landscape would shift dramatically.
| rco8786 wrote:
| > All of the people who demand things from the maintainers
| are.
|
| I think OP's point is that the maintainer is under no
| obligation to deliver on these demands.
| flir wrote:
| > All of the people who demand things from the maintainers
| are. Very few of them are willing to sponsor or pay
| consulting fees. If you give up they complain loudly, and
| then often pay a contractor to do the work they wanted.
|
| Ignore them. I mean, it's not like they're paying you.
| Scratch your own itch instead.
|
| I'm probably being dense, but I'm still not seeing a problem.
| I think if we dig, we'll find non-monetary incentives that
| open source authors are a bit shy about admitting to.
| Otherwise why hold on to the project at all? If you're not
| being paid, and you think you should be, and that's the only
| reason you're building the thing, just stop building it.
|
| Open source isn't unsustainable. We've got decades of
| evidence of that.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| If an individual were not the maintainer for a project, they
| would not be receiving demands from users of that project.
| The only reason they receive those demands is because they
| choose to be the maintainer. If they step down from that
| roll, all of the expectations go away.
|
| If the reason you're doing something is for money, and you're
| not getting money, then stop doing it. It's that simple.
| kawhah wrote:
| > You could though, if the mindset of open source software
| consumers were to shift to 'pay for things you get value
| from'
|
| What if the mindset of _producers_ were to shift? What if
| people only worked for free on things that they want to work
| on? Isn 't that both more realistic and better for everyone?
| dash2 wrote:
| >You could though, if the mindset of open source software
| consumers were to shift to 'pay for things you get value
| from'. Even if it was $1000 and only companies that paid, the
| landscape would shift dramatically.
|
| Any solution to a problem that relies on humans becoming more
| ethical is not, in fact, a solution.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Knowing most large corps, they would rather pay a contractor
| $175/hr for two months than sign a $20/month license. Also,
| you usually cannot hire the open-source maintainer as the
| contractor, you have to use some company with insider
| relationships.
|
| It isnt the engineering manager's fault at any large company.
| The policies make no sense, but there may be a larger wisdom
| that I do not understand.
| kawhah wrote:
| So become a contractor, work for an inflated fee for two
| months. Then take a month off and work for yourself on
| whatever you want. Or just do nothing, if you prefer that
| to working on your own projects.
|
| Economic injustices and inefficiencies can and do exist in
| free-ish markets. But this isn't one of them. It's more
| like "old man shouts at supply and demand".
| ejb999 wrote:
| absolutely true - once sat around in a meeting which the
| combined cost of the contractors in that meeting was ~$2500
| per hour - we met for 90 minutes arguing about which of the
| customer departments would be responsible for paying the
| $50/month subscription fee for twilio services for the
| year.
|
| We could have paid for 50 months of that service with the
| money we spent trying to figure out who would be
| responsible for the bill.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _I keep reading from project leaders like ESLint's things
| like "if only they paid $1 each..." as if that made any
| economic sense at all. If they paid $1 each, you would not hand
| thousands let alone millions of users._
|
| From another angle, if I gave a dollar a month to every Free
| Software program or library I used that month, it would cost me
| thousands of dollars a month. Obviously that isn't realistic. I
| have donated to projects before but those products need to
| individually make the case to me that my donation is needed.
| Expecting users to donate to every project they use by default
| just isn't realistic. Most projects won't get donations from
| most people most of the time; that's just the way it is.
| Developers should be at peace with this before they decide to
| personally commit themself to a project.
| bboozzoo wrote:
| I don't think anyone is expecting you to donate to literally
| every project you use. However, say your business is to build
| and sell a product done in JS. You already have a bunch of JS
| devs, whom you may have even bought those sweet MacBooks.
| Let's also say, you're invested in keeping the code quality
| high, which you boast about in your product web page. Why not
| donate a $100/month to the JSLint project which is part of
| your toolchain anyway and helps you achieve your goals? The
| annual cost is probably less then you'd spend on the toilet
| paper for the office. You get a maintained product, they get
| some money to support their efforts. It's clearly a win win.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| That's a fine pitch for the merit of donating to ESLint,
| but if that pitch isn't working for the developer then he
| should either make peace with doing the work for free, or
| stop doing the work.
| bboozzoo wrote:
| Yes, completely. If there's no business contract in
| place, it's hard to expect compensation of any sort. It's
| all hinged on the other party's willingness to recognize
| the value in keeping the project alive. Very few do.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Welcome to the pre-2000's, when it was possible to actually
| make a living from selling software, without having to bundle
| it behind a SaaS paywall, hardware devices,...
| argiopetech wrote:
| Serious question: is it not now?
|
| I have worked hard to escape closed source, commercial
| software, but I still purchase several box products
| (FamilyHistorian and SuperMemo come to mind immediately)
| from small companies. I acknowledge e.g., Microsoft or
| Adobe can make a killing by making their products
| subscription-based, but is that the way small companies
| (who can accept the lack of continuous income and charge a
| significant portion of full price for major upgrades)
| _have_ to go?
| pjmlp wrote:
| HN is a good mirror for that.
|
| Every time someone posts a project that happens to be
| closed source, and asking for money, there are several
| voices reaching out for the pitch forks and torches, how
| dare someone charge for XYZ when FOSS alternative (less
| functional mostly) is available.
|
| Hence why only those doing enterprise consulting get the
| nice toys.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| It goes both ways. Crowd blame the maintainer if they change
| the license for the future updates. So it makes sense to blame
| the crowd if they want the updates for free.
|
| But I agree with you. Open source projects shouldn't have any
| obligation to listen to the people if they change the license.
| Even if they intentionally bait and switch, the users should
| only expect the current version to be open source and shouldn't
| expect free updates for life.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Yes, if it's open source then users don't have any right to
| expect that it'll be maintained by someone, but if a project
| deliberately uses the bait and switch trick to get people to
| start using the project when it's open source in the hope of
| trapping them, then that's clearly manipulative and ruins
| trust in other open source projects.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Why? All they are claiming is that current version is open
| source and will remain open source. How is it different
| than stopping maintaining it altogether?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Because they released it as open source purely to lure
| people in and get them using it enough so that switching
| away would be difficult for them.
|
| If they're up-front with people and mention that it'll be
| open source up until a time of their choosing, after
| which subsequent versions will be proprietary, then I
| don't see a problem and no-one's getting tricked.
|
| When I'm choosing an open source tool to use, then I want
| to know whether it's under current development or is more
| or less abandoned. If the author suddenly decides to stop
| maintenance for some reason, then that's acceptable
| because they weren't trying to trick me into selecting
| their tool over others, though I'd still be looking to
| either switch to a different tool or see if the project
| has been forked. It's about honesty.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Any open source code that requires constant maintenance
| either has FAANG support or would switch license in the
| future. I don't think that donation or pay for support
| could pay market rate to talented developers except in a
| rarest of rare case(e.g. sqlite which has very high user
| to developer ratio).
|
| Just treat not open source product differently than open
| source. Assume that the current version is all you are
| getting in open source.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| That seems to be a limited view of open source software
| and is ignoring communities that work together on useful
| code and a lot of successful projects.
|
| One of the advantages of using open source code is that
| updates aren't purely done for commercial reasons and
| popular projects will tend to get a lot more people
| working on them than a similar proprietary piece of code.
| There's a lot to be said for enthusiasts working to make
| something better because they want to, rather than a paid
| developer just adding in features that a sales team think
| will look good in publicity materials and not being
| permitted to spend time fixing long standing issues with
| the code base.
|
| It's an implied social contract between the developers
| and the users - the users will often recommend the
| software to others and there's an expectation that a
| popular, active project (i.e. not just some code that
| someone's published and then left alone) will continue to
| be active.
|
| Switching licenses is only really feasible where all the
| code is owned by an individual (person or business) -
| certainly switching Linux to a different a license would
| be incredibly difficult.
|
| It's all about getting people to work together rather
| than in competition.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| You mean you would write your own leftpad function instead of
| pulling in a $1 npm dependency
|
| That is crazy. /s
| blitz_skull wrote:
| It would actually be amazing if you could do that--somehow
| stub dependencies with your own libraries.
|
| Because the number of times I've needed a left pad lib is
| literally 0, but other, more useful libraries always have it
| as a dependency.
| lynx23 wrote:
| This! Its always the same. When volunteers start to complain
| they aren't compensated for their work, things start to smell
| fishy. And this kind of behaviour seems to have increased
| lately. Rather sad. Either I do something for the love of it,
| or I am going for a paying job. Sometimes people are lucky and
| these two are the same, but that is very much the exception.
| eXpl0it3r wrote:
| Sometimes it's that devs still like the project, but more
| often it's probably just the fame/exposure that they don't
| want to lose. If you have no compassion for a project and the
| demand is high, it's still your decision to invest your time
| for no money exchange. You can just ignore the demands, if
| you can accept that your project might eventually fold.
|
| This is additionally supported by the point that only few
| maintainers will hand out commit rights to other devs. They
| rather complain about all the workload and demands than give
| up some of all of their control, so others with more passion
| or who are even paid can continue working on the project.
|
| If you want to be paid for your code, then pick a license
| model that matches it, but it will mean that you won't rise
| to the top, as only a limited amount of people will use it.
|
| I wrote some more thoughts on this, during the "Moq incident"
| earlier this year:
| https://duerrenberger.dev/blog/2023/09/23/foss-funding/
| sofixa wrote:
| > Either I do something for the love of it, or I am going for
| a paying job. Sometimes people are lucky and these two are
| the same, but that is very much the exception.
|
| Why should that be the exception? Why shouldn't people's
| passions, especially when they are widely useful to others,
| not be encouraged and turned into paying jobs? Everyone wins.
| The passionate can keep doing what they're passionate about
| without having to split their attention to a job to pay the
| bills, and in exchange everyone else gets better quality
| output.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Why shouldn't people's passions, especially when they are
| widely useful to others, not be encouraged and turned into
| paying jobs?
|
| Because there is no fair way of estimating what someone's
| work is worth without a free market. Sometimes it turns up
| weird outcomes like maintaining a critical driver being
| worth $0.
|
| If someone is willing to do something for free and the
| marginal cost of copying the work is 0 then by simple
| economics they will not get paid for doing the thing. Same
| logic applies to having children, advocating good ideas in
| politics and a lot of creative work.
|
| Besides, why should someone doing what they are passionate
| about entitle them to a leg up? What about someone doing
| plumbing and hating it? They're making more of a sacrifice
| for the benefit of others, they deserve more money. And if
| someone is adding enormous value then let them who
| recognise it pay for it.
|
| Nothing wrong with people working on their passions and
| making money of course, but words like 'should' are
| suspicious. Once you get to software development, people
| are in a world where market forces are fair and reasonable.
| spencerflem wrote:
| I think we Should - There's a ton of things like this
| where the benefits are huge but charging for it is
| impractical. And its kinda sad as a society that we can't
| figure out a way to fund such things
| abeppu wrote:
| I build stuff because I love it. But why should I publish it?
| If I publish it, why should I release it under a permissive
| license?
|
| I think people get pissed off because they're working out of
| a spirit of generosity, and the users who they interact with
| most are definitely not.
|
| Suppose my neighborhood regularly throws a block party, and
| everyone makes and shares some food, because they enjoy
| making and sharing food. Great! But suppose one neighbor
| grabs portions of everyone's freely shared dishes, packages
| them up, and begins selling your freely-shared food as plate
| lunches to others, and pocketing the proceeds. They come back
| and ask that you use more spice, and by the way, do you have
| any napkins and plastic cutlery? Is the right response here
| "well, if you don't love making and sharing food for the love
| of it, you should stop?" Or is it reasonable to want to share
| with people who are willing to engage in the same spirit of
| mutual benefit?
|
| I build stuff and keep my projects to myself. I would happily
| share with other people who are building hobby projects for
| the love of it. I would happily let almost any non-profit use
| my work for free (perhaps excluding some political or
| aggressively religious organizations). I have zero desire to
| gift anything to anyone's for-profit company. But for some
| reason, there's a strong stigma against sharing source code
| but not allowing a total free-for-all of what it's published
| for. "That's not open source," I'm told. So I don't publish
| at all, but that has nothing to do with not loving what I
| build.
|
| Meanwhile, a hobbyist makes music, and publishes some
| recordings with a CC non-commercial license, people get it.
| No one says, "oh if you object to companies using your
| recording as background in their ads, it must be because you
| don't love making music."
| cxr wrote:
| > I keep reading from project leaders like ESLint's things like
| "if only they paid $1 each..." as if that made any economic
| sense at all. If they paid $1 each, you would not [have]
| thousands let alone millions of users.
|
| The dirty secret of the GitHub era of open source is that many
| developers and open source codebases would be better off if
| such a thing happened.
|
| A lot of stuff associated with the development processes that
| are fashionable with GitHub and programmer Twitter provide net
| negative value (e.g. issue close bots) or neutral value at best
| (because they solve a problem that really exists but not at the
| scale that most downstream projects that opt in are actually
| at). If it suddenly became necessary or even just strongly
| encouraged for programmers to pay a dollar a month for things
| that are only as pervasive as they are because they are free
| and give the false sense of productivity, then we'd see a huge
| dropoff in the adoption and use of lots of things that are of
| dubious value to begin with.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| I could see it now, every time you run yarn install it
| charges you $1 USD per dependency.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| > The annoying part in this debate is people spending their
| lives on a project and demanding to be paid for it. > Don't do
| it! Who's asking you to work on it?
|
| I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where
| being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path.
|
| The value we get from OSS compared to the monetary compensation
| for that work is disproportionately small.
|
| OSS generally doesn't depend on an army of people paid to make
| you buy shit you don't need or want.
| sevagh wrote:
| >I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where
| being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path.
|
| They knew that before they started.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| I meant it in a general sense, I think we'd be in a better
| place as a society if this model of work was easier to
| follow/more mainstream.
| simbolit wrote:
| I am not sure what you are saying here.
|
| Is this is a general critique of capitalist exploitation
| of the "software" field? Like, as in software should be a
| utility like fresh water or electricity?
|
| If not, and you are relatively literal in what you write,
| the following question seems unavoidable:
|
| What about coaches for youth sports? What about beach
| cleanup? What about a thousand other worthwhile and
| societally useful activities that people volunteer to do,
| but for which there is no sustainable career path? What
| makes OSS contributing any different from them?
| anon291 wrote:
| > I think we'd be in a better place as a society if this
| model of work was easier to follow/more mainstream.
|
| Why?
| blueflow wrote:
| > I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where
| being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path.
|
| We do. You work for a company that needs software X, and you
| contribute patches and fixes to X from your paid time.
| Software X is essentially a collab between different
| companies then.
|
| The Linux base (kernel, libc and compilers) basically works
| that way.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Where is it written that being an OSS contributor should be a
| sustainable career? Just go write software for a company if
| that's what you want to do. But why there's an expectation
| that "open" source software should pay anyone is beyond me.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| > Where is it written that being an OSS contributor should
| be a sustainable career?
|
| Why shouldn't it?
| grotorea wrote:
| I think that society and companies benefit from FOSS even
| if there's no or little profit in doing it. Sure that are
| corporate OSS jobs, but think of all the societal benefit
| that comes from one-man or community FOSS projects. I feel
| that in an ideal situation people should be incentivized by
| being paid for doing that work.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where
| being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path.
|
| As is true for many (most?) crafts.
|
| If I am an artist (e.g. painting, digital art, etc). and give
| my work away for free, my fellow artists are not going to
| sympathize with my inability to make a living.
|
| Ditto photography ("look at all these companies taking my
| _free_ stock photos and not giving me any money! ") Ditto
| music. Ditto writing. Ditto anything that involves a
| significant amount of creativity.
|
| It's silly to expect SW to be any different.
| mandmandam wrote:
| That's why basic income is so, so necessary.
|
| Let people do creative work without needing to work for
| exploitative corporate ghouls, and let the world-killing
| planet-burning exploiters cry themselves to sleep on their
| mega-yachts about it.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Or maybe that's a large neon sign that we should fix those,
| too?
|
| Why isn't it a sustainable career path to be an artist or
| photographer or musician or writer _or_ open source
| contributor? (Outside of the lucky 1% or so at the top of
| those crafts, of course.)
|
| Why are creative pursuits so much harder to make a
| sustainable wage on in our society? Why do we expect most
| of them to be unpaid hobbies? Why do we expect the arts and
| crafts that are the fruits of their labor to start at
| "cheap as free" unless they work to be insanely talented
| _and_ are lucky enough to win corporate sponsorship
| /patronage?
|
| I don't have good answers either, but there are a lot of
| questions of what actually are we valuing about our use of
| our labor here, as a society, in general, across the board.
| jjav wrote:
| > It's silly to expect SW to be any different.
|
| True, I can't disagree.
|
| However, it's important to note that there is something
| different about the software world, in that very large
| subsets of applications and infrastructure of large for-
| profit companies are built on top of the free labor of open
| source.
|
| Not sure if that's true in any other craft.
|
| If unpaid open source were to magically disappear
| overnight, all of the Internet and all tech-using companies
| would collapse immediately.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You can say that for a whole host of things people volunteer
| to do with their time. They still volunteer that time often
| knowing it comes with no compensation at all. There's this
| idea of altruism and greater good that drives a lot of people
| beyond money.
| layer8 wrote:
| With OSS, it's more like a personal creativity outlet, or
| "I want this thing to exist". It is very similar to artists
| and musicians. Who also have a hard time getting someone to
| pay for their output.
| anon291 wrote:
| > I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where
| being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path.
|
| Why should it be? Most OSS authors get paid to work on their
| stuff by some company who wants it. If there's no one willing
| to hire you, then your software is not worth it. I don't mean
| this negatively. I have lots of open source projects that are
| not worth it. I have one that I've been hired to work on
| before, but am no longer working on it anymore
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| I think the general pattern is that someone releases something
| for free, then people start using it, and start depending on
| it, and then start opening PRs and issues, and then the person
| who did it for free in their spare time is expected to respond
| to those issues, etc. Now other people are making money from
| your work, but demanding that you work on it for free.
|
| Mostly this is the point where people start thinking about how
| to monetize it -- and they should! Your time is valuable, you
| should get paid for it. If you don't figure out how to get in
| the middle of the cash flows that are happening _because of
| your work_, someone else will do it.
| dale_glass wrote:
| One of the problems I found with this is that actually taking
| donations is hard work.
|
| I live in a country completely unsuited to making money from a
| hobby project on the side. To take donations I'd need to register
| as self-employed, and pay monthly for social security as long as
| I'm registered, even if I make no revenue whatsoever in that
| month. That's an absolutely awful idea for a project just getting
| started. I'd be losing a very appreciable amount of money,
| regularly. It'd take lots of effort to have enough support that
| I'm back to zero, and still not making anything. This is because
| this is a system made for plumbers, not for people doing rare
| jobs on the side which might some day grow into something
| serious.
|
| Apparently the government sort of looks the other way until you
| start making minimum wage, but that's not a bet I'm comfortable
| making.
|
| But finally, we (https://overte.org/overte_ev.html) managed. It
| took us a long time and a lot of effort to get a non-profit
| registered, and it absolutely required the participation of
| multiple knowledgeable people. This couldn't have been done as a
| lone wolf effort.
|
| And after that hurdle of course you have to somehow get people to
| notice you exist, and convince them to donate. This is
| unfortunately a tough job for people whose main passion is
| software development and who threw all their effort into that.
| Going out there and figuring out how to advertise yourself and
| how to ask for money is a whole new skill to learn, and a big
| time and effort investment.
|
| I highly suspect that the reason why libcurl shows up here every
| week or so is because Steinberg spends about as much time
| marketing it as writing code and it's clearly working. That
| project appears to be quite successful in getting donations.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| not to mention some countries requirements around running a
| non-profit would mean you couldn't keep control of your own
| project if you did get it created as a non-profit or add others
| to the project without risking that they used the rules to take
| over ownership when it was advantageous to do so.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > One of the problems I found with this is that actually taking
| donations is hard work.
|
| As many problems as there are with GitHub (social lock-in,
| Copilot laundering Open Source license violations), GitHub
| Sponsors is incredibly valuable and substantially reduces the
| friction for getting support for an Open Source project.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| I don't think he is speaking about the ability to get
| donations. Rather about the tax consequences. It doesn't
| matter to governments how you got money, you have to declare
| it, even if it is GitHub Sponsors.
|
| He did not say which country, but my guess would be Germany.
| You have to declare every penny here.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| The last part of the post is about the difficulty of
| getting people to donate, which GitHub Sponsors helps with.
| The first part is about the tax consequences, which
| Sponsors still helps _somewhat_ with: while you still have
| to _pay_ the requisite tax, with GitHub Sponsors you have
| one source of income to declare, rather than many small
| ones, which often reduces the amount of paperwork.
| joseluis wrote:
| I was thinking Spain, it describes the situation here
| perfectly.
| alfons_foobar wrote:
| As far as I can tell, the problem lies not with the payment
| processing, but rather with the bureaucracy around receiving
| money in OP's country of residence.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| This is one area where cryptocurrencies are useful. Don't need
| anything other than a wallet address.
| dale_glass wrote:
| You don't need cryptocurrencies to commit tax fraud. The
| problem isn't being technically unable to get the money.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| I guess then everyone accepting 50 quid from a mate for
| fixing up their car or something is also commiting tax
| fraud. Immaterial amounts like this are not on tax
| authorities' radar. And if you are making a material
| amount, nothing is stopping you from doing the right thing
| and reporting your side income anyway.
|
| Crypto just reduces the hassle.
| oblio wrote:
| ORLY? That's your plan? Tax evasion?
|
| And what about when you want to spend that money? At some
| point you have to declare that income and be taxed and the
| government doesn't care if you were paid in euros, bitcoin or
| seashells.
| gnramires wrote:
| > I live in a country completely unsuited to making money from
| a hobby project on the side. To take donations I'd need to
| register as self-employed, and pay monthly for social security
| as long as I'm registered, even if I make no revenue whatsoever
| in that month. That's an absolutely awful idea for a project
| just getting started. I'd be losing a very appreciable amount
| of money, regularly. It'd take lots of effort to have enough
| support that I'm back to zero, and still not making anything.
| This is because this is a system made for plumbers, not for
| people doing rare jobs on the side which might some day grow
| into something serious.
|
| We need to keep in mind systems can be changed. You've set a
| very clear example that can be understood and communicated.
| Legislators should get to know this. Receiving donations for
| community work should be possible without hurdle (at least
| until it reaches a very high level) everywhere.
|
| I call the idea that we spontaneously support what is right for
| all of us a Donation Economy. If most people are ethical, this
| would work well.
|
| ---
|
| Furthermore, I think we should also fight, in the long term,
| for organizations (collectively supported) that provide this
| function (supporting community work). Like pollution is a
| negative externality, where the act of someone is (an unpriced)
| bad for everyone, contributing to OSS is a positive
| externality, where the work of someone is (again unpriced) good
| for everyone. I propose creating distributed institutions for
| identifying and pricing those externalities (positive and
| negative), evaluating and rewarding (or pricing) them
| accordingly. What is the metric for externalities? Collective
| meaning and wellbeing of everyone.[1]
|
| There are foundations like NLNet[2] that do this for OSS. I
| think we should donate to them in the meantime.
|
| [1] More about this here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043752
|
| [1] https://nlnet.nl/
| riemannzeta wrote:
| There have been steps forward in the direction of making
| donation easier:
|
| https://github.com/sponsors
|
| GitHub Sponsors directs individuals to Open Collective
| https://opencollective.com/ , which can serve as a "fiscal
| host." The advantage here is that the default rule at law for
| how a group of developers working together will be treated is
| partnership, which means joint and several liability. Working
| with a fiscal host partitions individual liability from group
| liability.
|
| But there are still open questions. I don't know all the
| details of how Open Collective works from a corporate law
| perspective. How do they partition the liability of different
| collectives that are hosted by the same fiscal host? That is
| important to understand because otherwise, the collectives that
| share a fiscal host are partners. This is better than all of
| the individuals who contribute to each and all of the
| collectives being partners (because there's still a partition
| between individual and group liability), but worse than if each
| collective's liability was partitioned from the other
| collectives' liability (and the fiscal host itself's
| liability).
|
| This seems like an active area for legal innovation. No
| jurisdiction I know of is optimizing to maximize speed and
| minimize cost of setting up corporations. Yet without the
| ability to shield the contributors of capital and labor from
| individual liability, there isn't much a group of individuals
| can do in our modern economy. The problems that many DAOs have
| had is a case study in this.
|
| People who care about open source should also care about
| scaling up the speed and minimizing the cost of incorporating.
| Stripe Atlas and similar services are underrated sources of
| economic growth for this reason, IMHO.
| johngossman wrote:
| There are many reasons for doing OSS. Perhaps the company you
| work for pays you to (the author mentions the many contributors
| to K8s at Red Hat et al). Perhaps you are building your resume, a
| student learning to program and interested in feedback, or you've
| built something for yourself and generously sharing with others,
| giving back to the community from which you in turn are getting
| valuable software. Or maybe it's a passion project. Unless you
| are paid to, perhaps not even then, nothing obligates you to
| maintain the project, to offer free support. Consider a crude
| analogy: you are passionate about music, you practice, then start
| playing in the park (with or without your guitar case open
| accepting contributions). You're good, people gather to listen to
| you. Perhaps a record producer will stop by and offer you a big
| contract. Unlikely. If you find you tire of playing in the park,
| it is taking away time from your job and your family, you are not
| obligated to continue playing...no matter how much your fans love
| your playing. And an essay "The Lack of Compensation in Busking
| is unsustainable" would be unlikely to gain you much sympathy.
| isaacfrond wrote:
| There we go again. It seems only yesterday we had the same
| thread.
|
| I choose an unusual hobby, that other people seems to find
| useful. Hence people should give me money.
|
| I don't get it, I really don't.
|
| If you enjoy working for free, by all means continue doing it. If
| you don't then stop. Nobody is forcing you. If you think your
| time and effort is worth more then you get now, go closed source,
| paid-support or whatever and see how much value you really bring
| to the market.
|
| (I'm taking a -4 karma hit for this post, I know. I got it last
| time, do your worst)
| janfoeh wrote:
| For what little it's worth, I fully agree with you. This
| _should_ be so blindingly obvious that I have yet to wrap my
| head around how one could think differently.
|
| Maybe it's a clout thing? That some people really want to make
| a living _selling_ software, but at the same time do not want
| to miss out on the cachet of "I'm doing open source"?
|
| Whatever the reason, there is some amount of cognitive
| dissonance involved.
| sevagh wrote:
| I even feel the opposite would be terrible - imagine taking
| payment for something that started as a hobby project.
|
| Now the "pressure from users" is an actual contractual
| obligation! I can't walk away. What a nightmare.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| The feeling of entitlement people have around open source is
| unsustainable.
|
| If someone releases code then that's it. You have it. Do what you
| want with it (within it's licence). Be thankful.
|
| Unless that guy specifically says he's going to maintain it for
| free you are entitled to exactly absolutely nothing more you
| ungrateful little git.
|
| If you add this code to your project, you should fix and share
| any problems you encounter as a token of gratitude.
| kawhah wrote:
| What is the evidence for this feeling of entitlement?
|
| I use tons of free software. I've never either demanded that
| anyone work on it for free, nor have I expressed any sense of
| entitlement or expectation.
| skrebbel wrote:
| You're in the majority. But look through any issue list of
| popular(ish) oss projects and there's a small but very vocal
| minority just sucking up the maintainers' energies like
| vampires.
| ahepp wrote:
| I hear this and it makes sense that a minority of users
| sucks up a lot of time, but what isn't clear to me is why
| maintainers don't ignore these people.
|
| I've never maintained a popular open source project so
| maybe there's something about the situation I just don't
| understand. But it seems like:
|
| > Thank you for your feature request, we will add it to the
| backlog. The core team doesn't work on unfunded feature
| requests because they use up a lot of time and resources.
| We are happy to review high quality PRs from anyone
| interested in implementing the feature. We also have a
| variety of sponsorship options, and a list of past
| contributors and maintainers available for contract work.
|
| would be reasonable and polite?
| hypfer wrote:
| > but what isn't clear to me is why maintainers don't
| ignore these people.
|
| One reason is that you're being told that that's an awful
| thing to do by basically every resource on "proper open-
| source" you can find.
|
| Another is that these people are pretty good at starting
| shit storms trying to ruin your reputation if you don't
| comply with their unreasonable demands.
|
| It's also worth nothing that some
| requests/issues/questions might be reasonable when viewed
| in isolation but not if there are hundreds of them.
|
| Think for example stuff unrelated to the project but
| where you as a hacker could nonetheless help because you
| do know the answers/possess the skill. For me at least, I
| find it hard to deal with that, because I know that I
| could in theory help that person. I just can't in
| practice because time and energy are both finite.
|
| > We are happy to review high quality PRs
|
| Are we though? There's a lot of work attached to
| reviewing even high-quality PRs. Also, even if the PR is
| high quality, the maintainers will still be the ones
| maintaining that new feature so it's still significantly
| more work.
| kawhah wrote:
| > Another is that these people are pretty good at
| starting shit storms trying to ruin your reputation if
| you don't comply with their unreasonable demands.
|
| If you go on social media and offer your well-thought-out
| opinions about some controversial subject, you are very
| likely to get large number of people sending you
| offensive messages, arguing with you objectionably,
| trying to start pile-ons, attempting to dox you, etc.
|
| Is the correct response to announce that "your
| participation in political discussion for free has become
| unsustainable", and that you need to be paid by all the
| people who find your comments interesting?
| hypfer wrote:
| > Is the correct response to announce that "your
| participation in political discussion for free has become
| unsustainable", and that you need to be paid by all the
| people who find your comments interesting?
|
| Why are you asking me this? I'm not the author of that
| text. My take on this article can be found here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38302098
| ahepp wrote:
| This is a bit tangential, but I actually think charging
| money to participate in certain online discussions is a
| really good idea.
|
| For instance, I think it would be awesome if everyone
| sending an email to my main account had to send me $1. If
| what they are sending me isn't worth $1 to them, why
| should I get a buzz on my phone? Spam would be solved
| instantly.
|
| I certainly don't think that every corner of the internet
| should be pay-to-play, and I generally don't think that
| the fees should be substantial to users participating in
| good faith. But I've got about five emails in the past
| two days from an airline bugging me to upgrade my seat.
| It costs me time and attention to weed through my inbox.
|
| I'm sure this principle could be applied to sites like HN
| or reddit to raise the bar and put even just a little bit
| of skin in the game.
| pacifika wrote:
| Your friends and family are going to pay you for every
| email? Every online purchase would be several dollars
| more expensive. Transactional email providers would go
| bankrupt.
| quectophoton wrote:
| No worries, we'll make plans to make it easy to pay. And
| it will be just cents So you just subscribe to your plan,
| send emails without worries because it's just cents, and
| at the end of the month you get a bill. Even cheaper than
| Migadu.
|
| We can call it "Simple Mailing Subscription". Or "SMS"
| for short.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| The thing to notice about this system is that only people
| who send more emails than they receive lose out. It would
| end spam at a stroke.
|
| And it doesn't matter if online purchases are more
| expensive, because you get that money back through email
| receipt fees.
|
| Tougher challenges are the traditional ones with
| micropayments. Transaction costs. And maybe tax
| implications. And the differential incentive based on
| wealth. People struggling for cash would still try and
| minimise their outgoing communication, which is probably
| a bad thing for a healthy society.
| bensecure wrote:
| I've thought about doing this where the money is
| escrowed, and the recipient can optionally take it if
| they think the email is spam or otherwise unsavoury. You
| of course wouldn't take money from friends or family.
| Email marketing that you never asked for you would of
| course accept their money. Random spam phishing emails
| you would readily take the fee from.
| foobarchu wrote:
| While I don't think this idea is a good one, that problem
| is easily solved with whitelisting. Everyone gets to pick
| a set of senders who can communicate with them freely, or
| up to a cap.
| Beijinger wrote:
| Excellent Idea. But why email? Just use a webform that
| charges 1 USD via paypal to contact you. Trust me, I
| wont!
| quectophoton wrote:
| On one hand, I would like to see it happen. But on the
| other hand I just don't think it would work that well.
|
| As someone from Europe, the first thing that comes to
| mind is that PCI compliance isn't even required by law in
| USA, is it?
| ahepp wrote:
| I've never read any resources on what constitutes proper
| open source. It seems like there are a lot of different
| and incompatible goals in the world of open source. For
| example, if I wanted to get paid I definitely wouldn't be
| reading something by Stallman.
|
| Sure, reviewing and maintaining PRs is work too. If I
| wasn't willing to do it for free, I'd be clear and
| upfront, and say
|
| > Unfortunately we don't have the time to review PRs
| without funding. If you are interested in having a PR
| reviewed, you can sponsor the project or contract a
| maintainer. In the past, it's taken a couple hours to
| review PRs. Keep in mind that even after your PR is
| merged, it will need to be maintained. If there are no
| volunteer maintainers able to keep your code in a decent
| state, it may be removed in future releases.
|
| There's a very real chance someone won't use your project
| if you say this. They might use a competing project with
| maintainers that will work for free, or they might even
| fork your project. That's certainly their right.
|
| I don't think I've ever seen a shitstorm arise from clear
| and open boundary-setting by maintainers. I'm sure I
| don't have an extensive catalog of every internet
| shitstorm, but the ones I can recall off the top of my
| head are usually situations that I'm sure felt like rug-
| pulls or shakedowns to users. I'm also having trouble
| thinking of a shitstorm over a minor incident that truly
| ruined someone's reputation, but I might just not run in
| the right circles to know about that kind of thing.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > but the ones I can recall off the top of my head are
| usually situations that I'm sure felt like rug-pulls or
| shakedowns to users
|
| It's funny you mention shakedowns, because I've seen at
| least one or two minor shitstorms (objectively, they were
| pretty minor, but I'm sure they didn't feel that way to
| the maintainers in the moment) because language very
| similar to what you proposed was interpreted as a
| shakedown:
|
| > We also have a variety of sponsorship options, and a
| list of past contributors and maintainers available for
| contract work.
|
| And I think that's where the rub is. Almost any strategy
| as a maintainer for trying to establish a boundary and
| ignore people (close issues or PRs automatically, offer
| contract services, etc) can cause these kinds of issues.
| People _really_ dislike being ignored, and so a policy of
| ignoring things will kind of inevitably lead to conflict
| and confrontation with some percentage of people.
| fuzztester wrote:
| >> but what isn't clear to me is why maintainers don't
| ignore these people.
|
| >One reason is that you're being told that that's an
| awful thing to do by basically every resource on "proper
| open-source" you can find.
|
| The solution is clear. Just apply the grandparent's
| advice recursively:
|
| Ignore these "resources" (!) on "proper open-source",
| too.
|
| Also, that term sounds awfully entitled to me, too.
|
| Who the heck is anyone to decide what constitues 'proper'
| open source "resources"? Total nonsense.
|
| Everyone can have their own opinion about that, or not
| even bother to have an opinion, and just do _exactly_ and
| _only_ what _they_ want for _their own_ open source
| project, ignoring the naysayers, free-but-unwanted
| advice-givers, and freeloaders.
|
| I didn't know that we were living in a socialist heaven.
| Hot tip: We are not.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > but what isn't clear to me is why maintainers don't
| ignore these people.
|
| There very likely isn't just one reason that applies to
| all maintainers.
|
| But there are some reasons one can hypothesize that
| probably apply to some or many maintainers.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| It's like if you live in a quiet suburb, and someone
| walks up to your window every night and starts yelling
| obscenities for an hour or two.
|
| It can be ignored, yes, but the worst offenders go beyond
| a polite discourse and will send emails to whatever email
| they can find, DM you on Twitter, Mastodon, etc., and
| drop weird and annoying comments anywhere they think you
| have a chance of seeing them.
|
| Some people have thicker skins than others, but it's just
| a bit tiresome no matter how much you can deflect.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| This is something I'd _love_ to see, the problem is that
| any "pay for features" model runs into serious legal
| issues:
|
| - for American developers, many of them have provisions
| in their employment contracts that allow them to do
| unpaid open source work, but ban any kind of commercial
| (i.e. in exchange for money) activity. The fact that this
| reach into off-time by employers is possible is nuts
| anyway, but doesn't make the problem go away.
|
| - as soon as any kind of money is involved, a _lot_ of
| jurisdictions have provisions regarding warranties and
| liabilities - and these can be pretty enormous, see the
| log4j fallout. Some of these can be put aside by
| contracts, but nevertheless it 's a legal minefield.
|
| - some jurisdictions don't allow you to just take money
| _in exchange for a project_ , it exposes developers to
| tax and social security liabilities. Even labeling such
| stuff as pure "donations" isn't safe if your tax auditor
| is particularly focused on nailing you.
|
| - what to do if someone from a sanctioned country donates
| you money? What to do if you're European and get money
| from someone in Cuba (which is not sanctioned by the EU),
| but are employed by / work for American companies or
| intend to travel to the US?
|
| - what to do if some arms manufacturer donates you /
| funds money for a project that could be used in weapons?
| Virtually all countries have some sort of equivalent to
| ITAR regulations that you _really_ don 't want to run
| afoul of.
| angra_mainyu wrote:
| One of the best handlings of this I ever saw was on opal,
| where someone was ranting about a non-software issue
| calling for the removal of a prominent contributor.
| gman83 wrote:
| One example I noticed recently is when YouTube stopped
| allowing ad-blockers. You should have seen the people posting
| on the uBlock subreddit demanding it being fixed, it was kind
| of crazy.
| cyberbuff wrote:
| He didnt mean you specifically. But there are lots of people
| demanding fixes like its their birthright.
| otikik wrote:
| My favorite one is "you should do what I am asking because
| it would make your project more popular".
|
| Weee. Exposure.
| Hamcha wrote:
| Just look around forums and socials like Reddit. I see people
| bitching how OBS Studio doesn't work for them the exact way
| they want it while contributing nothing to the project almost
| daily.
|
| This happens less where the FOSS choice is a drop in a sea of
| established proprietary packages (FreeCAD, KiCad, Godot) but
| way way more when they have already established themselves as
| the popular pick (OBS Studio, Blender) so they get flooded by
| less tech-savy, more casual users that don't really see the
| value of open source other than they don't pay for it.
|
| "Normal" people have always had stuff given to them for
| "free" (either "you are the product" or built-in licenses
| like Windows) so they don't realize the goodwill and
| sacrifices that FOSS goes through.
| kawhah wrote:
| > so they get flooded by less tech-savy, more casual users
| that don't really see the value of open source other than
| they don't pay for it
|
| this was solved 30 years ago by an important socio-
| technical invention called the FAQ, used together with a
| social convention of not elevating or rewarding vexatious
| messages.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| A solution was proposed, the problem was never solved
| because people generally don't read or believe that
| social convention doesn't apply to them in this
| situation.
| buster3000 wrote:
| If you've maintained an OSS project and managed the tickets
| raised, you'd know.
| junon wrote:
| I maintain some popular packages. It's not often, but it's
| far from never. Some people are really nasty, I've yet to
| figure out why.
| dboreham wrote:
| Something like 5% of the population are insane. No need to
| figure out any behavior once you factor that in.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| You may not be part of the problem.
|
| However, there are entire industries that leverage open-
| source / free software, and put unreasonable, uncompensated
| demands on it.
|
| At the end of the day though, I don't see the problem. As a
| maintainer of open-source, gratis, software, just don't do
| the work. It isn't like it is a job. If you don't do the
| work, they can't fire you.
|
| Is that good for the community? Surely not, but who is asking
| whether the status quo is working for the developers? Nobody
| but them. So look out for yourself, and scratch your own
| itch, but don't treat open source as a job.
| api wrote:
| Those two things are connected.
|
| People will spend $10 on a coffee drink at Starbucks without
| blinking. Suggest that they spend $10 on a piece of software
| and they'll throw a fit and claim you are taking away their
| rights.
| bluGill wrote:
| Some people. There are people who think Starbucks is too
| expensive. There are people who donate to open source.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| I don't know anyone who doesn't think Starbucks is
| overpriced slop. In any European city you'll find local
| cafes with better quality and prices than what Starbucks
| sell.
|
| They seem to only be present in the big metro areas that
| attract a lot of tourists, travelers and immigrants who are
| familiar with the Starbucks brand and go for that out of
| habbit and know quality, similar to how McDonald's is so
| popular.
| zrail wrote:
| Weird flex but ok. In any area big enough to have a
| Starbucks in the US you'll find at least one local cafe
| that has better coffee. You'll also find at least one
| with much worse coffee that thinks they're better.
|
| As you say, people go to Starbucks and McDonalds for
| familiar known quality and you should be happy for it.
| That way the tourists and immigrants stay out of your
| local cafe.
|
| Edit: to be clear I'm not defending supranational billion
| dollar corporations here.
| creshal wrote:
| Tourists and immigrants giving their money to an US
| company that funnels all the money away from the local
| tax collectors and underpays their workers is still a net
| negative. All we're left with is their pollution, and no
| tax revenue to pay for its removal.
| sugarpile wrote:
| Sounds like an issue to take up with your government.
| Don't complain that other people spend _their_ money in a
| way _you_ disagree with.
| creshal wrote:
| "You can't blame us for offering bribes, you can only
| blame the people who take them" is a weird idea of
| morality.
| joshmanders wrote:
| I mean you're the one who votes for your officials in
| your area, so if they're accepting bribes that is kind of
| on you isn't it?
|
| I as a tourist didn't elect your officials, so it's not
| on me.
| creshal wrote:
| Looks like you offended some Americans' sensibilities,
| but it's pretty much on point outside the US. We already
| have a coffee culture, we don't need union-busting
| megacorps giving us worse for higher prices and lower
| worker wages, thanks.
| bluGill wrote:
| You need to meet more people. I know many who think
| Starbucks is great coffee. I know others who hate it.
| That is diversity.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > In any European city you'll find...
|
| This is so ridiculously optimistic and misinformed. In
| Poland's cities, for example, the cafes mainly belong to
| chains like Costa Coffee and Green Coffee Nero, which act
| identically to Starbucks in terms of prices, quality, and
| range of drinks. There aren't many independent cafes
| left, let alone ones with lower prices than a Starbucks.
| Similarly, in Helsinki the choice largely comes down to
| chains like Espresso House and Robert's Coffee that are
| no different than Starbucks.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| That sounds strange and mildly concerning for Poland, as
| Romanian cities are full with small local cafes not part
| of any chains, but unlike Starbucks & Co. they're just
| cafes, as in you go there to get a coffee and drink it,
| not to loiter for hours on a macbook and use it as a
| coworking space. Kind of like how it's in
| Italy/Portugal/Austria.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| If you are posting from Romania, then you have a very
| warped perception of Europe's cafes overall. But even in
| Romania, the old Central European and Balkan tradition of
| the cafe as a home away from home for intellectuals is
| dying. It has been well over a decade now since many of
| Cluj's independent cafes began to play loud blooming
| music to discourage lingering, and staff were instructed
| to immediately pick up a customer's empty glass and say
| "Va mai servesc cu ceva?", in order to nudge the customer
| to order more or get out. And of course, prices have
| risen to about the same as Starbucks.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> many of Cluj's independent cafes began to play loud
| blooming music to discourage lingering_
|
| Maybe because Cluj is an overrated, overpriced Silicon
| Valley wannabe (sorry to be so blunt), so greedy old-town
| cafe owners jack up prices to match IT workers' and
| tourists' purchasing power. In Iasi for example, there's
| still small neighborhood cafes that sell affordable
| coffee, you just gotta avoid the old town and city center
| where all IT workers and tourists gather.
|
| _> then you have a very warped perception of Europe
| overall_
|
| Doubt it. Go to Italy, Portugal, Austria and many others,
| and it's full of small family owned cafes and traditional
| coffee houses serving just affordable coffee and cakes,
| not acting like a tourist trap or hipster co-working
| space.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| The development I mentioned in Cluj predates the IT-
| sector boom, let alone the tourist boom. It began in the
| student cafes, and it can be ascribed to the fact that
| running a profitable cafe is hard. You like to make
| claims about things you know little about, don't you?
|
| "Go to Italy, Portugal, Austria and many others" The
| countries you mention by name are either southern
| European or Central European. You need more firsthand
| experience than that to make such blanket statements as
| "In any European city you'll find...", like you did in
| the OP.
|
| Your idea that Starbucks is unusual in that people stay
| there for hours, while independent cafes are necessarily
| drink-and-go experiences, is horribly misinformed. Go to
| the Western Balkans, where there are few or no Starbucks
| around, but myriad independent cafes where men often
| spend half the day on a single purchase. The cafe has
| always been a community center in that region. And in
| areas with high unemployment, ageing demographics, and
| little money, they also play an important role as simply
| a way to get out of the house.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> it can be ascribed to the fact that running a
| profitable cafe is hard._
|
| Seems like a lot of countries have figured it out. Just
| how you put it below that some old cafes serve as
| gathering centers instead of profit centers. Yes, if
| you're a business owner looking to maximize profit, then
| a cafe selling cheap coffee is not a good way to make a
| lot of money, and post '89 Romania is all about money and
| less about community.
| jakubadamw wrote:
| What? Which cities? In mine, Krakow, the above just isn't
| true. In my neighbourhood, there even isn't a chain-
| affiliated cafe that I could go to - if I wanted to in
| the first place - but there are five or six independent
| cafes in my immediate vicinity. Same with most Polish
| cities I've visited... That being said, yes, overall the
| number may be shrinking in favour of the chains. We're
| far from them becoming extinct, though.
| newsclues wrote:
| People will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on
| proprietary software.
|
| Most of those people won't spend $100 on open source
| software.
| api wrote:
| Yep, and if you ask them to they will throw a fit and claim
| you are taking away their rights.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| Correct. They've learned the behavior that attacking
| someone's ego, sense of fairness, or duty pays off and
| costs little. Almost everyone in customer service or non-
| profit space has to deal with these leeches.
|
| Easy to defeat, fatal to ignore.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| I had this moment of cognitive dissonance when I noticed
| that one colleagues would use "open source" as a synonym
| for "poor quality". Context: I was working as a contractor,
| for a bank. That colleague was managing a bunch of *nix
| instances used to deploy our web services.
| nablaone wrote:
| Because open source projects are not products per se. If
| you use mostly a proprietary software, open source
| project can be perceived as "poor quality product".
| pacifika wrote:
| if they had to pay for open source then they couldn't
| afford to pay for commercial software?
| Frost1x wrote:
| In businesses I've observed this behavior tends to surround
| dysfunctions in liability and understanding of liability
| organizationally and from business management.
|
| If you make a purchasing decision, your ass is on the line
| when people ask why certain product/service isn't
| fulfilling some arbitrary business need. In theory,
| assuming the functionality is part of the advertised
| purchase, the liability of the thing you're paying for lies
| on that third party. You did your due diligence. If you
| chose some open source combination with in-house build,
| they're going to question why you didn't outsource some
| envisioned cheaper third party option (sometimes, this is a
| legitimate strategy, often from my experience it's not). So
| you default to big vendor big solution to protect yourself.
|
| Apologies are made and blah blah, discussions about "what
| alternatives do/did we have" and you often end up landing
| on implementing some mixture of leveraging public domain
| software and in-house customization atop/leveraging it to
| solve the problem you were paying for. In the end, you end
| up doing what you probably knew was the correct path
| anyways: this vendor solution is questionable, it doesnt
| completely align with our business needs, and it's not
| going to get the actual need done. Conveying that to
| business leaders is often impossible though. So, to pass
| liability/responsibility and cover your ass with
| incompetent business leadership, you throw often thousands,
| tens, or hundreds of thousands away.
|
| I've had this discussion so many times and sat in these
| meetings so many times it grows tiring. The fact is,
| sometimes a generic solution works for your business
| (Office for example is a pretty generic need and often
| aligns), often it really doesn't (some arbitrary more
| niche/custom thing you do? Maybe, good luck).
| watwut wrote:
| Overwhelming majority of people don't buy 10$ coffee. They
| just don't do it.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| Hm, why do you think that is? Do programmers just respect
| each other less than they respect baristas?
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Because they got trained to think that way by the " _free
| as in speech and free as in beer_ " and " _Why pay for
| Windoze?_ (sic) _Linux is free_ " marketing the early FOSS
| advocates used.
| ahepp wrote:
| If Starbucks started giving the drinks away for free, I
| doubt people would still pay $10 for it.
| amelius wrote:
| > The feeling of entitlement people have around open source is
| unsustainable.
|
| The feeling of entitlement people have around capitalism is
| unsustainable.
|
| Have a businessmodel that allows you to make more money the
| harder you work. Be happy with it.
|
| Have a job as a teacher or a nurse or a police officer where
| your workload increases over the years and you make the same
| shitty salary no matter how hard you work. Tough luck.
| agent327 wrote:
| It still beats having a central planner from the politburo
| tell you to work in the mines for zero compensation.
| sofixa wrote:
| You know that's not how central planning worked, right? You
| were told to live in a specific place, with a few (narrow)
| options on where to work at (unless you were
| (un)specialised, then there was sometimes zero choice), for
| meagre but sufficient compensation. You could have a place
| to live, food to eat. The place to live might be a room in
| an apartment shared with other families, the food to eat
| might be bread with bread, and there were little things you
| could buy outside of necessities, but you were compensated
| and it was near certain you would have a roof over your
| head, and baring drastic mismanagement/crisis, enough food.
|
| If that's better than some having more money that they
| could possibly use, many having access to amazing amenities
| and luxuries, but a lot struggling to eat enough quality
| food and not being able to have a roof over their head is
| IMO a philosophical question. Do you prefer everyone (of
| course with some minor exceptions for higher ups) to be
| equally "not great, but not terrible" or do you prefer
| _some_ to have amazing lives, but others to suffer?
| dtx1 wrote:
| And by everyone you of course mean everyone that wasn't
| arrested because he thought maybe bread with bread and a
| shared appartment is kinda shitty.
| gruppe_sechs wrote:
| *murdered
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| The question of preference at the end is moot. Those with
| the power long ago made the decision that 'a few people
| should have a amazing lives while vast numbers of people
| suffer needlessly' is the way that society should be
| structured and structured it thusly. This is/was even
| true in countries with central planning as you've
| described above. There is/was always a select group of
| people at the top for whom the rules didn't apply and had
| all the luxuries that could desire.
| gruppe_sechs wrote:
| You forgot the part where the central planners herded
| millions of people into Gulags, starved tens of millions
| more to death, then executed a few million more for good
| measure.
|
| Other than that, spot on though.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| GULAG is an acronym for a state organ, it can't be
| pluralized.
| gruppe_sechs wrote:
| Maybe in the original Russian, but the English word
| "gulag" can refer to an individual camp and not just the
| organisation that ran them:
| https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gulag
| mistrial9 wrote:
| you mean like the Plains Indians in America? yeah, ugly..
| they "solved war" that way.. Almost all the "great
| nations" of the modern times did exactly that to minority
| language groups, at some stage of development. Many
| Wrongs Do Not Make It Right -- it is what happened,
| however. I would add that many genocides occurred in the
| longer time frame of history, which is the alternative to
| mass forced migrations, in the eyes of the Great Powers.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Do you prefer everyone (of course with some minor
| exceptions for higher ups) to be equally "not great, but
| not terrible" or do you prefer some to have amazing
| lives, but others to suffer?
|
| This isn't the choice. Socialism (actual socialism)
| repeatedly starves its populations. Capitalism repeatedly
| creates situations where new things are created that make
| everyone's lives better, and existing things get cheaper
| and better over time.
|
| I.e. you can't just ignore the opportunity cost of
| innovation and prioritisation via a decentralised market.
| An innovation-focused dichotomy is: should we spend lots
| of effort trying to precisely spread around what we have
| today, while still having a privileged class based on
| politics, or should we encourage people to do things that
| raises the floor and the ceiling for everyone, and have a
| privileged class based on value they created?
| iscream26 wrote:
| > Capitalism repeatedly creates situations where new
| things are created that make everyone's lives better, and
| existing things get cheaper and better over time.
|
| > _everyone 's_ lives better
|
| > things get cheaper and better over time.
|
| Oh, fuck off with that bullshit. Capitalism may appear to
| thrive when living in a first-world country, but only
| does so through exploitation and cutting corners. More to
| the point, isn't it funny that despite capitalism being
| pretty much the de facto economic system of the world
| only a few countries are actually deemed worth living in?
| No, some abstract 'informed exchange of currency' didn't
| magically cause things to appear out of thin air. People
| make things, and they are almost certainly underpaid and
| overworked. Behind every AI model there are X poorly paid
| workers around the world that curated the data that it
| needs to function. Behind every piece of clothing there
| are Y poorly paid workers in Bangladesh that made it. And
| behind every rechargeable battery there are Z Congolese
| kids risking death inside a mine in search for cobalt. We
| might try to (and often do) look away, pretend that those
| are the unfortunate results of corporate blunders that
| seldom happen, but they're not. Invisible exploitation is
| what makes the kind of lifestyle that is available in
| first-world countries possible.
| agent327 wrote:
| Is there no exploitation in communist nations? I should
| actually phrase that the other way around: is there, or
| has there ever been, a communist nation that did not
| exploit people to the max, even killing them if that was
| the most convenient option?
|
| As for cutting corners, check out some videos on tofu
| dreg projects, it will enlighten you on corner cutting in
| a communist system.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Capitalism repeatedly creates situations where new
| things are created that make everyone's lives better, and
| existing things get cheaper and better over time
|
| In theory. In practice, can you really say that existing
| things are getting cheaper and better, generally? Most of
| the Western world is seeing unprecedented price increases
| combined with record profits in multiple industries (so
| it's not just general inflation) combined with drastic
| quality and quantity decreases, combined with
| "enshitification" across multiple industries.
| zlg_codes wrote:
| Ah, ye olden 'capitalism, or dystopian despair!'
|
| Strangely one of those things that culturally, we can't
| get past. It's a false dichotomy at best, and completely
| ignores the costs of implementing capitalism.
| agent327 wrote:
| If you take away capitalism, you are still going to need
| a system. The alternatives are either anarchism (and I
| don't fancy living in a Mad Max-style world), or some
| form of dictatorship: either communism, or outright
| dictatorship, or theocracy, or some neofeudal BS. In all
| of them there is a single strong man at the top who will
| tell you what to do, and kill you if you don't.
|
| Capitalism at least gives you the freedom to make your
| own choices. All the others (except anarchism) don't.
| sofixa wrote:
| I don't know why you're mixing political and economic
| systems. The two are often related, but not intricately
| linked. Capitalism and democracy are orthogonal, and
| there have been plenty of capitalist but undemocratic
| (e.g. fascist) regimes out there, like there have been
| democratic countries with social democratic (aka not
| unfettered capitalism) economic systems.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >Do you prefer everyone (of course with some minor
| exceptions for higher ups) to be equally "not great, but
| not terrible"
|
| There's the argument that in a planned economy, things
| can be terrible for pretty much everyone, like in
| Venezuela or North Korea.
|
| You also have to account for the central planners
| choosing to repress people for political purposes.
|
| Maybe you can give us a specific example of a centrally
| planned society which worked OK according to you? Here's
| a compendium of case studies to get you started:
| https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Niemietz-
| Socia...
| luzojeda wrote:
| They are terrible for everyone except Maduro, his family
| and friends and the same about Kim Jong Un in North
| Korea.
|
| I many times suspect that people who yearn for
| communism/socialism just wish to be those who come out on
| top from the revolution such as the Castros, the Chavez,
| Maduro, Guevara, Ortega, etc.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Are you serious? No one is being FORCED to suffer in the
| United States. Such is the beauty of our freedom.
|
| No thanks, I'll take the system that allows me to move up
| or down generally in correlation with my effort and work
| ethics.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Are you serious? No one is being FORCED to suffer in
| the United States. Such is the beauty of our freedom.
|
| People have multiple jobs and can't afford healthcare and
| are living paycheck to paycheck or don't have parental
| leave or paid sick leave or paid time off do that because
| they want to, right?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| They just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps
| and get born into a wealthy family
| _heimdall wrote:
| I don't actually think that's a problem with capitalism
| (though it has many problems).
|
| I've always seen this as the markets reflecting what we
| collectively actually prioritize. Sure we want to be safe and
| educated, but damn it if we don't really get enjoyment out of
| fancy new toys, vacations, and new cloths.
|
| In this case capitalism doesn't seem to be holding down
| salaries of the careers you listed. Its noteworthy that most
| of those industries are unionized, but if the unions are
| worth anything at all they should be pushing salaries higher
| than the market would have otherwise paid.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Teaching, nursing, and policing are all either _highly_
| regulated or outright organized by the government. So I
| don't know if it makes sense to say something like "the
| market chooses not to prioritize policing" or "teacher's
| unions allow teachers to collect above-market salaries".
| The voters seem more relevant than the market here.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Yep that's a fair point. Government intervention can
| muddy the waters similar to unions, with regards to
| markets deciding on prices and value.
|
| There is still some level of market sentiment though,
| both in that we don't collectively prioritize politically
| pushing through higher wages and individuals are still
| willing to do the jobs for the current salary rates.
|
| Nursing may actually get the triple wammy - unions,
| governments, and insurance monopolies all weigh heavily
| into hourly rates and salaries for medical professionals.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Yep that's a fair point. Government intervention can
| muddy the waters similar to unions, with regards to
| markets deciding on prices and value.
|
| There is still some level of market sentiment though,
| both in that we don't collectively prioritize politically
| pushing through higher wages and individuals are still
| willing to do the jobs for the current salary rates.
|
| Nursing may actually get the triple whammy - unions,
| governments, and insurance monopolies all weigh heavily
| into hourly rates and salaries for medical professionals.
| j7ake wrote:
| So the end result is that you live in a society where the
| average quality of education and health care slowly plummets
| to zero?
|
| That is not a sustainable solution for society.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I'm not quite following - are you criticising modern late
| stage Captitalism or some imaginary implementation of
| bureaucracy?
| ykonstant wrote:
| No? What the fuck is this crap logic every time someone
| suggests we may not be living under a great politico-
| economic system? How did we go from "maybe we should tame
| inequality" to "let's resurrect Stalin"? Fucking fuck.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Haha I was just thinking about something similar recently.
|
| Imagine visiting a coffee shop and telling the barista: "hey,
| by the way, I can make my own coffee at home for free, you
| know?"
|
| People seem somehow OK with thinking this way when it comes to
| software.
| andsoitis wrote:
| I agree with your sentiment of "Unless that guy specifically
| says he's going to maintain it for free you are entitled to
| exactly absolutely nothing"
|
| That works both ways though, a maintainer cannot expect users
| to not complain (so they have to develop management strategies
| where they ignore the noise, rather than try to
| engage/capitulate). A maintainer can also not lament when users
| do not feel the desire to contribute monetarily.
| bjornsing wrote:
| > a maintainer cannot expect users to not complain
|
| Eh... Isn't that fairly close to the definition of
| entitlement (i.e. you complain when you have no reason to)?
| andsoitis wrote:
| As a maintainer you cannot control how people behave.
| There's no point in lamenting that people act entitled.
|
| Instead, it is more productive to develop strategies to
| ignore the noise from entitled voices. You do not need to
| respond to them. You do not need to convince them. You do
| not have to keep them happy.
| dom96 wrote:
| > There's no point in lamenting that people act entitled.
|
| There is: it discourages people from acting entitled.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Does it? How much of an impact do you think it has?
| billythemaniam wrote:
| I suspect ignoring them is more effective than
| essentially complaining back.
| mikrl wrote:
| >so they have to develop management strategies where they
| ignore the noise
|
| I believe this is called "please use the template when
| submitting an issue" and we all know how that goes.
|
| I've honestly found myself laughing like a madman at GitHub
| issues where the maintainer calmly and repeatedly tries to
| explain to the increasingly disgruntled reporter to UTFT (use
| the fine template)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I keep thinking that GitHub (and GitLab, and etc) made the
| initial costs to interacting with the developers
| unhealthily low. The barrier of having to create an account
| or adding your email to a newsletter on the older
| distributed systems was extremely good on filtering out
| that kind of thing.
|
| Also, "Issues" should really, really have a different name.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > That works both ways though, a maintainer cannot expect
| users to not complain (so they have to develop management
| strategies where they ignore the noise, rather than try to
| engage/capitulate). A maintainer can also not lament when
| users do not feel the desire to contribute monetarily.
|
| The solution is quite simple really.
|
| 1) have your repo private and release only tarball files or
| have a read only repo with no pull/merge request
| functionnality 2) do not use an issue tracker
|
| Basically, do not use a forge such as github/gitlab, at least
| not publicly. Problem solved.
| sweetjuly wrote:
| GitHub also lets you turn off the issue tracker, which is
| wonderful for projects which are ""incidentally open
| source"" where I have no plans to maintain it beyond my own
| personal needs
| hgs3 wrote:
| > The feeling of entitlement people have around open source is
| unsustainable.
|
| Free-rider problem [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem
| corethree wrote:
| Telling people to have gratitude isn't going to fix a
| logistical problem or social phenomenon.
|
| It's like telling people not to be Christian/Buddhist/muslim
| because religion is just a bunch of fantasy stories.
| teddyh wrote:
| A maintainer position for a software project is like any
| position or role, in say, a charity. You aren't technically
| forced to do the work, but the charity announces publicly (on
| its web site, for instance) that the work _will_ be done, and
| people expect it to be done. If you do not feel up to doing it
| anymore, you owe it to other people (who expect the work to be
| done) to announce your retirement and hand the position over to
| new people.
|
| Any project which is _not_ a going concern should:
|
| A: Not, IMHO, be called a "project"
|
| B: Be _clearly_ labelled, in its public-facing information, as
| being offered as-is, without any implied updates or future
| development.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| > B: Be clearly labelled, in its public-facing information,
| as being offered as-is, without any implied updates or future
| development.
|
| Pretty sure every open source license includes this in the
| warranty line...
| teddyh wrote:
| No, that's the legal warranty disclaimer. It has nothing to
| do with support, security fixes, or future development.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What do you think a warranty is?
| teddyh wrote:
| A warranty is about the code which already exists, and
| whether the code is fit for a particular purpose, etc.
| (all legal terms). The warranty disclaimer in free
| software licences all say basically "Although _this
| specific version of the software_ is meant to be helpful
| to you for a certain purpose, you can't sue the developer
| if there's a bug or an omitted feature, since we don't
| make any guarantee that it will work." But this is not
| what I was talking about. I was talking about disclaiming
| any implied support, security bugfixes, and future
| development, all three of which are usually heavlily
| implied (or outright stated) to be available in official
| project information (such as on an official web site).
| simbolit wrote:
| You are saying I should add, to my free lemonade stand, a
| disclaimer:
|
| I will not help you with drinking the free lemonade; if
| the lemonade is too sour for you I will not be providing
| extra sugar; and I will not make free lemonade tomorrow.
|
| Can you give me one or two examples of official OSS
| websites where these are heavily implied or outright
| stated? Do you mean anything beyond a roadmap?
| teddyh wrote:
| You don't need a disclaimer for something which nobody
| reasonably expects. Although an "available today only"
| notice might be useful, since people might reasonably
| expect a lemonade stand to be available the next day.
|
| Regarding examples, basically any software project web
| site which talks about the project as an ongoing thing,
| gives links to where "new releases" will be available.
| Stuff like that. All that implies that the software is
| actively developed and will be developed for at least the
| near future.
| simbolit wrote:
| Let's look at one of my favorite open source projects:
|
| https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
|
| Does gorhill need a disclaimer, as you propose?
|
| If so, please tell me specifically, where you are reading
| any "implied support, security bugfixes, and future
| development".
|
| I am not purposefully complicated, I just feel your
| "implied" is doing a lot of work, and I want to see what
| that really means. I don't see the implication, but
| perhaps I am blind. So please enlighten me. (If ublock
| doesn't fit your argument, please give another example of
| your liking.).
| teddyh wrote:
| Firstly, uBlock doesn't really talk about its own
| updates, since all the frequent updates it needs are
| provided by its filter lists. It's basically an app
| store, a little bit like F-Droid. And you're right, I can
| find no explicit language that either states or implies
| any of the things i listed.
|
| But think of it this way. There is a prominent link to
| their list of releases,
| <https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases>. From what I
| can tell, the releases vary from a few days apart to
| maybe a month apart, with the most recent release being
| yesterday. What would you think if, say, _six months_
| from now, there still wasn't a new release? No bugs
| fixed? And, when asked about the absence of these things,
| if the developer's answer would be "You're whiny and
| entitled, I have no legal obligation to do anything, read
| the license LOL."? I mean, he'd be technically correct,
| it _would_ be legal for him to do this. But would it be
| _OK_? What I am arguing is that it would _not_ be OK, and
| that users _do_ have legitimate reasonable expectations
| of any project that presents itself as being active; i.e.
| fixing bugs, security holes, and implementing new
| features. Users are not "entitled" when expecting these
| things.
| somethingor wrote:
| > And, when asked
|
| Just so I understand, what would be the question here?
| teddyh wrote:
| (I have edited to clarify.)
| infamouscow wrote:
| The distinction you're trying to make isn't recognized in
| the eyes of the law, nor really anyone else for that
| matter.
|
| The warranty disclaimer in virtually every software
| project, regardless of license, has been around for
| decades. The text has been fairly anodyne except with the
| recent wave of parasites killing their host and trying to
| snake their way out of it.
| growse wrote:
| > B: Be clearly labelled, in its public-facing information,
| as being offered as-is, without any implied updates or future
| development.
|
| So if I had a text file in the root of my repo that said:
| THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED
| BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING
| THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE
| PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER
| EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
| IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A
| PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND
| PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM
| PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY
| SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
|
| Would that be sufficient?
| teddyh wrote:
| That text does _not_ disclaim support, security bugfixes,
| and future development. On the contrary, all three of those
| things are probably either heavlily implied or outright
| stated to be available on the project web site.
| growse wrote:
| You and I are reading "SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE
| DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY
| SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION." very differently.
| teddyh wrote:
| At best, that only covers bug fixes. And, as I said, bug
| fixes are usually implied to be available in future
| releases.
| andrewjl wrote:
| > At best, that only covers bug fixes. And, as I said,
| bug fixes are usually implied to be available in future
| releases
|
| Can you explain how you got to that interpretation from
| that phrasing?
|
| > SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST
| OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
|
| And how is future development and / or support not
| covered under servicing of that clause?
| teddyh wrote:
| Fixing defects is a different activity from support and
| future development, no?
| infamouscow wrote:
| It also doesn't disclaim the author from writing you a
| check out of the good will of their heart.
|
| I genuinely don't understand what's so difficult to grasp
| here.
| teddyh wrote:
| > * It also doesn't disclaim the author from writing you
| a check out of the good will of their heart.*
|
| Nobody expects that. But people _do_ reasonably expect a
| project to recieve updates, security fixes, and new
| releases.
| infamouscow wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing with you, you're just wrong.
|
| It's _not_ reasonable to expect a project to receive
| updates, security fixes, and new releases for software
| projects the author put on the Internet explicitly with a
| license saying it 's warrantied for no purpose, both
| explicit and implicit.
| teddyh wrote:
| I was going to present a fair rebuttal, but you've just
| convinced me that it's unreasonable for you to expect any
| answer from me in this debate.
| infamouscow wrote:
| There's nothing to debate.
|
| The premises required to arrive at your conclusion do not
| hold. They're simply not true.
| radiator wrote:
| I think it is too long.
| sublimefire wrote:
| This is ridiculous because there is no legal or moral
| obligation from the creator to say anything except maybe
| adding the license. You as a user can use the given software
| and probably modify yourself at will due to the permissive
| license which is the main advantage of OSS. When I get stuff
| from the charity I do not expect them to provide a return
| policy and customer service, your analogy is moronic because
| the thing was done already and you can come back and get a
| newer thing if it is ready.
|
| The problem is that the barrier to use any software is so low
| that it attracts people who have no clue and demand support.
| I am not talking about you, even the larger companies always
| mention a wish to force smaller developers to patch security
| issues for free, this is an issue in supply chain security at
| the moment.
|
| The gist is that you can fix it yourself.
| teddyh wrote:
| To use _any_ software in these modern times, it's not
| enough to simply get a snapshot and use that forever. That
| time has long gone. Users _need_ updates for whenever the
| inevitable incompatibilities arise, and since switching to
| some other software is a lot of work, users need to be able
| to depend on regular, timely updates. Indeed, many people
| choose what software they use solely on that basis.
| Therefore, _any_ software project which presents itself as
| usable _is_ implying that the project will provide these
| things.
|
| (This is a bit like how a stable economy depends on there
| being a crucial threshold number of long-term, high-trust
| relationships. You cannot have a functioning economy when
| everybody is always backstabbing everybody else. Similarly,
| you arguably cannot have a functioning Open Source
| ecosystem if everybody is just throwing code over the wall
| all the time.)
|
| > _The problem is that the barrier to use any software is
| so low that it attracts people who have no clue and demand
| support._
|
| I think this phenomenon is caused by:
|
| 1. Some users being a bit whiny and entitled, just like
| some people are rude to waiters. Some have been taught and
| brought up to behave this way, and others have just gotten
| into bad habits.
|
| 2. _Many_ developers being overly defensive when presented
| with legitimate complaints from users. This is just human
| nature, harmful as it may be.
|
| 3. Due to 2., users exaggerate and act rudely when
| reporting complaints, because they _expect_ pushback from
| developers. This then exacerbates 2. again, leading to a
| vicious cycle.
|
| Some developers who are burnt out by 1., and are not
| realizing what is going on, are, as a way of psychological
| self-defense, adopting an attitude of "I don't care about
| you users, you'll get nothing and you'll ******* like it."
| This then necessitates the same developers to argue that
| all users who expect _anything_ are merely "entitled",
| because if any user's expectations would be reasonable,
| then the developer's attitude would be unwarranted, and the
| developers feel that they _need_ that attitude for their
| own well-being.
|
| None of this is new; the old jargon word "lusers" was
| frequently used in ages past with contempt and disdain for
| users.
| jjav wrote:
| > Be clearly labelled, in its public-facing information, as
| being offered as-is
|
| If you read the license (for most licenses anyway), that info
| is clearly right there.
| yawboakye wrote:
| it gets complicated when the project is intentionally marketed,
| and users deliberately attracted. i think at that point it
| ceases being purely source available and burdens the
| creator/marketer with support duties. unfortunately at the
| moment, most open source projects are actively marketed,
| including fringe and poorly thought out products.
| zackmorris wrote:
| _The feeling of entitlement people have around open source is
| unsustainable._
|
| Do you have standards? It doesn't sound like you do.
|
| People with healthy boundaries set standards for themselves as
| far as what they give to others and what treatment they accept
| in return.
|
| I think the fallacy in your argument is that you're blaming
| contributors for noticing that they aren't being compensated
| for the work they've done, rather than blaming others for using
| that work without giving anything in return. I see your
| sentiment reflected in society in the way we treat low-wage
| workers with disdain for not doing more lucrative work. You're
| applying the principle of rugged individualism to a systems-
| level problem.
|
| A healthier way to approach this would be to list a number of
| possible solutions and debate them in an open forum like this.
| When we find solutions but fail to adopt them, then that's a
| criticism of our agency. We are all failing ourselves by
| failing open source contributors. Then we can look beyond that
| to find the reasons why. Which are obvious because they are the
| same as with any other power imbalance. The fault lies with the
| wealthy and powerful people and corporations who profit from
| free and low-wage labor. The solution is to organize labor into
| a unified front so that exploitation can no longer happen.
|
| Our failure to solve open source compensation is analogous to
| failing to stop suffering in developing nations which provide
| labor and resources for wealthy ones. Your argument places
| guilt and shame on workers instead of identifying exploitation
| by the wealthy, which might be better spent on something like
| an open source endowment or UBI more generally.
| 38 wrote:
| > I think the fallacy in your argument is that you're blaming
| contributors for noticing that they aren't being compensated
| for the work they've done, rather than blaming others for
| using that work
|
| That's the exact opposite of what they are doing. They are
| blaming the users for expecting more than they should. They
| should expect nothing more than literally just the current
| version of the code, as is.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Thank you, you're right, I read the parent comment
| backwards.
| bawolff wrote:
| I dont think that is what the person you were replying to is
| saying.
|
| > I think the fallacy in your argument is that you're blaming
| contributors for noticing that they aren't being compensated
| for the work they've done, rather than blaming others for
| using that work without giving anything in return.
|
| Is anyone being forced to work on open source software?
| Unlike low wage jobs, where you could be forced in order to
| pay bills, eat, nobody is forcing anyone to work on open
| source ventures.
|
| Just because you do something useful does not mean you are
| inherently entitled to compensation in the form you want.
|
| If you are being forced to do something against your will
| that is bad. If it is some hobby you happen to like doing
| that is totally ok.
|
| > The solution is to organize labor into a unified front so
| that exploitation can no longer happen.
|
| Lol. What type of leverage do you think open source devs have
| to form a union? Open source in many ways is designed to
| remove all economic leverage from source code. Its not a bug
| its a feature.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Edit 2: you're right, I read the parent comment backwards.
| They're saying that people using open source code have no
| right to place demands on contributors. This is a teachable
| moment for me, so I'll leave my thought process below, even
| though it doesn't apply now.
|
| --
|
| If I follow your logic, then you're saying that there's no
| economic incentive to work on open source software, since
| it's not compensated financially. Which seems to create a
| paradox:
|
| A) Capitalism doesn't apply to open source software because
| there's no exchange of capital for labor
|
| B) Capitalism applies to open source software because it
| generates billions of dollars of revenue for people and
| corporations
|
| It sounds like the only rational act under capitalism is to
| not work on open source software, since the work is not
| compensated.
|
| Meaning that any solution we come up with will act outside
| of capitalism.
|
| Can you present a solution that works within capitalism to
| fund open source software?
|
| Edit: I forgot to mention that the primary power of
| organized labor is to withhold labor until compensated. For
| open source, that might look like deciding as programmers
| to withhold all of our contributions until we solve this.
| Since we won't do that, we're all scabs supporting the
| status quo.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| This is right, but maintainers themselves often forget. They
| don't enforce this. Their little thing became very important
| and they became a rock star, so they carry the world on their
| shoulders. They respond to feature requests that are out of
| scope originally. They let any and every PR in. Maintainers
| often manage to do things with their project that turn them
| into bahemoths and support large industry and find themselves
| stuck.
|
| More maintainers need to take the "no guarantee of fitness for
| purpose" part of their license more seriously. Don't fall for
| the temptation to be everything for everyone. Don't cave to
| social pressure.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > More maintainers need to take the "no guarantee of fitness
| for purpose" part of their license more seriously.
|
| I get this, as a very bottom line. But a lot of great
| projects are great because the developers consciously want
| people to use and depend on their work.
|
| Their is a living changing informal social bargain, unique to
| each project, along with licensing, economic and other
| concerns.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| Well, I'd say if you want users to _depend_ on your work,
| you 're voluntarily signing yourself up to endless
| maintenance for little reward. I look at it like this: I
| built something cool, if it's useful to you, use it. But if
| you come to depend on it, and doubly so for business use,
| maybe you should consider being prepared to maintain it
| yourself. Other people look at it differently, and if it's
| your goal for the world to depend on your work and you
| haven't set yourself up to benefit from that responsibility
| you take on yourself in a way that you like, then I don't
| really think it's a problem the rest of us have to solve.
|
| Is it unsustainable like the title of the article says? I
| suppose, but it's not some state of affairs that is
| unavoidable or that we are stuck with through no fault of
| our own. A guy wants people to depend on his work that he
| does for free, a company sees a core component of their
| business that they can get for free, a few years later the
| guy is upset that he is maintaining this thing everyone
| depends on and the company is scared their business will
| fall apart without him. They each got themselves there,
| it's a predictable state of affairs, the solutions for each
| party are very clear. As a developer though, the solution
| is what I've outlined: take the "no warranty of
| mechantibility or fitness for purpose" part of your license
| seriously and tell entitled people to solve their own
| problems.
| crotchfire wrote:
| > you should fix and share any problems you encounter as a
| token of gratitude.
|
| The whole point of the GPL is to change "should" into "must"
| for these fixes. That makes it a two-way street.
|
| The entitlement and ranting is a direct consequence of the
| recent GPL-hating campaign.
| hypfer wrote:
| IMO Posts like this always basically boil down to "Hey, I did
| follow every best practice and did everything as I was told and
| yet it's not working out like how it was promised"
|
| This is because the core premise is simply wrong. Sites such as
| opensource.guide are not written for you. They're written for
| people profiting from you thinking they're written for you. If
| you follow their guidance, you'll end up unhappy and writing
| posts like that.
|
| The only way to escape this is to ignore that con and instead
| pick a sustainable business model. That can mean not open-
| sourcing at all, but I'd wager that most of the time, it just
| means saying no, setting boundaries and knowing your worth + the
| value you provide.
| teddyh wrote:
| Open Source is a development process. It is not a business
| model.
| criddell wrote:
| I wonder if the promise of a couple hundred bucks would really be
| all that motivating at 11:43 pm, with your new baby sleeping
| nearby, after a full day working at your software engineering
| job?
|
| You have a new son and a partner that need a lot of you right
| now. Those PRs and bug reports can wait. The time you have all to
| yourself right now is extraordinarily rare. Use it for you.
|
| That said, I do agree with the premise of the post.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Given the current state of birth rates is that even a normal
| state for most developers how many developers have children or
| even desire children
| bluGill wrote:
| Probably a majority. There are some that have no kids, but
| birth rates are around 2 in the US, and 1.5 in europe. Some
| people have multiple kids, so we can't do math, but on
| average everyone has a kid anyway.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Not RMS!
|
| http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-
| vs-d...
| krapp wrote:
| RMS does desire children, just not in that particular way.
| yu3zhou4 wrote:
| I'm on the same boat, so I built a marketplace for devs to charge
| for our software. Blueprint here: https://github.com/poss-market
|
| Long story short: I recently put the marketplace down, because I
| lack business skills
|
| If any of you is able to help with business side of the project,
| please reach out - mail in my profile
| yu3zhou4 wrote:
| Let me just copy-paste it for easier access:
|
| - Your company's perspective: Pay for the software to receive
| reliable products from trusted vendors
|
| Business receives reliable open source software that is
| maintained on a daily basis, features are constantly developed
| and they receive a support from open source creators
|
| - Why?
|
| It's cheaper to pay a few (dozens / hundreds / thousands) bucks
| each year for a library, tool, component, etc instead of build
| it on your own, maintain, test, take care of security updates,
| do customer support
|
| - Yours (open source developer's) perspective: Get paid to
| build, maintain and support your software
|
| You as a developer make money by selling licenses to your open
| source software
|
| - Why not free open source?
|
| Because you still need a day job and do your open source after
| hours. Thousands (millions?) of companies make millions
| (billions?) dollars each year by incorporating your software in
| their products or using your software in their ecosystem, but
| you are left with $0 profit from it
|
| - But I want my open source to be available to regular people
| for free
|
| With poss market license it remains free for non-
| profit/personal/scientific users, if you choose to. It's just
| MIT License slightly modified
| anthk wrote:
| That non profit license it's a big turd. It's nonfree.
| Period.
| siva7 wrote:
| Are open source developers really motivated by money? Sometimes
| exposure is all they need
| apex_sloth wrote:
| Side note: donations are kind of difficult in a cooperate
| environment. Once I request that the department donates a modest
| amount to an OS project. We had to call it a 'license fee'
| internally. Paying it fine - donating is not :)
| cxr wrote:
| You, along with the original author, are selectively framing
| the issue. The original author's words:
|
| > This all boils down to a situation where you have many
| profit-generating companies using software that some programmer
| volunteered to write. That software contributes to that company
| making even more money. But the developer sees none
|
| Which developer? Because what I see going on matches what
| Stringer actually says earlier in the post: "There are lots of
| users, many in a corporate sense using my software to further
| progress their organization."
|
| So you have at least two persons here; there is no "the"
| developer.
|
| First, you have a company trying to make money. And then you
| have a developer trying to get money from their company (and
| not just that, but getting it, and generally trying to get
| _more_ ). Let's call this a type-1 developer. On top of that,
| you have a developer upstream writing the software in question
| that "contributes to that company making even more money".
| Let's call this a type-2 developer.
|
| What we're neglecting to acknowledge here, and what most
| conversations like these fail to acknowledge , is that it's not
| merely "the company" that is benefiting from the work of the
| upstream developer. It's the type-1 developer, too.
|
| If type-1 developers are effective at converting the labor from
| type-2 developers into personal enrichment, internal accolades
| from their employer, general career trajectory, &c, then type-1
| developers really ought to acknowledge their culpability in the
| system that leaves type-2 developers undercompensated. This
| doesn't really happen, though. Most developers with a type-1
| role wrt some money-earning scheme (i.e. the ones employed at a
| company) seem to treat their TCP, which is on average includes
| a salary alone that is well above the combined income of a
| typical _household_ , as a sacrosanct natural right that should
| not be examined at this level.
| Qem wrote:
| I wonder if, society-wide, the best way to allocate resources to
| free/open source software would be just reducing mandatory work
| hours. Say, if the average ~ 8h per day were reduced to 7h or 6h,
| how many of those freed millions of person-hours would be
| redirected to hobby software projects?
| johngossman wrote:
| You're suggesting we reduce the work day just for software
| engineers (many of whom probably work longer than 8 hours) but
| not other engineers, teachers, autoworkers? Or for everyone,
| just so people have more time to work on OSS? I'm all in favor
| of a shorter work week, but this seems a fringe motivation
| Qem wrote:
| Society-wide, for everyone. Most people would use those extra
| hours for things unrelated to software, like, spend more time
| with their children. But if even 0.1% of that goes to
| software, it still would be a huge amount of extra manpower.
| It's unfortunate despite all the productivity gains from
| technological advances in the last 60 years or so, the work
| week stayed the same size, roughly. Workers didn't earn a
| fair share of productivity gains.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I'd be pretty surprised if that increase averaged more than 15
| seconds per person per day and shocked if the increase was more
| than 3 minutes on average.
| Qem wrote:
| Python 3.11.6 (main, Oct 3 2023, 00:00:00) [GCC 13.2.1
| 20230728 (Red Hat 13.2.1-1)] on linux Type "help",
| "copyright", "credits" or "license()" for more information.
| >>> population_base = [100_000_000, 1_000_000_000,
| 8_000_000_000] >>> for population in population_base:
| ... print('15s/day for',population, 'people equals:',
| round((15*population)/3600), 'man-hours/day') ...
| ... 15s/day for 100000000 people equals: 416667
| man-hours/day 15s/day for 1000000000 people equals:
| 4166667 man-hours/day 15s/day for 8000000000 people
| equals: 33333333 man-hours/day
| sokoloff wrote:
| Now compare that to the total productivity loss (using
| whatever marginal efficiency deflator you think is
| reasonable).
|
| If you're trying to get shorter workdays, go for that.
|
| If you're trying to get more open source labor, go for
| that.
|
| Arguing that the best way to target the second is via the
| first seems tenuous _at best_.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I guess that means I'm not the only person to use a repl
| for calculations. Neat!
|
| (Though this has evolved a bit for me, in order of
| tidiness/laziness : repl -> jupyter -> GPT+ data analysis)
| benj111 wrote:
| I'd like to see some form system where you keep track of what you
| actually use. Apportion money appropriately and you can make an
| annual / monthly / weekly payment and it gets distributed in a
| somewhat sensible way.
|
| Yes there's edge cases, but at the moment there isn't really a
| good way to spread my money around.
| csneeky wrote:
| Most complex, unique, value producing things have a path to
| monetization for the builder of the thing. If the money isn't
| there for the builder they are either not leveraging their
| relationship to the thing correctly, or the thing does not have
| the value the builder may think it has.
| seydor wrote:
| > have a path to monetization for the builder
|
| The existence of the path to monetization is entirely outside
| their control though. Millions of people make viral videos,
| very few have benefited from it. The financial system
| disincentivizes or outright bans open-product monetization.
| johngossman wrote:
| The many startups built around OSS projects such as Mongo,
| Kafka, Spark, and Linux seem to have found a way.
| redwood wrote:
| There's a longer list of companies that have been basically
| out-competed and strip mined by the hyperscalers. But
| presumably the poster here is referring more to a long tail
| of small to medium sized projects that are important to the
| community at large but harder to monetize then these big
| high gravity projects that you mentioned
| seydor wrote:
| very few, one would call them exceptions to the rule
| kawhah wrote:
| > Most complex, unique, value producing things have a path to
| monetization for the builder of the thing.
|
| I don't think this is true. You need an extra condition 'that
| few people want to produce'.
|
| There is lots of good free art. Why? Because lots of people
| want to be artists and make art. There is tons of good free
| writing. Why? Because lots of people want to write. There is
| masses of good free music. Why? Because many, many people enjoy
| making music.
|
| There aren't people who collect garbage, clean toilets, dig
| holes in the ground, or work in oil refineries for free. But
| there are people publishing science, doing research, writing
| philosophy, producing erotic material, designing things,
| putting on theatre, producing textbooks and teaching people
| things, making clothes, thinking of jokes, answering questions,
| providing peer support to addicts, playing music, making games,
| making animations, all without monetary compensation. This is
| because the people doing these things want to do them.
|
| This isn't a failure of our economic system. It's a great thing
| - it makes the products better, the producers happier (provided
| they have the economic freedom to spend time on these projects)
| and the consumers better off.
|
| First of all, it's obvious that in _the vast majority of cases_
| , writing free software falls into the 'amateur art' category
| not the 'dirty, boring and necessary job' category. Many, many
| people enjoy the time spent on writing and maintaining
| software, are motivated to solve their and other people's
| problems, and take pride in doing so well. You might expect
| that only games, intellectual toys or fanciful projects would
| motivate people to work on them in their free time. The reality
| is that software projects which could be seen as dry and boring
| to non-technical people (OS kernel design, file transfer
| protocols, laptop power management support, database and
| webserver stability, document rendering) attract many very
| talented people to work on them.
|
| Secondly, if we think that there's some deep inequality or
| instability in our society because (for example) critical
| Internet infrastructure depends on hobbyists and volunteers,
| doesn't it make more sense to try and improve the conditions
| for hobbyists and volunteers, and make it possible for there to
| be more of them? The alternative put forward seems to be to
| turn them into more of the people who both don't enjoy the time
| spent on what they do, nor produce the best product that they
| can.
| xoac wrote:
| IMO a huge problem is that extremely permissive licenses have
| totally devalued software development as the software you release
| gives everyone the opportunity to infinitely exploit it. What did
| people think was going to happen?
|
| I find it especially funny when people complain "that they can't
| use the software 'at work'" when you release something as GPL.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > the software you release gives everyone the opportunity to
| infinitely exploit it
|
| How is that exploitation if you write some software for
| yourself, think it's useful for others, release it and then
| someone else uses it? If the software wasn't released, then
| others may have the same need and thus similar software may be
| written multiple times in a huge waste of time and effort.
|
| To my mind, open source software is returning to the basics of
| human society - helping each other where we can. If you only
| ever do things with the intention of getting paid to do them,
| then you live a sad life.
| xoac wrote:
| Ok I make a really nice server and give it away for free.
| Some guy making 300k a year uses it to build something else
| and gets a promotion so now he makes 400k a year and his
| company is now making millions. They've exploited my freely
| available software to acheive this goal. Sure they could have
| _invested_ to build it again (perhaps by paying me to build
| it? or by licensing my software from me?) but instead they
| get this at the cost of 0 and the result that they make is
| under no obligation to be free. This is a problem because
| when you _assume_ that it 's free you whole business model is
| based around exploiting the free to build the proprietary.
| This is the business model of almost every software company
| in operation and why the OS authors are broke and the
| software is devalued. A lot of the times if you're working at
| one of these companies that operate under this business model
| you are even discouraged from writing anything serious
| yourself or to do "overengineering". That's because the
| overengineering is being done by unpaid open source
| contributors.
|
| > To my mind, open source software is returning to the basics
| of human society - helping each other where we can. If you
| only ever do things with the intention of getting paid to do
| them, then you live a sad life.
|
| This honestly is horseshit because we wouldn't have this
| conversation if the profit of off open source was being
| distributed in any way fairly (or to put it patronisingly:
| used to help the contributors). By releasing your software
| under a license that permits this type of exploatation you
| are putting yourself in a precarious position of being at the
| mercy of whoever exploits it for commercial gain.
|
| So as I am not misunderstood, I am not against open source in
| general or say GPL, but against using licenses like MIT/BSD
| by default.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I agree that commercialising open source software can be
| exploitative and obviously, that why the GPL was thought
| necessary to try to stop that kind of behaviour (or at
| least ensure that the resultant code was also open source).
|
| But with non-commercial usage, I don't see it as exploiting
| the author as they wanted to write it for their own reasons
| and had no interest in commercialising it or believed it to
| be non-viable. If someone releases under MIT/BSD, then
| they're pretty much saying "here's the code, do whatever
| you want with it", so I don't see a problem with companies
| using it.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| There isn't a problem with companies using software
| licensed under the MIT. There's a problem with the
| developer who made it: they're devaluing software as a
| whole. If companies get into the habit of receiving
| software for free, without any limitations, they value
| software as a whole less.
|
| In contrast, a good, upstanding developer publishing
| under the GPL/LGPL/AGPL doesn't create the same negative
| externality: they establish that the cost of using open
| source software is contributing to open source software.
| Which should be the cost of open source software. Want
| functionality added to a project? Add it yourself, or
| hire somebody to add it, and then share the result
| openly. The original person who wrote the code is a
| pretty compelling candidate for that contract, but far
| from the only person available.
| doxeddaily wrote:
| >nd why the OS authors are broke
|
| OS authors aren't broke. In fact the guys from Microsoft
| are some of the richest dudes in the world. Maybe OS
| authors that give away their stuff for free are broke?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Completely agree. The only licenses that make any sort of sense
| are AGPLv3 and proprietary all rights reserved. Permissive can
| easily end up being just free labor for trillion dollar
| corporations.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The article doesn't make any argument why the current situation
| is unsustainable - it does point out some problems, but as far as
| we can see, there's no reason why current situation, with all its
| drawbacks and limitations, couldn't go on for ever, i.e. be
| sustainably sustained.
|
| Some contributors will quit, but that doesn't imply that the
| system is unsustainable, as long as some more people will
| temporarily make some contributions, and we're not seeing an
| imminent collapse where people will stop scratching their itches
| and publishing the resulting code as open source.
| boxed wrote:
| 100% agreed. I've had my response to this sitting in my drafts
| folder for years now. Finally published it now after reading
| this thing.
|
| https://kodare.net/2023/11/17/open_source_could_be_better.ht...
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38302122)
| teddyh wrote:
| Your web site said "[CLAPPING HANDS SIGN] 3 claps". Since I
| didn't know what that meant, I clicked on it. It changed to
| say "[CLAPPING HANDS SIGN] 4 claps". Now I feel like the
| person in that old joke about someone standing by a well or a
| cliff, repeating a number out loud.
| komali2 wrote:
| I agree, however, compensation in general is reaching a point
| where rational value calculations are fraying. I can't explain
| why an engineer, though well paid, is making .01% of the CEO's
| salary, nor can I explain why an engineer doing the same work but
| in the Philippines is making 40% of the salary of the one in the
| USA.
|
| I was very inspired by "Walkaway" by Cory Doctorow. It involves a
| world where people detach themselves from "Default" (global
| capitalist society) by living in abandoned towns, building the
| tooling they need to re-establish a modern quality of life. He
| pulled a great deal on the open source movement in his
| speculations of how this might look. What I didn't realize at the
| time is it is essentially an anarchist proposition of community
| self-reliance. In the novel, there's no point in seeking
| compensation for your work, because your basic needs are already
| met by a share-and-share-alike society, and therefore everything
| you do fulfills either a very clear personal or community need
| (building a tractor, a house, software to manage a farm, a public
| spa, or repair schedules), or, is purely for pleasure.
|
| My friend that's sticking it out in the USA is doing the
| "correct" path for an engineer: First gig in our hometown,
| transitioned to NYC, did a 4 year tour there saving a couple
| hundred K, house upstate, still working and saving for retirement
| but also farming ants and doing his other odd projects for his
| pleasure. In a recent conversation he mentioned frustration at
| the poor retirement opportunities for most of our generation. You
| gamble your life saving's on the stock market, or, do something
| that doesn't really benefit the world like flipping properties,
| if you can afford it. If your interest is self fulfillment,
| community fulfillment, and financial fulfillment as we grow
| older, that doesn't really exist, at least not in any combination
| that we've been able to figure out. He's thinking about some kind
| of ethical business venture, or maybe just a fun thing he can
| kick off that he can hire his non-engineering friends into like a
| cute little sandwich shop or something, but as he enters that
| world he's realizing all his competition is hyper-capitalized
| businesses or people that he can't possibly compete with if he
| doesn't do the same shit they're doing, such as filling their
| kitchens with undocumented immigrants. Basically, if he wants to
| do good and get paid for it, the opportunities just don't seem to
| be there.
|
| So therefore, long term what I want to strive for as I build out
| open source software is actions that "break us out of the box." I
| and my like minded friends don't really think capitalism is going
| to cut it in terms of actually rewarding with money our efforts
| to do good in the world; after all, an investment banker makes
| more than a teacher and firefighter combined, and does
| functionally nothing useful. Therefore I'm interested in building
| things that free people from a financial burden. Every little
| financial burden I can free people from is a success. I love when
| I read stories about people building out little GPT programs that
| can automatically negotiate parking bills or whatever. Or scan
| your email to automatically apply for rebates and coupons. Or,
| outside of actual coding, helping people find out that their
| library has a streaming app they can use for free, so they don't
| have to pay netflix anymore. Or helping people turn their lawns
| into gardens, to reduce their food bills.
|
| From a software standpoint, the "Awesome Selfhosted" project is
| very inspiring in this vein: https://github.com/awesome-
| selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted Lots of tools that many people pay
| for that you can instead deploy on your own and use for free in a
| way you control.
|
| That's the kind of open source software I want to build. Trying
| to get paid to build FOSS is a distraction, instead I want to
| build things that will help people not have to pay for other
| stuff. I make plenty of money in my day job, I'm good on that
| front. Pipe dream, we do enough of it, and the question of
| "getting paid" becomes moot.
|
| Even in this thread we can see the toxicity around trying to get
| paid to do good in the world. "What, you did something good for
| free and expected to get paid for it, what are you, an entitled
| moron?" vs "FOSS software is the backbone of your organization,
| if you don't pay for it, you are evil." I think it's just so
| frustrating how twisted up things are. Normally you get paid to
| do engineering, but if you build something genuinely useful for
| people, now you don't get paid, but somehow you're an asshole for
| asking to get paid, and also you're naive for thinking any
| organization would ever pay for something they don't have to pay
| for... what a mess. What a rats nest of competing values and
| accusations. It's not worth trying to fit what imo often inspires
| FOSS, namely "fixing a problem in our society," into the
| capitalist mode of thinking, "and getting rewarded for it." If
| you want to fix things in society, build FOSS, if you want to get
| rich, take contracts, charge your clients 200/hr for engineering
| time, put Indian engineers on it, and pay them 10/hr. There, now
| you're rich. So what?
|
| Edit: on reflection I think basically our efforts to do good for
| people by writing foss will simply be exploited for profit by
| corporations, so better to walk into this understanding that, and
| for those that aren't happy with that state of affairs, try
| writing foss that can help other people escape these kinds of
| exploitation.
| siva7 wrote:
| >> I can't explain why an engineer, though well paid, is making
| .01% of the CEO's salary, nor can I explain why an engineer
| doing the same work but in the Philippines is making 40% of the
| salary of the one in the USA.
|
| That's economics 101 and not the problem of a particular
| profession
| komali2 wrote:
| Sure but it makes it a lot harder to figure out how much
| someone "deserves" for writing a FOSS project.
| disintegore wrote:
| Fantastic post. Your logic is a perfectly hermetic circle.
|
| I'm sure the OP can competently explain all of these things.
| What they can't do is justify them, or reconcile them with
| the principles that their society has instilled in them.
| okraigher wrote:
| I think an open source compensation system could work similar to
| how artists are payed when their song is played on the radio.
|
| Radio stations in Sweden pay a fee to an organisation which
| distributes the money to artists in proportion to the amount of
| playtime.
|
| Imagine a new type of open source license that mandated paying a
| membership fee to a global foundation to use the code
| commercially. Non-commersial use would still be free.
|
| Companies would have to pay royalty to this organisation in
| proportion to their size or some other metric. The organisation
| would distribute the money to projects according to some usage
| criteria such a download count or similar.
|
| For it to work there would have to be one or very few such
| organizations to that it is easy for the companies to handle. It
| should also not be very expensive for the companies. But even if
| it gets every company to contribute just a few thousands to open
| source it would still inject a lot more money into the system.
| johngossman wrote:
| There is a similar debate going on among musicians about how
| very few are compensated much if at all while a few at the top
| get extremely rich.
| cxr wrote:
| > Imagine a new type of open source license that mandated
| paying a membership fee to a global foundation to use the code
| commercially.
|
| That would by definition not be open source.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| This is the most underrated comment in this whole thread.
| okraigher wrote:
| I would not care so much about the definition of open source.
|
| My ideal scenario is that code is open, can be improved and
| reused among commercial and non-commercial endeavors. I also
| would like that some of the value created by users of the
| open code flows back to the creators.
|
| Individual commercial licenses do not create this ideal as
| they are monolithic and does not reflect that open source is
| a network of many dependencies.
|
| Companies would be willing to pay for open source but they do
| not want to manage each node in their dependency graph
| individually. Thus the need for some centralized tax and
| redistribution system.
| tzs wrote:
| Such a system has been proposed for copyrighted works in
| general. The general idea is that you change copyright law so
| that making copies does not require permission of the copyright
| holder, but you also put a tax on something that correlates
| somewhat with copying. The government would then distribute
| that tax money to copyright owners in some manner dependent on
| how much their work was copied.
|
| Even Stallman has suggested such a system [1], with the amount
| a given copyright owner gets for a work being proportional to
| the cube root of how much it is copied.
|
| A common suggestion for the tax is a tax on internet access.
|
| For entertainment such as movies and music and games that could
| probably work well. Probably also for closed source software.
| For open source software it might be too difficult to figure
| out how to allocate the money.
|
| [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-
| community.en...
| okraigher wrote:
| Yes I think it needs to be centralized and aggregated.
|
| I am sure many companies realize that they gain value from
| open source. Thus they are willing to pay something. However
| they do not want to handle transactions with every transitive
| dependency they use. Just like a radio station doesnt want a
| contract with every artist. This is why isolated commersial
| licenses wouldnt work for anything but the very largest
| projecys.
| marviel wrote:
| > Quick, name all the dependencies of Kubernetes. You can't, and
| I can't either. There's just too many. It shouldn't be only end
| user facing products that get appropriate compensation. It should
| be these products that send a portion of their contributions
| (money and developer time) down to these dependencies in a big
| happy tree of contributions.
|
| Thought this was a good quote to pull.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| The issue isn't lack of compensation necessarily, it's lack of
| societal support.
|
| Here in America I cannot work on OSS because if I tried to make
| that my main form of contribution, I would not survive due to
| healthcare costs, living costs etc. Companies being made to pay
| more or subsidize OSS I believe would have a detrimental effect
| on the system, because then it warps OSS to serve the desires of
| big companies in order for its contributors to survive.
|
| The actual solution to this problem would be things like
| socialized healthcare detached from work. This isn't to say I
| think companies shouldn't pay for OSS (they absolutely should be
| funding and contributing to work that underpins their software)
| but rather that we need to reduce the reliance on corporate
| funding for people to be full time contributors.
| harha_ wrote:
| I develop some open source software that I created. It's not very
| popular, maybe few use cases currently + my services hosted by
| me. But I still have an userbase and that userbase demands
| features from me. I tell them that the source code is open, you
| are free to create pull requests for me to review, but 95% of
| these people are no developers so they cannot do that. So now I
| have users who I care about, but who also demand me to develop
| the systems further. I don't know, I have mixed feelings about
| this situation, but in the end I drove myself in this dead-end,
| so it's my fault.
| hgs3 wrote:
| Charge a consulting fee to implement those new features? If a
| single user cannot afford it, then start a crowd funding
| campaign. If the crowd funding campaign fails, then say there
| wasn't enough interest. Let your users vote with their wallet.
| halukakin wrote:
| I think there should be some serious changes about this. Github
| already knows which software packages a company uses. They could
| facilitate this. For example if the OSS maintainer asks for it,
| any company more than say three members should pay a monthly fee
| per package. Even 1 USD per package per month would make a huge
| difference for OSS. So if your javascript package.json has 20
| dependencies, and you are actively developing, every month you
| should expect to pay 20USDfor that package.json.
|
| I know the math above can be challenged from multiple aspects.
| But we need to start from somewhere.
| balder1991 wrote:
| Then suddenly a company paying more will feel like their
| demands are worth more than random Joey's demands, and soon the
| backlog of the project is the company's backlog and the
| maintainer will be treated as an employee with nonsensical
| deadlines and fixed long hours.
| cxr wrote:
| > 1 USD per package per month would make a huge difference for
| OSS. So if your javascript package.json has 20 dependencies,
| and you are actively developing, every month you should expect
| to pay 20USD
|
| The proliferation of tiny NPM packages is bad enough already.
| It will only be made worse by the cobra effect.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Once you make a system like that distributing money, it becomes
| a game and people start exploiting it, and it all turns to
| crap.
| crabbone wrote:
| I don't agree with the author on how financial compensation
| should be structured or where does it have to come from.
|
| My idea about what's currently in open-source domain is that it
| can be split into two categories: infrastructure projects that
| enable users to use their computers at the basic level, enable
| networking communication and maintain state-provided services
| land in "category A", while "category B" can be roughly described
| as interesting hobbies, leisure, entertainment etc.
|
| What needs to happen, in my mind is that we need (international)
| organizations like eg. WHO to take care of the "category A"
| projects, where governments would have to allocate resources to
| finance and oversee these projects. Much in the same way how
| governments spend money on postal service or regulate / oversee
| banking. So, projects like Linux or OpenStack need to be under
| such international umbrella. This would require a bureaucratic
| process of examining such projects, estimating their usefulness,
| budgeting them etc.
|
| On the other hand, non-essential projects, or projects that
| explicitly don't want government oversight / intervention could
| still work on the currently employed scheme: donations,
| sponsorship, volunteering.
|
| In other words, I believe that some people working on open-source
| projects today ought to be paid. We just need a framework which
| establishes how much and how many such people can be employed for
| how long etc. It's prudent to make them (international)
| government employees to avoid playing into interests of sponsors
| who might not act in the interest of anyone but themselves.
|
| For me, this would also solve a situation whereas employees of
| private companies are told / paid to work with open-source
| technology, but are powerless against the maintainers of such
| technology, while having no plausible alternatives. A lot of such
| projects succeed based solely on the good will of the open-source
| maintainers, but some fail due to the lack of, or deliver lower
| quality products. Having essential services covered by a
| government entity, and, by extension, being open to citizen
| complaints and wishes would make it possible to fight back
| against maintainers lacking the said good will.
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| Open source and "give me money" are the antithesis of each other.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| I really don't get it. People build open source projects because
| it gives them unlimited freedom to build what they want. Open
| source was never about money. If you care about that there's far
| easier ways to get paid (and disclaimer: they're usually boring
| AF.)
|
| You don't have to try turn every project into a business...
| There's also a pretty big catch-22 here in that most of these
| projects are only widely useful precisely because they are free.
| With that came the users, the plugins, bug fixes, and features.
| Take that away and many projects will have never became popular
| and then you'll have solved the issue of not being paid for your
| work (because no users will exist to buy your software.)
| realPubkey wrote:
| Just close the issue section. Then you only have to review the
| PRs where CI is green.
| ivars wrote:
| Do people donate more if they see that the app is developed by a
| lone-wolf developer rather than a team?
| donatj wrote:
| I have never understood this "I have an open source project and
| it eats all of my time, and I must scream".
|
| Just stop. It's a hobby. As in life in general, don't have
| hobbies you don't enjoy. That's weird. Give your project to
| someone else - if this is you, skip to the bottom for my advice
| on how to do this.
|
| I maintain a couple popular open source libraries, and a ton of
| unpopular libraries. At least two of the popular ones are way
| more popular than this guy says his is. For the most part they
| maintain themselves via pull requests. A good test suite, static
| analyzer and code standards validator go a long way towards
| making this possible with far less intervention. If you don't
| have those, that is where you should put your time.
|
| When someone does open an issue, you look at it for 2 seconds,
| make a judgment call. Either label it wontfix, or ask them
| directly if they think they can handle fixing it.
|
| If they can't fix it, you again make a judgment call about if
| it's worth your time or if you want to slap "Help Wanted" on it.
| And that's it, go eat dinner with your family. That's all you
| needed to do. Takes 30 seconds.
|
| Once in a blue moon there's a hotfix that demands immediate
| attention, but it should be rare if you're building good
| software. If it's not rare, I'm sorry, I have bad news. Every
| once in a while a platform change requires some refactoring, but
| even that will often get PR'd by someone in the community who
| enjoys living on the edge.
|
| At the end of the day, if you don't enjoy it, don't do it. If the
| library is truly popular just hand the reigns off to someone
| else. Forcefully if need be.
|
| And don't just post a vague "maintainers wanted" somewhere. No
| one will see it. Scan your contributions for quality PRs and
| actually reach out to those people who are clearly invested in
| your code enough to understand how it works.
|
| One of the projects I maintain, the original author literally
| just threw maintainer rights at me after having opened a handful
| of quality PRs myself. Didn't even ask. It worked :shrug: but
| YMMV.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| > Just stop. It's a hobby.
|
| But why should they, if they can turn their hobby into a job --
| there are many very valuable companies that have been built on
| top of open source projects.
|
| I think donations is a bad way to handle it though. If you
| don't want to do the full SaaS model, another tried and true
| way is consulting and training.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| "Unsustainable" might not be the exact right word for it. I mean,
| it's software - if you can compile it, and run it, it's not like
| age will actively deteriorate it like a physical good. (Bit rot
| is definitely a concern, but far less of one than e.g. salt
| corrosion.)
| krapp wrote:
| I'll tell you what so many tech bros tell artists upset about AI
| - you should be working for passion and love of the craft,
| instead of profit. Compensation only corrupts the dignity of the
| soul and results in terrible software, and programmers who only
| care about the paycheck.
|
| Maybe you can find a second job, and focus on creating software
| as a hobby.
| Certhas wrote:
| This is essentially realizing that free markets don't pay
| proportionally to value created, but according to the marginal
| value created by paying more.
|
| Compensation according to value created is fair. It's a goal we
| should strive for, but it requires either not going through free
| markets, or it requires empowering market participants to
| generate fairer outcomes.
|
| This is pure fantasy, for many reasons: But if there was a union
| of OSS developers that would negotiate corporate open source
| users contribution to open source, and that would have the power
| to withhold license rights, compensation would probably be fairer
| overall.
|
| Essentially a code collective rather than decentral anything goes
| open source ala GPL. I wonder if that would be attractive to some
| open source developers?
|
| I think there sometimes is a strong aversion to get organized. "I
| just want to code!". But the idea that we can do without actively
| organizing society is naive, and if the outcomes don't suite us
| it's because those that actively organize (e.g. corporations)
| hold the power to shape the world in their interests.
| Galanwe wrote:
| Unfortunately, a system can be individually unsustainable while
| being globally sustainable.
|
| That is, maintainer burnout rate can be high, but a continuous
| influx of new maintainers could compensate.
|
| In fact, a lot of industries work like that, and numerous
| examples regularly appear on HN. Video game companies are
| notoriously full of super bright young developers, which are
| squeezed until burnout, just to be replaced by a new ones.
|
| As for the compensation bit, although I agree with the principle,
| I tend to disagree that it would solve the problem as a whole.
| Sure, some maintainers would be more willing to spend time on
| their OSS projects if they were paid, some might even quit their
| job and work full time on their OSS. But my personal experience
| is that money is but a short term replacement for passion. Once
| you reach the point where you're not willingly working on a
| project, additional money can give you a boost of motivation, but
| ultimately you will tend to procrastinate to work on it, until
| you just won't be able to force yourself to touch it.
| pharmakom wrote:
| > Unfortunately, a system can be individually unsustainable
| while being globally sustainable.
|
| Wow this is such a great description of the arts, fashion,
| Hollywood, game development, startups (?), ...
| hyggetrold wrote:
| It shows that the sustainability is not intended for humans,
| but for the entity they serve. When we talk about things
| being "sustainable" it's sustainable for the business, not
| for the people working in it.
| psini wrote:
| Don't know of many unsustainable endeavors that last for over 30
| years with no sign of stopping
| elforce002 wrote:
| My company uses lots of libraries from different sources. They
| are considering on allocating money for most of them. We'll start
| small but the idea is to keep funding those projects since we use
| them as part of our core products. We hope others step up too.
| Devasta wrote:
| This is why everyone should switch to AGPL3.
|
| You can use MIT/BSD/Apache/GPL3 dependencies without issue; never
| need to worry about derivative works or anything like that, just
| set it and forget it, and because corporations avoid you like the
| plague you can code away without a care in the world for
| backwards compatibility.
|
| The BSD/MIT license is free as in free tech support, always has
| been.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| "It's too hard for dev teams to fund open source": yes, it is;
| but we're not going to fix that by giving them the code for
| free. If businesses really want something, they'll pay. What's
| missing are better ways for commercial entities-and dev teams
| therein- to monetarily support devs when they need to use a
| licence for commercial purposes because clearly the current
| parasitic economic model isn't working.
| sevagh wrote:
| >free tech support
|
| Like, what, open-source police are going to arrest you for not
| addressing support questions?
|
| MIT/BSD is "free as in the maintainer is free to ignore any and
| all tech support requests."
| fredgrott wrote:
| With eGames and other subscriber things taking off, could this be
| applied to come up with a better open source compensation model?
| sirsuki wrote:
| I'm curious if it makes sense to have a distinction between
| source code existing for the purpose of discovery versus software
| for fitness of purpose. In other words this is similar to the
| Cathedral and the Bazaar as OSS used as a tool by users compared
| to the Bazaar where the focus is on displaying the source code.
| Much of my interest in contributing to OSS is more about offering
| examples and ideas via source code and not if the utility of the
| software fits specific users' purposes.
| blackoil wrote:
| From all the discussion here and previous it seems OSS is
| unsustainable.
|
| People pay for software, notably Office, IntelliJ, OS, Adobe,
| video games, enterprise s/w and many more. For normal consumer
| products things are simple you pay some money for product and can
| have simple expectations that s/w will work. Every once a decade
| the direction a s/w takes major change, and you have to decide if
| you want to stay with it or move to something else.
|
| Now with OSS both sides expectations have become implicit and
| ambiguous. In letter they come with no warranty but in spirit it
| does. No sane person would depend on database/compiler which can
| stop working or won't fix bugs without recourse. It may be OSS
| but I don't have time/skills to fix myself, so implicit
| understanding is that community at large will fix it.
|
| Next is the issue of payment to the community. how much should be
| the payment, who should be paying and should be paid? No payment
| was discussed up-front, but it is expected implicitly. Should I
| review all s/w I use to understand the payment I should have been
| making. Maybe I should stick to only commercial s/w as
| expectation of payment is clear or maybe s/w being free but
| created by large corporates are ok as no payment is expected. Is
| making s/w in NodeJS / Python risky, as I don't know if community
| is paying for all the libraries I am using and how much I should
| be paying?
| jussij wrote:
| I think one of the side effects of Open Source has been the
| devaluation of source code. Many decades ago, Microsoft destroyed
| the IBM PC by licensing their source code to other hardware
| manufacturers. Not only did that destroyed the power of IBM
| hardware, but it also allowed smaller hardware players like Dell
| to enter the hardware market and defeat hardware giants like IBM.
| Move on to the present day and software is no longer the king it
| once was, only because the major players like Microsoft, Google,
| IBM, Amazon etc now all tend to use the same Open Source
| software. However, they now run that common code on proprietary
| hardware systems meaning we have come full circle where hardware
| is once again the king of the castle, and the real money is the
| hardware and not the software. And the real problem is, unlike
| earlier times when a small players like Dell could take on
| massive players like IBM, these days with hardware once again
| king, it now requires high levels of capital to compete.
| jddj wrote:
| I support some open source software.
|
| It's a bit annoying as from an accounting point of view I'd
| rather they just invoiced me for a service.
| alias_neo wrote:
| I don't know if this is the author's first child, but I'm going
| to assume for now that it is.
|
| As a similar sort of person, now on my second child, with the
| first now 4yo, my advice is this;
|
| Focus on yourself and your family. Get that rest, when the baby
| is sleeping, get some sleep, it gets harder before it gets
| easier.
|
| Presumably paternity has finished now, and your partner (again
| I'm going to make an assumption) may be able to do much of the
| heavy lifted on maternity, but that'll end; at that point you'll
| both be working, you'll both have a massive sleep deficit, and in
| all likelihood (in my experience) you'll have a ~1yo who doesn't
| sleep through the night yet.
|
| There were times where it got really difficult for me, and the
| passion projects became a source of depression because family
| life just didn't allow them to happen. Different people work
| differently, but for me, it took a while for me to realise that
| my priorities have changed, looking after and enjoying my life
| and my family became passion projects of a significantly higher
| priority than anything I build in software or hardware. The time
| will come (I assume, too early yet) when my children can take
| part in those with me.
|
| The projects people are using to keep their companies running, on
| the back of your work, without paying for it, fuck them, let them
| be someone else's problem for a while.
| Communitivity wrote:
| This is a complicated problem I see pop up on HN every once in a
| while, in different forms. I think there is neither an easy
| solution, nor a simple one.
|
| Each culture is different, but many people now see 'free' and
| don't think of how that product is getting created.
|
| For Open Source the problem is even worse. As a project becomes
| more popular there are more demands on a maintainer's time, which
| is in short supply for most good senior devs. They have a
| demanding job, they have a wife, they have children, they have
| other family, they have friends, they have their own self-
| learning. This doesn't count the lucky ones whose employers pay
| them to work on Open Source software. Once a FOSS project gets to
| a certain adoption level it becomes a supply & demand problem
| where the demand quickly outstrips the supply.
|
| How do we fix this? Well, we can either reduce the demand (PRs,
| issues, etc on a single project) or increase the supply (hours of
| dev time).
|
| One way of reducing the demand is to have many projects that do
| similar small things, splitting users across the ecosystem. The
| NodeJS NPM system is like that. I think that leads to problems
| with reliability, technology selection choices, and vulnerability
| finding/fixing. Then again, NodeJS is still going strong.
|
| Increasing the supply from one person is hard. For most the
| supply spent on personal relationships (family, friends) should
| not change, except to go up. That leaves the supply spent on
| work. This is a hard problem too. Most devs work a minimum of a
| 40 hour week. The only possibilities are going freelance, so you
| can choose your own hours if you can financially justify it (many
| freelancers work more than a 40 hr week though), or going part-
| time (which is not an option for many). Let's say a senior
| engineer makes $160k salary (not looking at options, etc in this
| math). For him to go freelance he would need to cover family
| health insurance and life insurance, say $2000 per month, $24k
| total [1]. Taxes will be around $60k [2]. These are both much
| more than he'd pay working for a company. To get the same
| spending power freelance as he did at a company, he's going to
| need to make about 40% more (16% for FICA taxes, 24% for
| insurance), or around $200k. That's not doable from donations,
| for any other than a select few maybe.
|
| What about around half? He can make $100k from freelancing, $104k
| from Open Source donations. For Patreon the average backer
| pledges $6 per month [3], or $1.50 per week. You'd also need to
| figure out what pledger rewards were. You would need around 1800
| backers to do that. As a project rises in popularity you will
| also have an opportunity to get a co-maintainer or two who helps
| oversee PRs, etc. The pledges should be split among the co-
| maintainers, which means more pledges needed. The co-maintainers
| can also start to have some of their freelancing be consulting on
| using the project. JBoss is a great example of that, so are a
| number of other projects. When you get to enough consulting on
| it, with 2-4 other maintainers, you might save each other costs
| by incorporating as an S-Corp.
|
| Ok, so if that works, why isn't everyone doing it?
|
| There are a number of reasons.
|
| First, security & stability. Some people need the stability,
| structure, and security that comes from working in a company.
| Freelancing is a lot of work, across a diverse set of skills, and
| there are no guarantees of a next paycheck. You might make $10k
| one month and $1k the next (an outlier, but it happens). So you
| have to be very budgeted, with a nice safety net in your account
| for dry spells.
|
| Next, skill set & capabilities. Some people just are not good at
| marketing, or working with people. I think you cannot be
| successful in freelancing without having some skill at marketing
| and at working with people. I also think you can't really be
| successful as a software engineer without those skills either,but
| that's a different topic.
|
| Finally, risk. I touched on this in the first point above, but
| it's worth touching on again. Freelancing is high risk. Your work
| could hit a dry spell. You could get sued (you did get liability
| insurance right?). Some people, or their family, find it
| unhealthy to have to deal with that level of risk.
|
| Are there other solutions? Probably. Better ones? Possibly. Dev
| collectives, bounties, FOSS organization grants, FOSS
| organization patronage (Google Summer of Code is an example) are
| all other ideas that come to mind.
|
| As always, I am a dev - I am neither a lawyer, nor an accountant,
| so do not take the above as legal or financial advice.
|
| 1. https://www.ramseysolutions.com/insurance/how-much-does-
| heal....
|
| 2. https://www.quora.com/If-a-professional-freelancer-were-
| to-m...
|
| 3. https://www.crowdcrux.com/patreon-statistics-and-
| demographic....
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| It's really interesting to me how the vibes have shifted against
| open source in recent years. I remember when open source came
| out, it seemed like an implicit critique of proprietary software
| as stuffy and corporate. But proprietary software has an
| advantage: The devs get paid.
|
| If you want to get paid for your work, why are you choosing to
| give it away for free? I'm not judging, I'm genuinely curious.
| Are there any open source boosters left, and if so how would they
| make the case for open source at this point?
|
| Maybe what's needed is a "for-profit open source" license, where
| the code is free for anyone to read, but it's illegal to use for
| commercial purposes without paying. I'm guessing this approach is
| already being explored?
| pharmakom wrote:
| I do free open-source work because I want to reshape the world,
| and this is somewhere I have leverage. If I was paid to do the
| work, then I would have to deliver what the customer wants,
| which is not always aligned with how I see things.
|
| It's pure ego, but I hope it benefits the world too :)
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Thanks for replying. Yeah that seems like a decent model --
| it starts as a passion project, then acquires users, then the
| dev stops having as much fun and starts feeling a sense of
| responsibility.
|
| One solution is to announce that you're abandoning the
| project and suggest that its users make a plan to fork it /
| take over maintenance. Instead of adding a social norm that
| open source devs should get paid, we could drop the norm that
| open source devs should feel obligated to maintain projects
| for free. Maybe every README could have info about the
| primary maintainers and how enthusiastic they think they're
| going to be about the project going forward, so people can
| make informed technology choices. That way no one complains
| about a bait and switch.
|
| Another idea is for the dev to respond to issues on Github by
| saying things like "I can fix this if you pay $X"
| pharmakom wrote:
| Another approach might be for employers to allocate 20% of
| employee time to open-source work.
|
| Benefits:
|
| - recruit high quality developers
|
| - up-skill existing developers
|
| - devs will sometimes fix things that the company is using
| krapp wrote:
| >Maybe what's needed is a "for-profit open source" license,
| where the code is free for anyone to read, but it's illegal to
| use for commercial purposes without paying. I'm guessing this
| approach is already being explored?
|
| Nonfree and proprietary licenses have always been an option.
| The problem is developers want the convenience that FOSS
| culture provides without actually making the sacrifice of
| putting end-user rights before their own profit. Coding
| (specifically web dev) has turned into a money train and FOSS
| devs want on board.
|
| FOSS licensing is an ethical stance. That ownership of
| software, (nonfree) copyright and intellectual property is
| fundamentally immoral, and authorship doesn't grant you
| privilege over the code you write. And that stance has a cost.
| If developers want to get paid, get a job writing code and a
| paycheck, or use a nonfree license. Otherwise, stop being
| hypocritical. You chose this path.
| sevagh wrote:
| >Are there any open source boosters left, and if so how would
| they make the case for open source at this point?
|
| I consider the way I publish MIT projects to be mostly in good
| faith. I put it out there because I like having my name
| associated with useful implementations of things. If my code,
| worked on with my own hands, is spread via unattributed copy-
| pasting? Good. Even if I don't know about it, somewhere out
| there my code is powering something.
|
| I started this mindset when I was a new grad, and to achieve a
| task I would first look at a bunch of different open-source
| projects to get a sense of how they were approaching the
| problem domain.
| fzaninotto wrote:
| Many open-source developers just want to code and get paid. But
| do they pay open-source developers to do the same? Or do they pay
| companies to sell them a product or service? In that case, they
| should build a product or service, not a tool or a library.
|
| I have written and maintained dozens of open-source project [1],
| but I have only managed to make one sustainable open-source
| project [2]. It's also the only project for which I did all the
| things necessary to build a business (documentation, payment,
| invoicing, marketing, content, support, design, product
| management, tax fillings, legal, finance, etc).
|
| I encourage everyone to open-source their code. But if you want
| to make a living out of it, you must also be an entrepreneur.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/fzaninotto [2]:
| https://marmelab.com/blog/2023/11/13/open-source-profit-2.ht...
| pacifika wrote:
| Let's clarify the difference between hobbyist software and open-
| source software.
| epx wrote:
| I have published a project to interact with house alarm systems
| manufactured by a local company [1]. It is a hobby project, I
| have it for my own use, don't expect it becomes a money printing
| machine.
|
| Yet, since many users request features well outside my use cases,
| and I have only one sample of the many alarm models that use the
| same protocol, I thought I'd be successful in getting some help
| from the manufacturer, from lent hardware (at pessimist side) to
| some small monetary contribution (optimist side). I got no
| response at all...
|
| People are also fast to point things that are "wrong" but don't
| want to submit a PR at all.
|
| [1] https://github.com/elvis-epx/alarme-intelbras
| sevagh wrote:
| Tyler the Creator famously tweeted "Hahahahahahahaha How The F*
| Is Cyber Bullying Real Hahahaha ** Just Walk Away From The Screen
| Like ** Close Your Eyes Haha."
|
| Seems like a ridiculous statement (and definitely doesn't address
| the real issue of cyberbullying)...
|
| _but_ when it comes to open-source, that's my exact attitude.
| Notifications off, users opening issues and pull requests? May as
| well not exist. I'll occasionally check but that's it.
|
| The easiest answer is that deep down you need to accept that you
| can only be "tortured" by the incessant, needy, unfair demands of
| your users if you choose to. If you can't handle it, disable it,
| archive your project, walk away.
| j1elo wrote:
| "My choice of license allows you to hire a contractor and fix or
| change the code in the way you seem fit for your purposes".
|
| There's user entitlement, but there's also lack of dev
| entitlement toward the license terms they themselves chose.
|
| This should be a template response in GitHub issues by default:
| > Remember that this project is: > * PROVIDED "AS IS"
| > * FREE OF CHARGE > * WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND >
| * WITHOUT PROMISE OF FITNESS FOR YOUR USE CASE > * WITHOUT
| LIMITS FOR YOU TO USE OR EDIT
| bee_rider wrote:
| Work on the passion project! Always work on the passion project
| in your free time.
|
| Companies that depend on your hobby code can send you some
| maintainers if they aren't happy with your hobby output progress
| rate.
| calrain wrote:
| One person's passion is another person's chore.
|
| Focus on your passion.
|
| The success of OSS projects is a function of how many people are
| passionate about it.
| pixelbath wrote:
| > One happens to be heavily used
|
| This does not matter in the slightest; your only obligations to
| other entities are self-imposed. Using a developer's piece of
| code does not confer an additional right to that developer's
| time.
|
| > The bad parts are that there's a dozen issues that I haven't
| even reviewed much less triaged, investigated, and fixed
|
| If those 3/4 million downloaders really found it that useful,
| aren't there code contributions?
|
| > time = passion + money
|
| I didn't _start_ writing code because of money, and I'd still be
| writing code on my own even if I weren't being paid to do it. I
| know this because I code on my own without being paid to do it,
| only work on things that are interesting to me, and I don't have
| a problem dropping a project if I'm no longer interested in it.
|
| > Those companies in that list are contributing to the success of
| those projects
|
| Go work for one of those companies then? Seems like a win-win.
| waffletower wrote:
| My sense of entitlement related to open source is honestly more
| specific and, in my mind, not related to specific compensation,
| but definitely related to the cost of utilizing and maintaining
| software. I feel entitled to a discipline of semantic versioning
| in open source ecosystems -- a consciousness where open source
| developers understand how flippant changes within software
| libraries can have ripple-effect maintenance costs. I feel
| entitled to software with appropriately pinned dependencies such
| that upstream changes will not divert software consumers
| resources to otherwise needless fixes. I often deride ecosystems
| where these values are often not shared (Javascript, Python,
| Ruby), and laud those that adhere more often (Java, Clojure).
| constantly wrote:
| It's important to set an example to avoid being dismissed as a
| hypocrite. This author should post the inventory of all the
| dependencies their projects use across the board along with how
| much the author contributes to each of them monthly.
|
| That would absolutely get people off the fence and to start
| agreeing.
| coding123 wrote:
| Last time this was brought up someone said, well yeah it's a
| resume builder. And get a job with it, then work on it at work.
| That's why they hired you, you're the xxxx guy.
| karmakaze wrote:
| > Open source software developers should have compensation that
| follows this: money = contributions * usage
|
| This seems wrong. Typically opensource that gets compensation is
| for _support_. That 's active ongoing work. Past contributions or
| usage thereof isn't material. That's the beauty of opensource, it
| keeps on giving to the original work, and derived works.
| vikmals wrote:
| yeah, seems like the author came up with this formular to cope
| with the fact that others are making way more money off his
| software because they found a way to utilize their oss software
| to make profit. Author should do the same or not ask for money.
|
| A more accurate and sane formular would be
| money = time_spent_on_project * avg_salary
| CaptainFever wrote:
| I'm a junior so please take this with a pinch of salt, but
| yeah this is what I intend to do when I do open source too.
|
| Once I've finished scratching my itch, I will only spend T
| hours per week on the project: T =
| patron_weekly_income / 20
|
| Where: 1 <= T <= 40
|
| Where the min of 1 hour is intended to "get the project off
| the ground", and the max is for work life balance (any
| additional income is then either profits, or to be reinvested
| in other contributors).
| Ekaros wrote:
| Maybe someone should build ecosystem with payments for this type
| of work. You pay for package and it comes with warranty,
| guarantees, fit for purpose and so on.
|
| It notices the upstream dependencies and bills you accordingly.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I don't agree with this formulation of the problem nor the
| proposed solution space. The cost/price angle might be useful to
| solve other problems though.
|
| Publishing opensource to a package repository should have higher
| hurdles than picking a LICENSE file and pushing code to Github.
| Java/Maven repos typically have higher quality because to get
| code there, you have to have a domain, register it and get
| through the packaging requirements/bureaucracy. The use of
| packages from Github with merely a repo/git-hash is a bad trend.
| On the other side, if everything had a _visible_ price /cost,
| then we might not end up with simple functions being overused and
| compromise a library ecosystem.
| gumballindie wrote:
| This is made even worse by ai companies recycling the code.
| jh0486 wrote:
| I understand this is a jaded take, but it's not wrong.
|
| Open source entered a bubble because companies started requiring
| active open source contributions to staff+ engineering
| requirements. The model was never sustainable. A select few
| contribute to open source out of sheer passion, but the majority
| are/were using it as a career advancement mechanism or network
| effect.
|
| The result is that major companies were able to advance their
| technology and profits rapidly off of people's free work. The
| result is better products, services, and tooling for everyone,
| but let's not kid ourselves about who benefits most from open
| source: large companies.
| gustavus wrote:
| > who benefits most from open source: large companies.
|
| Maybe in absolute terms but because of FOSS software I have
| been made free from the shackles of the windows ecosystem and
| liberated from the prison of Apple lock in to be free forever
| in the fields of the Linux and that alone has been invaluable
| to me.
| bogwog wrote:
| This is what I dislike about OSI. It feels like their mission
| is specifically to provide free labor to megacorps. The FSF has
| (IMO) goals that have a more tangible benefit to society, and
| while megacorps can and do use free software without
| contributing anything, that feels like more of a side effect
| than the primary goal of the movement.
|
| If you know that someone is going to take your code and make
| money off of it anyways (which is almost guaranteed whether you
| pick an FSF or OSI license), then you might as well make it so
| that society can benefit from this too. GPL/AGPL do this,
| MIT/BSD/etc do not.
|
| And as an aside, I feel like it should be easier to profit from
| open source if you pick a license like AGPL. Companies that
| want to use it can pay you (the sole rights holder) for a
| commercial friendly license, while everyone else can use the
| free license. This is the same model for Qt/KDE.
|
| You don't even need to sell support, and could probably even
| throw up a self service checkout page for commercial licenses.
| Thats minimal effort for maximizing profit lol.
| grotorea wrote:
| Maybe I'm naive but I get the feeling open source is more
| about convincing the megacorps that they can get better,
| cheaper and higher quality software without vendor lock-in by
| cooperating with the other megacorps. Not so much as
| convincing volunteers that doing open source in their time
| off is some great idea or that they can make a living off it.
| disintegore wrote:
| I have one major objection.
|
| It's easy to forget, due to the vast wealth of genuinely great
| volunteer-driven projects out there, that an overwhelming share
| of open source contributions are actually funded by capital. It's
| hard to imagine the Linux kernel, or llvm, or even projects like
| React ever fizzling out due to maintainer burnout or disinterest.
|
| This is fascinating, in my opinion, because our systems of
| accounting and economical analysis are by design terrible at
| keeping track of externalities. They are not good at analyzing
| the potentially holistic value of mutualist projects. Largely
| speaking whatever cannot fit on a balance sheet becomes the
| province of philosophy and culture.
|
| Despite all that, in the modern culture of tech companies, the
| value of FLOSS seems to be understood and the companies that
| recognize it genuinely seem to out-compete those that don't. They
| recognize the value it creates _for them_ , even if it's very
| difficult to estimate the costs that are avoided by using a FLOSS
| system that would otherwise need to be licensed or built. Even if
| the completely optional act of using one's own resources to
| contribute to open source software does not easily map to an
| equivalent or greater return in accounts receivable or company
| valuation.
|
| What I mean by this is that the sustainability of "open source"
| broadly speaking is already demonstrated and I don't see that
| changing any time soon. What's _not_ demonstrated however is the
| sustainability of OP 's project. I think this is a challenge that
| they and their users should tackle without implicating the
| entirety of open source software as a culture, or attempting to
| impose any responsibilities upon users of open source software
| that don't already exist.
| Havelock wrote:
| Linus Torvalds $50M net worth says otherwise. There are however
| very few "winners" and a lot of losers.
| npn wrote:
| If he sold his OS like other US companies then his networth
| would be $50B not $50M.
|
| You can argue that Linux can't reach that kind of successful if
| it is nonfree, but there were a lot of poorly written OS that
| sold millions.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Bad example. He also was part of a number of startups including
| Transmeta.
| hartator wrote:
| > I would be willing to bet that 99% of these companies don't
| neglect compensation out of malice.
|
| There is no malice. FOSS is free and open. There are many
| softwares that chose to be paid ones and they are successful.
| taeric wrote:
| Alternatively, the lack of a non-corporate sponsored source of
| health care and income in the US is unsustainable. :(
| teddyh wrote:
| The feeling of entitlement _of some developers_ is sometimes
| baffling. They have a position of authority in a project, and got
| that authority based on their demonstrated trustworthiness and
| ability to deliver useful software. Now they don't feel like
| doing that anymore, but instead of resigning their position in
| the project like a responsible person, they want to use their
| earned trust to be paid for software development.
| Congratulations, you've come up with a business model. It might
| work, or it might fail. _But it has nothing to with the software
| project._ Open Source is not a business model. It is a
| development process.
| growse wrote:
| > they want to use their earned trust to be paid for software
| development.
|
| They're entitled to do that, and you're entitled to fork it.
| teddyh wrote:
| Everybody's entitled to be impolite. But I can still argue
| against it.
| npn wrote:
| they own the project, not you. open source licensing does not
| mean giving up the authorship.
| teddyh wrote:
| They own the _copyright_. The _project_ is a thing that
| happens in concert with users and contributors, just like art
| requires an audience to be art.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I get the feeling that FLOSS holds the niche that software
| patents were supposed to hold. To wit, it publicly discloses
| methods of the art to a practitioner in such a way that (s)he can
| fully implement it.
|
| Software patents don't actually do this to a sufficient
| granularity (at least imao) , but get paid for; while floss does
| this to sufficient granularity that a compiler actually _can_
| implement it.
|
| Basically we seem to have a collection of loose bits that
| variously ensures we have a public foundation for software
| development, and other loose bits that ensure people get paid for
| disclosing things.
|
| The thing we don't have is one single cohesive system where
| people get paid to disclose the state of the art as a public
| foundation for software development.
| PoutCo wrote:
| The last time I checked the statistics, approximately 75% of the
| industry's codebase was open source--a significant portion!
| However, when it comes to the earnings of open-source developers,
| it's almost negligible.
|
| I strongly believe that open-source contributors should be
| compensated for their work. So, in my opinion, there's a real
| need to establish an open-source economy where contributors can
| be fairly compensated for their work without compromising open-
| source principles.
|
| I'm currently working on finding a compensation solution for OSS
| contributors. If you're interested in learning more, please don't
| hesitate to get in touch with me (see my profile).
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I think in the minds of many, software patents are the means of
| getting people to disclose their source. But they currently
| don't work that way anywhere.
|
| (edit: actually IIRC it's fine to sometimes promote what you're
| doing on HN, so long as it's not Every Single Post) . Can you
| tell us a bit more?
| PoutCo wrote:
| Open Source Projects should take inspiration from how
| companies pay people. There are some very good ideas in how
| companies distribute revenues and compensate individuals. We
| just need to take the best parts of this approach and blend
| them with our open-source principles, and we will have the
| best of both worlds.
| toasted-subs wrote:
| To be fair a huge portion of the open source code being used by
| industry comes from industry.
|
| Don't get me wrong though I love me a good open source project.
| I think the idea of being compensated might increase the
| quality, but let's point fingers at github. It would be as
| simple as adding a "support contributors" button on repos.
|
| I don't know how divide the winnings fairly. But it should be
| possible.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The sustainable route for open source projects is individuals
| being paid by an company to implement functionality that the
| employer wants in a given project, and then being obligated
| under the license to share those changes. Those individuals
| could be employees of the company, or contractors, including
| the person who wrote the software in the first place.
| grotorea wrote:
| Wait a second, where is it said that those 75% were made by
| volunteers and not by for example the many companies
| contributing to the Linux kernel?
| cedws wrote:
| If you want be compensated for your project, license your project
| appropriately and sell licenses/corporate support. Nobody's going
| to throw money at you out of the goodness of their heart, that's
| not how the world works.
|
| If you burn yourself out on serving your entitled users for free,
| that's on you, not on them. You've created that sense of
| entitlement. You're an adult capable of saying "no" or "pay me."
| seydor wrote:
| easy to say - hard to do. corporates have the money to sustain
| an accounting department, random devs from developing countries
| don't. And nobody cares about them
| cedws wrote:
| Many of those complexities come with accepting donations too.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| this single-point-of-view analysis fails to account for market
| dynamics over time, adoption of innovation, commodity markets,
| disruptive inventions.. and many, many other things that
| someone with experience and real critical thinking skills would
| discover quickly with any research on the topic.
| carapace wrote:
| I honestly do not get the Open Source movement.
|
| > It is quite literally a free lunch at the expense of hard-
| working individuals.
|
| Yes! This. That's the point.
|
| I'm a Free software developer and that's why I give my code away:
| to solve someone's problems with software. I can do that. I'm not
| particularly good at most things, but when it comes to writing
| software I'm very capable. In other words, I am a "free lunch"
| generator.
|
| To me the entire point of computers and software (where these
| intersect with economics) is to change the structure of the
| economic system itself to a more humane system (that works in
| harmony with the global ecology, but that's a tangent to my main
| point today.) "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their
| pay."
|
| Science and technology have won the day. We have the knowledge
| and resources to take care of everybody on Earth without
| "disadvantaging anybody" (as Bucky Fuller liked to say.) You
| don't have to "earn a living" anymore. We won history.
|
| Software is just the clearest, cleanest example of the general
| phenomenon of science and technology obviating the physical
| bounds that held us back until now.
|
| Getting back to software development: technology should be
| deployed so that folks only have to work a few hours a week to
| pay for their living expenses (e.g. $300 per month should cover
| food, housing, clothing, health care, etc., and over time that
| number should decrease!)
|
| In that milieu people can develop software and give it away
| without the extra constraints of having to make it profitable in
| and of itself.
|
| This is the whole point of technology in general and computers
| and software in particular: change the structure of the economy
| so that we can all "live happily ever after".
|
| (And get on with space exploration and mitigating climate
| change.)
| seydor wrote:
| The EU has an elaborate system of VAT taxation. It is an
| accounting nightmare, but it is fair tax: every part of the chain
| is paying according to their value-add. Whole of the EU has it.
| If EU wasn't so anachronistic, the accounting for it could be
| completely automated.
|
| But nobody ever thought to make a similar system to pay people
| for the value they add to the chain. On the internet it's
| possible, and many blockchain systems promise something similar.
| But big tech wants all the profits, from everyone's creations,
| all for itself. And governments are silently guilty standing in
| the background
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > nobody ever thought to make a similar system to pay people
| for the value they add to the chain
|
| of course, you are joking! look in the USENET news archives..
| from the early 1990s.. you will see many proposals like
| "micropayments" .. later, even standards proposed. Also see the
| importance of "ad free Internet" and how certain govt-company
| groups try to add their own "ID" to people and machines.
| seydor wrote:
| ok they thought of it and never did it, which has the same
| effect
| mistrial9 wrote:
| who exactly is the mysterious and all-powerful "they" ?
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| This is consistent with our findings in the OneBusAway project,
| an open source real time transit app that is hugely popular in
| Seattle, and used across the world, including in San Diego,
| Washington DC, Boston, Tampa, and New York.
|
| We've been appealing to our end users for funding to help keep
| the development of the mobile apps going, which you can
| contribute to, as well:
| https://opentransitsoftwarefoundation.org/donate/
| ternaus wrote:
| I am one of the creators and maintainers of
| https://albumentations.ai/.
|
| - 12800+ stars
|
| - 1M downloads last month, 37k per day
|
| - Paper about the project: 1500+ citations
|
| - Used in 18k other repositories and 317 packages.
|
| => People use it.
|
| But!
|
| - 365 open issues
|
| - 25 pull request
|
| that hang for years
|
| Only one sponsor.
|
| And this is fine. People use the result of our work, but we do
| not feel that we are entitled / deserve / [some other vomit
| words] of more support.
|
| In the beginning, we decided that we would do it:
|
| - only for fan
|
| - when and how we want it
|
| - if some user is unhappy with our commitment or decisions
|
| => feel free to fork.
|
| But!
|
| We do enjoy when people thank us, create pull requests (we do
| review and merge them, although it could take time), or create
| feature requests or bug reports.
|
| I can see open source as a great pet project that you do for fun
| and to improve your skills, but unless it is an OpenCore business
| or another setup where maintainers are financially compensated,
| all whiners and complainers can go and fuck themselves.
|
| I would not recommend maintainers of the open source software
| even notice them.
|
| If working on OSS is not fun - do not do it. Life is too short
| for unnecessary stress.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| The problem from the maintainer side is:
|
| 0. Don't give away something and expect tips, donations, or
| anything else because it will only lead to resentment. If you
| voluntarily give something away, you basically lose all control
| of how it's used in the real world. If someone intends to make
| money from code, then OSS is probably the wrong approach.
|
| The challenges from the user side are:
|
| 1. Donate time, money, and effort based on utility and necessity
| to support what's vital.
|
| 2. Be a proactive self-starter whenever possible rather than
| depend on others for support.
|
| 3. Some maintainers and communities turn out to have an
| un{cool,professional} culture of hostility, uncooperativeness, or
| unhelpfulness. Don't waste time with that.
| doxeddaily wrote:
| If you want to get paid maybe don't give away your software for
| free? This comes across as major sour grapes. "I made this free
| thing for people to use and they don't pay me for it!!" Ok, then
| maybe don't give it away?
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