I feel like this is a very modern problem with the community. I’ve been in open source for a long time, I’ve been employed by some of these companies to write open source things.
Most open source stuff was created by someone who was employed to write that open source thing. There are exceptions, of course, but most things came about because of a need, and that need is often related to work. Companies used to be a lot better with allowing open sourcing of components.
Then, there are all the community contributions that come from commercial reasons. If someone working at a company fixes a bug they encounter, that’s someone being paid to write open source software.
I do not understand the reaction people are having to this now. The open source ecosystem was built on this.
Richard Stallman was the first developer to get paid for selling Free Software (the emacs editor) and in the original, first idea it was always intended that Free Software may and even should cost something. It was not intended as anti-capitalism software. It’s free as in freedom, not as in free beer.
The idea that it is bad or not ethical for somebody working on Free Software to get paid is absurd.
There may be different names for the same thing, like Free Software, Open Source, Libre Software, and therefore acronyms like FLOSS, however, something called Communist Software, Anti-Capitalism Software, Money-is-Bad Software or similar would be a different thing and must not be confused with the former one.
I’m not saying that nobody should impose the restriction that people working on software are not allowed to take money for it. I’m saying that software with this restriction would be something different (and does not exist afaik) and as far as I am concerned I don’t care about that kind of software or philosophy behind it. Just leave the devs that manage to get paid for working on FLOSS alone and do your own thing.
It was not intended as anti-capitalism software.
Anti-capitalist doesn’t mean nobody gets paid, though.
Yes, I should have used some other term here. However, I think the message came across.
It’s free as in freedom, not as in free beer.
But you can’t have one without the other. Putting a cost on software is adding a restriction, thus making it less free (as in freedom).
Free software should be available to everyone, even to people who don’t have money to pay for it (poor third world countries, students, kids).
I personally believe, that you should pay for software that helps you earn money. For everything else - it’s everyone’s own decision to donate or not, based on a financial situation, beliefs, political position and what not.
The problem is companies that fully take advantage of open source, as is their right, and then fully expect the volunteer dev to provide support them when they have a Sev 1.
Sure they read the license and saw that it was free, but they didn’t read the part that it was free but offered literally no support.
The amount of money that my company has made on the backs of open source developers is probably in the literal billions. But we don’t give fuck squat to them outside of one day a year that we contribute code back to a few select libraries.
Yeah I think that people should be a lot more willing to pay someone to contribute to open source than they are to pay for usage of closed code. It really should be seen as the best form of charity, like when I donate to an open source project that makes a good education tool what I’m really doing is donating that tool to every school in the developing world and every student that wouldn’t have been able to afford a paid version.
I think that we need to get into a world where showing off which projects you support is a way of flexing, like all these super rich attention seekers need to start funding development teams for apps ‘oh yeah I was so annoyed the librivox app didn’t have ai search tools that I paid two PhD students to implement it, apparently it’s been a real boon for foreign language learners and literary academics but I just use it to find me historic novels similar in theme to events in my own life, you know it suggested shadow over innsmouth, I don’t know what it’s trying to say!’
People need to see that it’s much better to buy something for everyone in the world than just for you, especially because it makes it possible for other people like you to repay the favour and pay for further improvements which benefit you
Well, then you have to find another name for that kind of software and define it that way. That’s what I meant with that being a different thing, because if you look up the definitions and freedoms of the term “Free Software”, the term “Open Source” or “Libre Software”, and most other “free” licenses there is no mention of making the software available at no cost to everyone. It was not even the idea when the first free license was created, historically speaking.
That does not mean that it’s a bad idea. I certainly would support such an effort, i.e. to make software available to everyone at no cost. Also, what’s wrong with doing it the classic way of making goods available to “poor third world countries, students, kids” through donations or state supported programs? Do you think the producers don’t get paid in that cases?
Either way, my point is simply that we are discussing different things when it comes to the freedoms in software licenses of FLOSS and providing something valuable for society at no cost.
Donations is a good way to handle paying maintainers, but unfortunately most people don’t even know what open source software is or what software they depend on greatly that would deserve donations.
The problem is a bit deeper than this, because even if a user is familiar with open source software and is willing to support application projects that they like, they aren’t going to know what other open source modules or libraries are being used in those projects and probably wouldn’t think to check or to support those developers. The user front-end is visible, but the stack of dependencies often isn’t and these days no software is a monolith. How many end users would think about donating to Qt directly, or alsa, or libusb?
This is one of the major universal gaps in FOSS. I have a yearly reminder set to donate, and a list of projects within it — I do it this way because a) every project I’ve encountered only offer MONTHLY recurring, which is stupid as fuck because b) no I’m not fucking donating the $5 a month minimum to dozens of projects and c) larger donations usually have lower fees (e.g. donating $60 usually has lower fees than 12 x $5); why the fuck would I give the banks 30% more of my donation than necessary?
Users shouldn’t have to manually deal with this shit, and valuable projects shouldn’t have to beg for pennies. There should be a FOSS payment management project that enables users to create an account, add ALL of the FOSS projects they use (or want to donate to), set a monthly / yearly contribution, and be done with it. Users can choose to allocate percentages or let the software divide the money between all of them evenly, including all of their FOSS dependencies.
There should be a FOSS payment management project that enables users to create an account, add ALL of the FOSS projects they use (or want to donate to), set a monthly / yearly contribution, and be done with it. Users can choose to allocate percentages or let the software divide the money between all of them evenly
Well, sure but at some point that donated money has to get distributed out to the accounts of the individual developers, and then you still have the transaction fee problem.
It might seem like the obvious solution is to collect donation amounts for a developer until some minimum value is reached and then distribute it, but then the donation platform is holding money (in trust? in escrow? not sure) basically making them a bank, which makes the whole thing a lot more complicated in terms of financial regulation (not impossible, but probably too expensive to operate to be worthwhile).
including all of their FOSS dependencies
I think this part might be a practical impossibility. All of the larger/more popular open source projects are basically this:
That XKCD reminds me of the case a year or three ago where some solo dev that no-one had ever heard of was maintaining a library that a couple of other very popular and major libraries depended on. Something somewhere broke for some reason, and normally this guy would’ve been all over it before most people even realized there had been a problem, but he was in hospital or jail or something, so dozens of huge projects that indirectly relied on his library came crashing down.
What upset me most was reading the community discussion. I didn’t see a single person saying, “How can we make sure that some money gets to this guy and not just the more visible libraries that rely so heavily on his work?”, even though the issue was obliquely raised in several places, but I did see quite a few saying, “How can we wrest this code out of this guy’s hands against his will and make multiple other people maintain it (but not me, I’m too busy) so we don’t have a single point of failure?”
When I buy a turnip from the grocery store I don’t have to pay the farmer directly.
If I donate to debian, that I depend on , then debian (morally) should disburse some of that donation to the linux kernel that debian depends on.
This makes logical sense on the face of it, but in practice dependency stacks can be very broad and very deep. I doubt there would be enough donation money to make the effort of distributing it worthwhile, and at some point there would be so many small transactions that the transaction fees would eat up a significant amount.
Especially for something as complex as an OS, the dependency inventory is less like a list and more like a fractal.
It’s a donation so you’re never going to have perfect pricing everything down to the nearest penny or remunerating each person-hour worked. I think It’s about something rough and ready that is better than nothing. And it’s all goverened by morality anyway . . .
so doomed to failure on that side.Buy hypothetically a simple principle with reasonable administration cost, like each 3 months, each node shoud add up all donations, slice off 25-50% , split it equally among their top 5 or 10 most important dependencies - just guess, and maybe swap from quarter to quarter if if there’s doubt. There’s some wiggle room there for small projects to do less and large over funded projects to do more.
Each node in the network could follow a simple rule like that, making a limited number of transactions each time period ,and you’d probably end up with quite a complex outcome after a few iterations (years).
The real trick would be having enough nodes in the network that actually enact such a simple rule. (Apart from having enough donations flow in to the consumer level projects of course).
But enough nodes and enough inflow and the fractal would work for you - roughly.THe speed is an issue, the more often you settle up then quicker people see money, but the more the admin cost.
But even doing it quaterly is not slower than doing nothing.Such a model is not something anyone will be securing bank loans off though, so if that’s the point then you probably need a paid licensing / service model of some sourt maybe Canonical and redhat.
IMHO the reality is more complicated than what’s described here.
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Open source is sustainable (in the sense that people will continue to do it), even without the maintainers getting paid, for better or worse. This is evidenced by the history and the majority of open source projects now.
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The bait-and-switch problem, which gets the maintainers paid, hurts the ecosystem in the long run, which relies heavily on the good faith.
Many open source projects are not developed by unpaid volunteers. The Linux kernel, for example, is primarily developed by professionals on paid time. I’m not convinced the Linux kernel development would continue without business contribution. I’m not convinced all open source projects could just continue without any payment.
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Amen
At my work we use a few open source projects in critical infra, but I’m sad that we are pretty shit at budgeting for donating to said projects
if you have your engineers developing a feature for selfish reasons, and the code is good, you can share it right?
“No we’re not giving out our IP for free”
open source project repos on your company github is how you attract top talent i thought :(
I hate this word arrangement in the title. It reminds me of painfully oblique ‘breadtube’ videos. “Getting naked near an elementary school and eating whipped cream off your boyfriend’s ass is good, ‘actually’!” I think the first person who used it might have been the chick who got hit by hotdogs in that old GIF.
I also think the arrangement of some words can be very panful.
