
Subsistence Programming - feross
https://blog.licensezero.com/2019/09/03/subsistence.html
======
whatshisface
Why aren't these packages jointly maintained by the money-making companies
that use them? A lone developer writing a library isn't taking advantage of
any of the positive-sum advantages of open source, he's just a guy working for
free.

~~~
PeterisP
Well, many serious open source projects _are_ heavily maintained by the money-
making companies that use them - either directly as a company, or by
"accidentally" happening to employ key maintainers of these projects and
letting them loose on that, or by simply having their engineers do a
significant amount of feature development, or by sponsoring the projects.

Where it does break down is with excessive fragmentation. A hundred small
libraries each doing one thing will get much less corporate support than a
single important library that does the same hundred things.

~~~
_bxg1
> Where it does break down is with excessive fragmentation. A hundred small
> libraries each doing one thing will get much less corporate support than a
> single important library that does the same hundred things.

I think you've nailed it; similar patterns have played out with news/blog
sites, or even media like music and indie games. The internet has allowed for
rich selections of micro-products to pop up, get created, get distributed. But
we have yet to solve the problem of getting the money flowing the other way
through the same ever-more-fine-grained tree.

It's not that people refuse to pay for their news, it's that they don't want
to sign up for and pay for dozens of different sources which they might follow
a link to once a month. It's not (primarily) that people refuse to pay for
software, it's that people don't want to spend the energy tracking down how to
donate a couple dollars to the 100 different NPM dependencies their project
has. In all these cases, unless you're a household name, you're going to get
lost in the noise.

Ads have traditionally been the workaround for this. They don't require any
involvement from users, and they scale based on traffic. I supported Feross'
experiment because I see (non-tracking) ads as a necessary evil until we come
up with a better solution to this problem.

Proposed solutions include bundles, Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, and what Brave
is doing for web content. None of these have changed the equation yet, though,
and it's a really vital problem to solve in today's world of content creation.

~~~
agustif
What aboout a Spotify-like rev-share model, where the user only Subscribes
once, Paying Whatever you want monthly, and then the platform redistributes
that to your repo's deps on some way, make it easy to give extra tip's after
nice interactions/issues-solved/pr's-merged/releases etc

~~~
_bxg1
Yep. Perhaps repositories like NPM run such a system, giving you perks for
subscribing or maybe just framing it as a (cheap) donation, and then each time
you NPM install a package they factor that in to how your fee will get
distributed. Even if it were a $5 monthly donation they asked for out of the
goodness of people's hearts, which automatically and granularly divvied itself
up based on what you use, I bet it would go a long way.

~~~
agustif
I would have a problem trusting npm or GitHub (Microsoft) with my donation
money because of the same issues I've with mainstream NGO who play ads on TV
of famelic enfants to make you send a paid/premium SMS... of which the ISP
gets more than a 30% of the cut to start, and probably most of it will end up
spent in whatever the C-level people in such organization consier fun.

npm is very much a business, stuff like pnpm, an yarn exist for a reason!

~~~
_bxg1
That's silly. NPM's business relies on its thriving package ecosystem, and
ecosystems like it face a very real risk from this problem. It would be in
their interest to provide such a service, and it would swiftly become obvious
if any funny-business were going on, at which point their reputation would be
completely decimated.

------
andymockli
Some people volunteer at a food bank or shelter and some people volunteer by
writing/maintaining open source code. It's for the common good and
volunteerism is a good thing.

~~~
raphlinus
You could argue that much open source work is like volunteering to serve food
at the local country club. Sure, you're feeding hungry people, but there is
something just a little bit wrong about that.

Personally, I'm getting more paid open source work than I have time for, all
based on permissive licensing, but I might be something of an outlier.

~~~
feross
> You could argue that much open source work is like volunteering to serve
> food at the local country club.

It's more like volunteering to pave the road in your neighborhood because you
want to help your neighbors out, and also to make it easier for your friends
to come visit you at your house.

But eventually, some local small businesses realize that they can use the road
to get their commercial goods to the market faster. At first, you don't mind
because they're not causing much harm. Why not let them use the road?

But eventually some international megacorps hear about the road and start to
tell their trucks to use it too. After a while, some of the truck drivers
start to loudly complain about the way the road was designed. "This road
doesn't let us drive our trucks as fast as we want to. Please fix!"

Next time you're repaving the road, you spend some extra time to make it less
curvy and easier for the truck drivers to drive fast, even though you don't
own a truck and this doesn't really help your friends or neighbors.

Eventually, even more huge companies start using the road to bring their goods
to market. Their complaints get more frequent. "This road isn't designed for
our eighteen-wheeler trucks that we'd like to drive through here! Please fix
it or we'll start using another road!" And on and on...

Eventually, you realize that you're working for free and this isn't about
helping your friends and neighbors anymore. You start to tell friends in other
neighborhoods who are considering building their own free public roads not do
it (it's just not worth it). You recommend if they want to do it that they at
least charge a toll to use the road. That way the road won't be overused by
folks who complain and don't give anything back.

After word gets around and some time passes, the world has fewer public roads
and the remaining roads require a toll to use.

------
maxk42
This person is complaining that subsistence isn't enough?

News flash: Open source doesn't exist to pay your bills. It exists because you
want _others_ to benefit from your work. If you want to pay your own bills you
should be selling something or working for someone who does.

~~~
lacampbell
By the same token, we should have very low expectations from open source
libraries/projects that aren't backed by big companies, or where the authors
aren't living off consulting.

I've stopped relying on them entirely, unless they're very simple.

~~~
ulucs
I'd argue the other way: hobby code is a product of genuine enjoyment and is
probably better than the paid alternatives created to earn money.

------
pkteison
This "article" appears to be an ad for a license selling business.

~~~
feross
I don't know where you get this idea. Just because this essay is hosted on
License Zero's blog doesn't make the content less interesting or useful.

~~~
zokier
Conversely just because the content is interesting or useful doesn't mean that
it isn't an ad

------
vorpalhex
Open source won't pay your mortgage or buy you that yacht. It won't get you a
job. It isn't going to help your resume potentially.

And if you're doing it for any of those reasons, then stop doing it because
you're missing the point.

Do it because you care about what you're building. Do it because you want to
share your solution with the world. Do it because you want to contribute.

~~~
ummonk
Why would anyone want to contribute solutions that others can profit off of
for free? It seems really weird to me that there might be people who actually
want to do this kind of charity.

~~~
harperlee
In my case, even from a self interested point of view this makes sense: this
only applies to improvements and bug fixes on some Clojure libraries, but: If
I contribute back to a library I use, I can raise the probability that other
people use it and contribute to it, thus ensuring that my dependencies keep
fresh; and by sharing work I’d do nonetheless, I do not lose anything. On the
other hand if I keep my changes to myself, then I do not gain anything, but I
contribute to the withering of the environment Im building dependencies with.

~~~
ummonk
Contributing bugfixes, sure, but that's different than providing a project
you've written yourself for free to others and continuing to invest
significant work in maintaining it.

------
draw_down
This has long seemed like a mug's game to me, and all the talk of "passion"
and "community" and so forth strikes me as unconvincing.

It's such a scam, you work hard on something that tons of companies use for
free. If you're lucky, you get a couple bucks in donations. Then, if you
decide that you're wasting your life doing this, people yell at you because
you transferred the project to the wrong person. And don't you dare mess with
the license, you evil greedy developer! (Greed is ok for the companies that
use your stuff, but not ok for the people whose efforts they build on top of.)
The whole time people are giving you shit for not solving their particular
issue, not to mention the crappy things people say about the `standard`
project itself.

It's signing up to be treated like a donkey, branded as something virtuous and
righteous. No thanks.

But somehow feross is the asshole. What a world.

------
cortesoft
I guess the question is whether there SHOULD be developers who only make money
as independent open source developers.

My gut instinct says no. Open source development should be funded by companies
paying their developers to work on and maintain open source projects.

Developers are paid because what they write provides value to a business that
will utilize that code to make money. This is true or open or closed source;
many companies realize you get more value out of sharing coding resources with
other companies to create shared, open source projects.

This is how most open source is funded, and that isn't bad.

~~~
msbarnett
> I guess the question is whether there SHOULD be developers who only make
> money as independent open source developers. My gut instinct says no. Open
> source development should be funded by companies paying their developers to
> work on and maintain open source projects.

What you’re describing is a future where open source is driven and controlled
_solely_ by corporate interests, and anywhere user needs or desires or
freedoms run counter to corporate interests, they go unserved by open source.

That strikes me as a highly undesirable future.

~~~
zokier
> That strikes me as a highly undesirable future.

I imagine that is largely because the corporations here bring to mind faang
and their ilk who use software to ensnare their users to whatever purposes
they need.

But what if the corporations were of wider spectrum, more Fortune 500 and less
silicon valley, whose goal is to create a good computing environment for their
companies to flourish in. Then I think the scenario should seem much less
dystopian.

