[HN Gopher] Paying people to work on open source is good
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Paying people to work on open source is good
Author : webology
Score : 179 points
Date : 2024-02-16 19:52 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jacobian.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (jacobian.org)
| bugbuddy wrote:
| Yes, please start by practicing what you preach. I actually
| donated 1% of my income to various open source projects I use.
| devmor wrote:
| I'm really happy that github in particular has made it so easy
| to give some cash to the people responsible for tools that I
| enjoy.
| abound wrote:
| My (very small) tech nonprofit has started doing something
| similar [1], where everyone contributes to a list of OSS tools
| we use heavily, and then everyone gives a weight/score to each
| tool.
|
| We then split the pot ($1,000 in 2022, probably ~$2,000 when I
| get around to doing 2023) among all the OSS projects, according
| to the relative scores.
|
| [1] https://siliconally.org/policies/open-source/#yearly-
| donatio...
| fydorm wrote:
| This is a good thing to do, but not really the point of the
| article.
| netbioserror wrote:
| The premise of paid open source devs is fine and well, but every
| single one of these blogs devolves into delusional utopian
| nonsense from people who do not understand the staggering
| infrastructure and maintenance cost of the modern society they
| think should be some sort of guaranteed right. People, please
| learn and understand where your food comes from before writing
| this kind of garbage.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| FWIW, the author was at least thoughtful enough to include this
| disclaimer at the top:
|
| > Warning: rant ahead. I'm writing from a place of frustration
| and not particularly interested in trying to moderate my tone.
| If you don't want to hear me yell about open source for a
| while, please skip this one.
| woodruffw wrote:
| TFA's author is one of the co-creators of Django and a
| preeminent member of the Python community. I think it would be
| charitable to assume that he does, in fact, understand these
| things.
| davepeck wrote:
| See also Nadia Eghbal's (IMHO definitive) work on the economics
| and sociology of open source software, "Working In Public":
| https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public
| delichon wrote:
| A pro capitalist message from Jacobin? [Looks closer.] No.
|
| I'd pay for an open source project that could filter & sort news
| by surprisingness-for-that-news-source. This opinion would rank
| high for jacobin.com. The story about Zuckerberg's preference for
| the Quest 3 over the AVP would disappear.
| mkeeter wrote:
| https://jacobian.org is Jacob Kaplan-Moss's website
|
| https://jacobin.com is a socialist magazine
|
| This blog post is from the former!
| delichon wrote:
| *jacobian.org for JKM's site
| mkeeter wrote:
| thanks, edited!
| prisenco wrote:
| Jacobian, not Jacobin.
|
| But even so, paying people for their labor is entirely
| uncontroversial amongst socialists. Some might even argue it's
| the fundamental underpinning of their critique of capitalism.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| I want to agree, and I understand the position, but there's no
| room for nuance when you throw around the work 'always'.
|
| I think I disagree that it is always good.
|
| For instance, if a company is paying someone to work on open
| source, and they use that to leverage the project in a direction
| that is against its other users' best interest, can that be good?
| I don't think so.
|
| There are numerous examples of situations and behaviors you could
| come up with that are not 'good'.
|
| I'm all for people making a living, but I don't like bad
| behavior, no matter if it generates 'freeish' source code or not.
| smburdick wrote:
| This is why grants are really important. That usually means
| deliverables in a specific timeframe. To me, that elevates open
| source from a full-time hobby to a job.
| jraph wrote:
| Grants are great but are often not nearly enough and they can
| vanish from a year to another. You'd better secure other
| sources of income. Grants will also usually fund specific
| features of your product but not the whole thing.
|
| Other kinds of income are also good ways to fund open source
| like service, consultancy, support and even paid open source
| apps (which works particularly well for apps that have
| enterprise oriented features, turns out it doesn't matter
| that the source code is available under a free software
| license if it's convenient enough to click and buy).
|
| Coincidentally, this is how I get paid :-)
|
| Still, grants should not be ignored indeed.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I think the article addresses this.
|
| It's a matter of not letting "perfect" get in the way of
| "good". You're totally right, we should work towards getting
| everyone who wants to work on open source code bases the public
| funds they deserve at every opportunity, but in the mean time,
| we'll have to put up with corpos funding some of the FLOSS
| code.
|
| > We have to accept the world as it is - even if it's not the
| world we want. This means we have to be okay with the idea that
| maintainers need to be paid. Far too often I see arguments
| like: "maintainers shouldn't be paid by private companies
| because the government should be supporting them." Sure, this
| sounds great - but governments aren't doing this! So this
| argument reduces to "open source maintainers shouldn't be
| paid". I can't get on board with that.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| But some of these aren't good. Some of them are the opposite
| of good.
|
| We are allowing lousy business models to survive by insisting
| they are better than nothing.
| thfuran wrote:
| >can that be good? I don't think so
|
| Well that's just an implied always. Is it likely good? No,
| probably not. Is it always bad? No, probably not. It's
| conceivable that there are a lot more potential users in the
| direction the company wants to drag the project, and the few
| current users can fork it.
| zrn900 wrote:
| That's why the open source communities themselves should be
| funding their own projects. Because if the communities and
| users dont fund their own projects, private corporations will
| fund them and they will have the say. Open Source must not
| become outsourced 'free labor' which major corporations can
| leech on. The best way to do it has been the 'freemium' format
| that is used in the Wordpress ecosystem and a few others - the
| open source shop creates and maintains a free version of their
| software under GPL2+, and sells downloads, update licenses &
| support for more advanced addons. The WP ecosystem was able to
| float itself with this method without taking in investor money
| or corporate money, and the software shops that exist in that
| ecosystem are able to pay their developers living wages. The
| entire ecosystem was created and is still floated by the open
| source software producers and the community members.
|
| Basically, open source is like politics: Who funds it gets the
| say. And just like politics, we need to make sure that the
| communities are self-sustaining economically so that external
| money wont call the shots.
|
| I know that a lot of us in open source software are very proud
| with our voluntary work and its contributions to open source.
| That is accurate and praise worthy.
|
| But what do we do when we get up in the morning and go to work?
|
| We each work in a private company that seeks to maximize its
| market share and gain more control of the economy, bar a
| minority of us who work in actual open source jobs. In one
| hand, we are giving something tangible to open source with our
| contributions, but the work that we have to do in our day job
| in a private corporation takes a lot of that away because the
| organized, concentrated impact of a large private organization
| with a lot of money goes much further than the heroic efforts
| of collectives of volunteers.
|
| That is why open source must fund itself and become its own
| economic and political power. Otherwise we will always be
| giving with one hand with our contributions but involuntarily
| taking back with the other hand because of the work we have to
| do in private corporations. And this is without mentioning that
| if we dont fund & float our own ecosystems and become a
| collective economic and political power as a community in our
| own right, we will always be rule-takers and will always have
| to fight the attempts of the private lobbies at destroying open
| source.
|
| Basically we must create our own world. And in that world, we
| must be able to work in, make money with, and live with open
| source.
| gustavus wrote:
| I don't understand when it became this was FOSS was always about
| "Free as in speech." But for some reason it became "Free as in
| beer." and many of the arguments I see around dev pay seem to be
| conflating the 2.
|
| Open source merely means the source is open and free for you to
| view look at modify, etc. At no point does it mean it costs
| nothing. Now with code it's not exactly a super reasonable
| business model to sell a software product but make it's code
| freely available, but that would still meet the definition of
| open source.
| wmf wrote:
| [Never mind, I didn't express this clearly]
| ahepp wrote:
| I've worked for multiple companies that pay for dual licensed
| GPL software
| reedciccio wrote:
| Tell that to Red Hat, WordPress, Canonical, MySQL and many
| more products built on pure Open Source. The issue is
| complex.
| jraph wrote:
| That's not true. The company I work for manages to sell free
| software [1]. All the stuff we sell is under LGPL, and it's
| not open core, it is fully free software.
|
| It works under specific conditions and you need to come up
| with a business plan that makes it work, but it is possible.
| And it is one of the most ethical ways to fund free software
| so it would be too bad to discard this option too early.
|
| For us, what works is enterprise oriented extensions for a
| platform we develop. Turns out companies will fork off
| hundreds of dollars and enjoy the support that comes with it
| instead of compiling all this thing by themselves. It's more
| convenient and employees understand that it funds the open
| source software they are using, and it's an easily justified
| expense. But should they want to enjoy any of the freedoms
| that come with free software, they can.
|
| [1] https://store.xwiki.com
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The reality noone wants to admit is that most people use and
| patronize FOSS because it's free-as-in-beer and nothing else.
| Nobody cares about freedoms, but everyone cares about their
| bottom line.
|
| This extends to even most of the FOSS devs themselves, refusing
| pay and ostracizing those who accept pay because money to them
| is kryptonite.
|
| In my opinion, this philosophy that runs counter to a very
| fundamental law of the world (everything, including manhours,
| requires compensation) plays one of the largest roles in
| keeping FOSS behind both commercial and proprietary/closed
| software.
| preommr wrote:
| Perhaps unpopular opinion, but it's because the 0$ cost is what
| 99% of OSS users care about.
|
| Since it requires no investment on part of the user, it
| increases the potential target market to a much larger size
| than it would if it were paid. There's just something about
| things being free that break people's minds.
|
| There's even a study on this where they offered chocolates for
| free vs 0.01$, and the free option was much more popular even
| though the 0.01$ chocolate was much higher quality and much
| better value for a very negligible difference.
|
| Lots of users just want to download something, use it for a few
| minutes and be done with it. Or at least try it out and know
| that they can fall back to a free version at worst and not feel
| like they made a bad investment.
| jacobian wrote:
| I think the thing is that it's always been both. The freedom to
| hack and modify has always been inextricably linked with the $0
| license fee. If the early free/open licenses had allowed source
| access and modification but come with a license fee, or if
| early FOSS had cost nothing to use but disallowed modification,
| I don't think we'd have seen the success that we have. The two
| senses of "free" in "free software" are and always have been
| linked.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I've put some serious thought into solving this problem. There
| are two main structural issues I know of:
|
| 1. Open source libraries tend to be complement goods. You're more
| willing to pay for a good physics engine if you already have a
| good rendering engine and vice versa. But a sad truth of
| complement goods is that they are a centralizing force - it's
| actually better for everyone if the physics engine maker and
| rendering engine maker join forces and offer a bundle discount.
| But the most common strategy seems to be for them to just merge
| into one company, and this is why you see giant conglomerate
| products like Unreal and Unity instead of buying each component
| from a different vendor.
|
| 2. Since open source software is a public good (non-rivalrous,
| non-excludable), the "free market" cannot really incentivize its
| production nearly as much as would be optimal. Let's say there
| are 1000 people who would each pay $10 for a feature to be added,
| and the maintainer would happily add it for $5000. If 90% of
| those people each paid $6 they would get what they want and the
| maintainer would be happy too, but each individual has an
| incentive to be part of that 10% that gets to keep their $6 and
| still gets the feature, so what happens is that almost no one
| ends up paying.
|
| These problems can't be solved without slightly modifying open
| source, but they can be solved by maintaining the spirit of open
| source I think. What you need is to have some kind of foundation
| that takes money and gives it to "quasi-open-source" projects,
| and then only allows businesses to use those projects if they
| contribute a certain percentage of their revenue to the
| foundation. Of course, now the foundation needs to decide which
| open source projects to give the money too. It's an extremely
| tricky problem, but there's been a lot of interesting research by
| Glen Weyl on that exact subject and I'm confident it could be
| solved in a satisfactory way.
|
| I think this proposal would create a virtuous cycle once it got
| off the ground. The more projects licensed "quasi-open-source",
| the larger the incentive to pay the foundation to use them. The
| more the foundation is paid, the more money these "quasi-open-
| source" projects get, and so more people will license their
| projects "quasi-open-source", increasing the incentive again,
| etc.
|
| Of course, it would only be "quasi-open-source", and not truly
| open-source. But there's no reason the license couldn't be
| extremely in line with the spirit of open source. For example, it
| could say "if you're an individual or small company, you can use
| our code for any purpose for free. If you're a big company, you
| can use it in a way that complies with the AGPL or you can pay
| us, your choice".
|
| I think employees would also encourage their employers to become
| paying members of such a foundation, if it lead to those
| employees being able to determine where some of the money goes.
| Everyone at my current company is a Rust developer and so we
| naturally like Rust, but Rust jobs aren't always easy to find. As
| employees, it could be in our best interest to subsidize the
| development of Rust open source projects, if that increased
| Rust's attractiveness to other companies.
|
| If you're interested in this idea, my email is in my bio :D
| wmf wrote:
| Or just use BSL...
| mrob wrote:
| You don't need "quasi-open-source" to solve the coordination
| problem you describe. It can be solved with a threshold pledge
| system[0]. People agree to donate money, and the developer
| agrees to release the code once sufficient money is donated.
| There can be a time limit after which the donations are
| returned if the threshold isn't met.
|
| This has actually worked in practice: Blender was originally
| proprietary software, but the copyright holder agreed to
| release it under the GPL after collecting 100K EUR in
| donations. After 7 weeks they collected enough donations and
| Blender was released as FOSS as promised.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system
| axus wrote:
| Given free hosting and compute by the NSA? Win
| 4kimov wrote:
| > Every time a maintainer finds a way to get paid, it's a win.
|
| Amen. It's becoming more common, and there's lots to celebrate
| [0]
|
| [0] https://fossfox.com/
| samatman wrote:
| A note to writers: when you find yourself writing a paragraph
| defensively justifying alienating your intended audience, take a
| walk around the block and _think really hard_ about whether doing
| so is a good idea.
|
| I will never compromise on the definition of open source. I'm not
| particularly hard-nosed about proprietary software, or source
| available software either, they're fine, with some caveats I'll
| leave out.
|
| But it's important to have a term for software which is
| unencumbered by use restrictions, and we do: open source. Lumping
| other licenses in with it should be resisted. It's like (I've
| never seen this, to be clear) pescatarians rebranding as "seafood
| vegans". What is supposed to be gained there, or by trying to
| bolt on various source-available licenses to the definition of
| open source?
|
| So this guy picks an important topic, and right up front, he's
| telling me he knows that it's going to piss me off, but he's
| going to call not-open-source software open source anyway, and if
| I object, I don't care about developers getting paid.
|
| Y'know what? You succeeded. Fuck you, tab closed.
| barnabee wrote:
| Agree and I don't understand the downvotes.
|
| The goal isn't for every dev or project to make money or be
| sustainable in open source, just as it isn't for every business
| idea to succeed.
|
| I donate to numerous open source projects and make a point of
| donating more than I believe they'd charge me to buy/subscribe
| if the software wasn't open source. I encourage others to do so
| too, I sincerely hope and believe we can see that happen. I'd
| love to see more _truly_ open source software become
| sustainable, of course.
|
| But I don't kid myself that it all will be. And I don't care to
| relax the definition to include open core, VC exploitative,
| bait and switch, or whatever (have we learnt nothing in the
| last two decades?!). If the project dies it dies, if it stays a
| hobby project that's ok too.
| FOSSwins wrote:
| I'm a developer with 15+ YOE, working mostly on legacy code in a
| govt job but I have extensive experience with modern code bases
| (C, Rust), and I have contributed to lots of FOSS of projects
| over the years in my free time as a way to learn new tech. I
| would work full time on Open Source if I was paid enough to leave
| my 9-5 job, which is not a lot in a third world country like
| mine. Say, $1500 / month.
| coretx wrote:
| It certainly is good, but money also turns many people bad and
| impacts organizational dynamics.
| barnabee wrote:
| I donate to a decent number of open source projects. Others I
| think are more than fine without me (Linux kernel, etc.) but I
| wouldn't hesitate to donate if I believed they weren't.
|
| For the rest, I would indeed as happily see them fail than
| compromise on the definition of open source. The two are
| equivalent to me.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| So many strawmen being set-up in this article the crow population
| is gonna take a major nose dive.
|
| If I hate _any_ specific business model that is used by a company
| that does some some open source suddenly I don 't think people
| deserve to be paid for their work?
|
| Yeah no, that's garbage. There's plenty of garbage business
| models and they aren't suddenly okay because one company uses it
| and 1% of their money funds some small bit of OSS work that
| underpins their business model.
| benatkin wrote:
| I'll respond to the little part where it puts using a "non-OSI
| approved license" under the umbrella of open source. It's not OSI
| approved because it isn't open source, as the community defined
| it long ago, and as it still makes sense for it to be defined. If
| you want me to agree with you, don't do that.
|
| Otherwise, I don't feel compelled to consider a bunch of
| disparate things as a _Win_. Here 's one that could be more of a
| trap than a win, depending on the particulars of the job:
| "Employed by Microsoft to work on Python?" Look no further than
| https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
| lolinder wrote:
| He anticipated your comment and already replied. You're free to
| disagree with him, but he clearly thought that part through
| already and already knows he disagrees with you and with the
| OSI. This entire post is his justification for his
| disagreement, while all you have is an appeal to the OSI
| definition that he's specifically rejecting.
|
| > "open source" / "free software"
|
| > Note the deliberate use of lower case. I'm not referring to
| Open Source(tm) as defined by OSI, nor to Free Software(tm) as
| defined by the FSF. I mean these terms in the broadest, most
| inclusive sense: "software with source code that I can read and
| modify and release variants of, perhaps under some conditions."
| So I'm including OSI and FSF licenses, but also the Polyform
| licenses and the JSON license and, yes BSL in my version of
| "open source".
|
| > This is perhaps a side point, but the "minimalist" definition
| of Open Source meaning "only OSI-approved licenses" - or,
| worse, "the GPL is the only 'true' Free Software license" - is
| part of the problem here. I want to see more experimentation
| and variety in licensing options, and if that means introducing
| some additional restrictions beyond "anyone can use this for
| any purpose" I'm pretty okay with that. In my book, a broad
| spectrum of licenses from Blue Oak to BSL (and even more
| restrictive) "count" as open source.
| benatkin wrote:
| I used lower case deliberately as well.
|
| It's a term that excludes source available, not just because
| of OSI but because of the community.
| cratermoon wrote:
| By picking his own definition of what open source means, is the
| author really arguing for paying people to work on open source?
| Or is his argument more one of being in favor allowing a bunch
| of things that happen to pay people to work on them be counted
| as "open source"?
|
| For example, if RHEL still counts as open source, then Red
| Hat's programmers are paid open source developers, but if RHEL
| is now proprietary, then there are fewer people being paid to
| work on open source.
| hardcopy wrote:
| A few weeks ago a wrote in to my Senator on the complete lack of
| government funding for independent engineers/small projects
| building FOSS (USA).
|
| NLNet in the EU is awesome. We really should have something like
| the NLNet in the USA.
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