
The failed economics of our software commons and what to do about it - jerf
http://pchiusano.github.io/2014-12-08/failed-software-economics
======
johngalt
To paraphrase the problem: 'Lots of people are relying on volunteer created
code running for free. How do we fund the development of useful tools and
software collectively?'

I'm not sure what the best mechanism is, but making some group pledge on a
website probably isn't it. I can't envision that any substantial fraction of
people would contribute regardless if other people are helping.

Instead lets restate the problem a little: '$Billions in value is built
partially relying on the use of these tools. How do convince the whales that
they make money by contributing?'

I wonder if people from the operational side of the house could start this
conversation. Business will already do something similar with legacy systems.
I.E. Vendor disappears and management finds one of the developers formerly
employed at the vendor and cuts them a check for help. When X critical system
is at risk everyone gets their checkbook out. We need to connect the
operational risk from things like heartbleed with a cost that business people
will understand. I like the free software/paid support model, but clearly
there could be something better.

~~~
rayiner
The basic difficulty inherent in monetizing digital goods is affecting all
reaches of the software industry, in a bad way. From websites being forced to
rely on advertising to system software developers being forced to rely on
donations or patronage--the digital goods economy is here, and frankly it's
pretty disappointing.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but the first step I think is to admit that
you've got a problem. Supply chains in the physical goods world aren't a piece
of cake by any means, but at least they are predictable. If you make an SSD,
you buy flash from Micron and a controller form Marvell, etc. You just _buy_
it. That simple "money for product" transaction allows the incentives to line
up. If it was possible to make money selling SSL libraries the same way it's
possible to make money selling flash controllers, the world might be a better
place.

~~~
virmundi
Honestly I think the answer is micropayments. Large companies should get
together to fund the creation and running of a centralized payment system with
no fees. They could move tiny sums of money around to developers. Apps could
charge $0.05/month to $1/month to monetize themselves. The user would be given
a trial period and then asked to pay.

The way I see it, Google, Amazon, Walmart and others would create a small firm
of about 10 people. The central processing system could probably handle real
traffic with as little as 20 production servers. All tolled, the company would
cost probably 10 mill a year. The benefit is that the founding companies would
save in transaction fees their contribution to the new monetary commons. If
Amazon didn't lose 3% to credit card purchases, they would save billions a
year. At that point what is 10 mill to keep that going? Hell, if I'm off by an
order of magnitude, 100 mill a year is still cheaper than the fees.

~~~
edraferi
That's basically what the author is pushing. Snowdrift.coop[1] is a platform
for making small payments to open source projects, with the additional twist
of a matching donation mechanism. It's like Patreon with a twist. They plan to
fun the platform as a project on the platform, rather than charging a
percentage of each transaction like KickStarter does.

I like the idea. If something like this caught on, it would give corporations
a centralized place to support open source tools they rely on.

[1]
[https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/intro](https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/intro)

------
mwhite
An alternative solution could be to innovate in licenses.

I think a lot of the problem is the idea that MIT/BSD-licensing is the ideal
solution because it promotes freedom the most. Clearly, using restrictively
licensed components under currently existing restrictive licenses often isn't
practical for businesses, but that doesn't mean that having everything be
MIT/BSD is the end stage in the evolution of open source licensing.

MIT/BSD-licensing promotes freedom for businesses, but hurts open source
developers by requiring them to trust that they can be adequately compensated
for their work by a reputation economy that's subordinate to a corporate
system that we don't ultimately control.

What if the open source community adopted a norm of dual-licensing open source
libraries with the choice of a restrictive non-commercial open source license
(basically, AGPL with an added non-commercial restriction) or a license that
permits commercial use if you pay?

The key would be that this dual-license would require that any derivative
software also be licensed under the same dual-license.

Wouldn't that preserve freedom as in free, while ensuring that open source
developers are compensated for their work at levels that ensure and
incentivize an optimally robust open source software base?

The devil would be in the details but I bet there's a way to do this that
preserves everything that's good about FOSS now and incentivizes better
software.

~~~
drewcrawford
Having spent some time on the problem I agree generally with your approach,
but the problem is it doesn't appreciate the history and context in which the
current system has arisen and continues to exist.

There are basically 3 cases of successful FOSS projects:

1\. Ideologically-driven, e.g. Emacs, GNU, etc. These tend to have licenses in
the copyleft family

2\. Commercially-driven, e.g. WebKit, Docker, etc. These are projects that are
strategically important to one or several companies. They tend to have
licenses in the MIT/Apache family

3\. "Lone Wolf" or "indie developer". While a lot of FOSS is this by volume,
what you discover is that by the time projects become popular they have
generally evolved into one of the first two types, although they often
preserve their creation story as part of the marketing material

The problem with charging money for code is that it's really a bad deal for
the first two types. The ideology camp doesn't want non-commercial licenses
because it's a "restriction on a field of use" which they have a philosophical
objection about that you can google. In the second camp, the corporate masters
derive some kind of strategic advantage from having a popular open-source
project and charging money necessarily means the project would be less popular
and so of less strategic value.

What this necessarily means is that if there's any legs to this plan,
positioning it as "open source" or to the "open source community" is exactly
the wrong approach, because basically all the people who are successful in
that community will find it a nonstarter. Instead you have to hypothesize that
there's some completely different set of people that can benefit from this
system, writing completely new software (or releasing pre-written software
that isn't currently considered 'open source', e.g., proprietary software). So
your positioning needs to be something like "proprietary 2.0" or even "third
way" rather than being connected with open source.

The real problem with this system is that I'm not sure there's a market on the
buying side. Developers are used to getting things for free, and even if
somebody wrote a source-visible-but-pay-$1k-to-use-it high-quality TLS library
I'm not convinced that people wouldn't just keep wrestling with OpenSSL
because it's free.

I have a whole blog post I'm drafting on this topic, if anyone reading this
comment is interested, give me a shout and I'll give you a preprint.

~~~
pdkl95
This kind of situation where there is a common need for something, but there
isn't a reasonable way to pay for it in individual transactions has a
traditional solution: make the project publicly funded.

As an example, a military is a useful thing to have for protection, but paying
for it as some sort of subscription or "per-invasion" billing is obviously not
a realistic solution. So we fun it publicly, as a tax, which generally
works[1]. Similarly, it might be useful to make a publicly-funded service that
is charged with creating software infrastructure such as TLS or even libc that
are difficult to fund directly.

There are a few advantages to using public funds: unlike traditional Free
Software, as it uses public funds, the output would be _public domain_ , and
usable by anybody, commercial uses included. Also, as it doesn't have to worry
about VC money drying up or "maximizing shareholder value", it would be easier
to stick to a mandate that emphasizes quality instead of time-to-market.

On the other hand, problems with this idea would be the general concerns about
corruption due to political meddling, and how to keep the NSA from pulling a
BULLRUN on it like they did to NIST.

<speculation> Perhaps a "dept. of software infrastructure" could take over the
"defense" side that the NSA seems to be neglecting recently. Moving all
industry interaction (and trust) over to the new, open group so the NSA was
known as spying-only might improve the relationship a bit... </speculation>

I'm not sure if this is a particularly good solution to the problem, but it's
worth considering.

[1] Of course, there are details to argue over and bugs in the system to fix,
just like any complicated project.

~~~
Flimm
There's a free-rider problem if the funding is from a national funding body.
Since software is generally useful globally, the funding body would have to be
international.

~~~
pdkl95
Some sort of international version would be a good idea, if some reasonable
plan could be created.

Regarding "free-riders", consider compatibility and interoperability. Some
amount of "free riding" may be _desired_ if it means you don't have to spend
as much time and effort making things work together. These benefits may not be
as important at the application level, but for infrastructure, these can be
very important features.

------
fidotron
The bigger problem is open source software as a business model incentivises
making the software over complicated, as if it just worked properly there
would be no need for value added services. This is what lies at the core of
the Docker/Rocket fiasco. (And possibly systemd too).

This means that good open source projects almost by definition rely on being
produced in someone's free time, or as a side effect of something else (such
as Rails), because any company funding something they don't directly use will
have some extraction motive which will eventually lead the project into a
quagmire.

~~~
walterbell
This is also a problem with commercial software and maintenance contracts, not
to mention "certified engineers" in the adjacent ecosystem.

~~~
dllthomas
Very much the case - look at Oracle or Cisco.

------
Totient
Looks like a system to setup up assurance contracts for funding software. Glad
to see more people trying to make this sort of thing work.

What's interesting is that you can actually make pledging a dominant strategy,
if you find someone willing to put up enough capital. Roughly speaking,
dominant assurance contracts work along the lines of "Everyone who pledges
will receive X amount of money if the fundraising fails to hit the appropriate
threshold." For anyone who would stand to gain from public good, the outcomes
are now "Pledge: either the project will be funded or I will get money vs
Don't Pledge: either the project will be funded or I will get no money"

[http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/PrivateProvision.pdf](http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/PrivateProvision.pdf)

~~~
dllthomas
That's not quite right - it's "Pledge: either the project is funded and I
spend money, or I get money", vs the "Don't Pledge" you give.

It's still interesting, to be sure.

------
ChuckMcM
I think this is a badly needed capability. But the SSL bug (which is
highlighted) and the Netflix bug, really brought home an interesting question,
"Who is writing your software?"

A company has a whole stable full of developers, but if they are all using the
average of 8.9 open source "components" in their stacks, really there is a
huge software development "organization" that is essential to their business,
larger than their paid employee base, that is both absent from the building
and outside of their control.

Think about that. Its bad enough when your middle managers don't know how the
sausage is made, what about your engineers? And what are you paying the
engineers for anyway? And why are they getting paid essentially to put into
action stuff that other people wrote? Its a very interesting question for me
to think about.

~~~
cubix
> why are they getting paid essentially to put into action stuff that other
> people wrote

Isn't that true of almost every tool in a modern economy with division of
labour, including something as simple as a pencil[1] that you use to jot down
notes?

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil)

~~~
robert_tweed
I may not know how to make a pencil, but I know precisely how a pencil works.
I can be reasonably confident that it is not going to start writing in ink one
day, because an upstream maintainer thought it would be a cool feature.

------
angersock
So, some things that stand in the way of OSS:

In some companies, using OSS or even commercial tools that solve problems is
frowned on if it seems like a better idea to roll a tool in-house. NIH is
_huge_ in many sectors (fighting against this myself at work), and a lot of
the same folks who are reluctant to let other people's code into their work
are also reluctant to give back to the community from which it came.

In certain places, using OSS is a colossal pain in the neck. Certain
enterprise problems are completely unaddressed in various ecosystems, and when
they _are addressed_ (say, Ruby's support of Kerberos and LDAP) they are
usually just addressing the one or two pain points that that dev had at the
time. People are usually not willing to _properly_ solve a problem given
limited time and resources.

Even if they _are_ willing to exert effort, many ecosystems can be completely
unhelpful and unwilling to give people with domain expertise the support they
need to make meaningful contributions. As an example of this, working on a
small math library for the new language Elixir, I had at least one person (in
an otherwise amazing and friendly IRC channel) continually asking "Wait, why
are you doing any type of numerical stuff in Elixir?". Now, imagine that kind
of reaction to enterprise features ( _much_ harder to get right!) in a
different language, and you start to see why things are the way they are.

I don't know if there are any ways of _fixing_ this other than just doing it
for the sheer joy of helping other programmers and knowing that, someday
somewhere in some ledger, your effort will be rewarded--or at least marked as
legacy some other sod has to work around. :)

~~~
zanny
> People are usually not willing to properly solve a problem given limited
> time and resources.

They are solving their own problems. It is bad enough when people are
shoveling snow for everyone else for free, to think they would do it while
their car is not stuck would be ludicrous.

In that context, the _only_ incentive that works is compensation for ones
labors. If they want Rubys support of authentication protocols to improve,
they have to do it themselves, or pledge some money and hope enough companies
do it to pay for it to be done.

> imagine that kind of reaction to enterprise features

At least in the context of numericals, I think it is more "dont make a new
snowdrift where there isn't one already, and we have already mostly gotten rid
of a similar one in the numpy ecosystem". When free software developer
resources are already incredibly scarce, them being wasted on project
duplication sucks. Albeit, implementing features for certain programming
languages is one of the least bad duplicated efforts.

> someday somewhere in some ledger, your effort will be rewarded

The whole point of the article is that being listed in the contributors file
is not enough for 99% of developers and the 1% that do volunteer like that are
being (voluntarily) exploited for their labor as a result, and software a a
whole cannot sustain like that.

------
bkirwi
It always seemed to me like the academic-style sabbatical was a nice solution
to this. Instead of trying to convince a bunch of people that what you're
going to do is going to be worthwhile, you develop a culture where capable
people are regularly given time to work on whatever they think is important.

Clojure's a nice example: it's been hugely successful, but I have a hard time
imagining anyone raising two years' worth of salary up front to work on their
idea for an idiosyncratic Lisp implementation. It looks like he had to fund
that work himself; how much more innovation would you see if this kind of
extended project was common?

~~~
tree_of_item
Perhaps a basic income would be a more general solution than Snowdrift.

~~~
quadrangle
Absolutely! Implementing a Basic Income takes more political power than
starting a webite though.

~~~
dllthomas
I think there's actually room for Snowdrift even with a Basic Income -
particularly if it's not a crazy high Basic Income.

------
javajosh
tldr: matching pledges to fund FOSS at
[https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/intro](https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/intro).
"Snowdrift" is a reference to a game theoretic game similar to the prisoner's
dilemma.

My take: solid idea, terrible name and URL, and also it won't succeed unless
some big, respected FOSS names endorse it.

~~~
dllthomas
What don't you like about the name?

I think it 1) invokes "things piling up", 2) references relevant game theory
in two ways, and 3) draws attention to the fact we're organized as a
cooperative. All of which seem a good fit for what we're doing.

------
lucozade
To offer a contrary view:

I think the economics of software commons has been stunningly successful. It's
substantially lowered the bar of entry for a large class of businesses and
non-profit organisations.

It's great that people are experimenting with financial reward systems that
are between free and fully commercial. The more the better as it's not at all
obvious which ones will stick. I think it has the propensity to increase the
number of people actively involved in this work.

Even better it may open up new types of activity e.g. independent open source
software auditing.

But I don't feel that Heartbleed etc demonstrate a systemic failure in
economics. The seismic shifting in attitudes to privacy/security that have
happened over the last few years appear to be largely orthogonal to the
funding models.

~~~
rectang
I find it rewarding to volunteer at one of the big open source software
foundations because the time I put in working on project governance,
licensing, policy and so on ripples out through hundreds of projects and into
the broader FOSS ecosystem. We're way better at what we do than we were even a
few years ago, and one result is that there are far more people getting paid
to work on FOSS.

Expertise on the administrative aspects of open source also makes me more
valuable as an employee, because I can help my employer to consume and
contribute to FOSS safely and efficiently. I recommend that anyone with the
knack get involved.

------
mwsherman
Asking why popular software isn’t well funded is backwards. The question is,
why is underfunded software popular?

Lots of under- and unfunded software is of poor quality and is ignored. Why is
some of it (like OpenSSL) not ignored?

I don’t even think there is a market argument here, it’s much more pedestrian:
a lot of people, based on social proof, use OpenSSL – which, short of becoming
a crypto expert oneself, is entirely reasonable.

------
thmcmahon
This is the same economic problem that affects basic research. Open source
software is a 'public good' \- its usefulness is not diminished when it is
used by others, and you can't prevent others from using it.

The longstanding solution to this problem is government support. This might
not be a sexy solution on HN, but it is the obvious one.

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
I agree it would make sense, but is the real problem not how to allocate that
money?

Who decides how much the Postgres guys get, or if its worth to support yet
another NoSQL store? Involving politics seems like a surefire way into
mediocrity. How to get around that?

~~~
edraferi
Maybe the government could provide the funding as a Tax Credit for donations
to platforms like snowdrift.coop, just like donating to other non-profits
works. Companies / Individuals would make their own decisions about what to
support, and the government would foot the bill through them.

Obviously the government would create a class of acceptable organizations to
donate too, rather than designating a single platform / portal. In this way it
would be just like the new crowd equity system.

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
I like that idea, power to the people.

If there was a way to do so without complicating my tax filings, that would be
even better.

------
zzzeek
It's tough for companies to fund individual open source developers using
"contribution" kinds of models, because now they are essentially paying
someone for services in such a way that is entirely outside the bounds of the
usual employment agreements, either at-will, full time employment or via a
contractor agreement. It opens them up for a variety of legal liabilities.

This is why the bigger projects start up complicated 501c organizations, which
from my research appear to be quite burdensome to administer and also place
restrictions on the project itself as to what circumstances money can be
accepted.

------
motters
A thought occurs to me that maybe public software could be funded by the
public, via taxation. I don't think that would be any kind of panacea, because
you can see what happens with other publicly funded things, but it's worth
consideration - especially if public software is considered vital to the rest
of the economy.

~~~
gargantian
Great idea in theory, but as you fear I think this would quickly be
bastardized into more private military-industrial complex funding.

I would expect a tax-funded OpenSSL to be developed mostly in secret, in
cooperation with the NSA, to be extremely expensive to develop/maintain, and
to most definitely have backdoors.

~~~
motters
Yes, I think you're right. It is probably better for most public software to
be independently produced, outside of the context of companies or governments.

Another way to tackle the problem might be to ensure that people who want to
make public software have the time to do so, because that's usually the main
limiting factor with any sort of volunteering.

------
oofabz
I don't believe we have failed. We have simply not yet succeeded. It's not
like things used to be great, and then got screwed up. The tools and libraries
we have now are so much better than they were ten years ago, and infinitely
better than they were twenty years ago. We have been making steady progress
and will continue to do so.

Sure, it could be going faster if someone threw more money at the problem. But
right now there are thousands of top-tier developers working on tooling for
the rest of us. Intel, Redhat, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and many others pay
full time developers to work on important open source projects. Things are
looking pretty good, we just need more time.

------
WalterBright
I'd get out and shovel simply because it's more interesting than sitting in
the car, bored and getting cold.

Also, I contribute to open source because I intensely enjoy it - far more than
writing software I was paid to write.

~~~
quadrangle
Indeed, and everyone thanks you for it, but others enjoy freeriding. I think
the actual game-theory is clearly simplistic. You could think of it more as
being at home and having work to do rather than go shovel, so it costs you in
other ways. It's not just shovel or be passive and wait.

------
BenoitEssiambre
This is cool. You can then phrase your plea for donations as something like:
"Every 10 dollars you pledge makes others give us up to $100, your donation
has 10x power!"

Also you could use with the fact that at the beginning of a campaign, your
pledge doesn't have much multiplicative power but doesn't cost you much while
at the end it costs you the full amount but you get huge multiplicative power.

------
phillmv
I had this idea earlier this year and investigating how to seriously pursue it
was in my 2015 todo list. Great to see other people moving on this.

------
ssivark
I think it would be great for both Snowdrift and Wikipedia if Wikipedia
endorses Snowdrift and attempts using the platform to raise funds.

------
Sanddancer
I think this is the beginning of an interesting idea, however, the specific
funding aspect seems like we could end up with the same dilemma, where people
fund flashiness instead of the boring infrastructure projects. I'd rather see
effort made for a sort of United Way for open source, where you give money,
and their accountants audit projects, and give to groups based on need and
value to the community.

Furthermore, I think this is a place where we need outreach to more than
coders. This is a good start, but getting donations, and doing all the
bookkeeping can be a pain if you're a non-profit. So having accountants
willing to sit down with projects and getting things in order so they can set
up as a non profit will make companies more willing to donate because they can
write it off on their taxes; being a 501(c)3 from the beginning makes that
process a lot easier.

~~~
walterbell
See [https://sfconservancy.org](https://sfconservancy.org)

------
codeshaman
Most software that we write depends on one or more 'free' libraries that we
embed into our projects (eg. express.js, libopenssl, CocoaLumberjack or
jquery). Maybe your project is impossible without a certain library or maybe
it saved you weeks or months of work. The fact is, we build on the work of
others, who give it away for free. They make our ideas possible.

Concept: The people who developed the libraries are part of my team. Just like
the people who contribute code to my project.

If we look at it that way, it becomes a lot easier to determine how OSS should
be funded.

If my project gets a donation from a satisfied user or company, wouldn’t it be
morally correct to ‘forward’ a slice of that to some of the libraries which
make my project possible ? It wouldn’t just be morally correct, it would be a
great satisfaction to be able to share the user’s generosity with them.

------
tim333
Snowdrift.coop is an interesting idea but I'm not sure how well it would work
in practice. If you consider his example of improving on open SSL I guess
you'd get a bunch of companies saying we'll chip in say $10k as long as other
companies do too. Then assuming that happens you'd have a money to pay some
developers but that might not actually result in a better SSL. Just raising
money does not necessarily produce good software.

In practice a lot of stuff seems to get funded by corporate sponsors or
corporations just building stuff and making it open. Examples -

Rust - funded by Mozilla and perhaps the project most likely to lead to better
SSL and similar?

Go, V8 etc - Google

OpenSSL - contributed to by Nokia, Huawei and others

Maybe Snowdrift can do better? Maybe not?

~~~
quadrangle
Ongoing donations helps with accountability. But otherwise, funding isn't a
guarantee or anything. But if you look at where good software is, _really_
good and robust, you don't find it from totally underfunded projects. Mozilla
is way better funded than most other free/open software.

------
logn
I don't think libre or open source is broken. I think some projects are
broken. I think other projects are those people simply don't like, don't want
to fund, and have to use because there are no other options. With some
creativity and planning, open source projects can be self-sustaining, but they
have about the same success rate as any other startup. The upside is that all
progress doesn't evaporate when an open source project fails, it gets forked
or consultants can transition people to new tools.

------
holri
If our society values sharing and condemn selfish behavior everything would be
ok. But at the moment our neo liberalism capitalism values none cooperative
egoists.

It is our ideas and virtues that have to change.

~~~
quadrangle
One step at a time. Showing people that others also care is huge. It's easy
when isolated to feel helpless. Big corporate multinationals are all connected
and have strong business ties and networks and work to actively divide
consumers so that we just choose what to buy when we go to the big box store
or surf Amazon etc. That's why cooperatives are so important, and we need more
of them on a large scale on the internet.

------
vgrichina
IMO the problem isn't that there are less resources dedicated to open source
stuff than to commercial projects. The problem is that there is much less
effort and especially polish dedicated to any not user facing aspescts of
software. Internal libraries are almost certainly even more half-baked and
full of shitty code than most open source projects.

------
davidw
Ideas like this have been around for a while, but never seemed to take off.
Maybe in the era of kickstarter and similar things, it's more likely to
succeed.

It's likely to work better for existing projects that need extra work, though,
because it's not going to be easy to get people involved in something that
doesn't even exist as a proof of concept.

~~~
quadrangle
Indeed, Snowdrift.coop says it's really for existing projects, not for new
initiatives. It's not for Kickstarting.

------
vrnut
It seems to require technical talent having a conversation with project
managers for their company to pay other people to be open source developers.

I think in most cases technical talent that would care about these underlying
issues would rather try to become open source developers themselves.

~~~
derf_
Then why wouldn't they have a conversation with project managers for their
company to pay _them_ to be open source developers, instead of other people?

------
easytiger
I don't think I've ever read an opinion piece where I so completely disagree
with every single point made or believed the author has completely inversely
represented the reality he is trying to change. Interesting. Perhaps when I
get home I shall expound on it.

------
GFK_of_xmaspast
I thought the free market was supposed to be the most efficient allocation of
resources.

~~~
forgottenpass
It all depends on how you define "efficient." Vague proclamations about the
market like this often hold utility in narrow contexts, but abstracted as a
general rule rely on circular reasoning.

------
PaulHoule
The quadratic growth dynamic for individuals looks dangerous to me. Change the
x to x^2 in the exponential growth equation and you get a singularity.

~~~
jerf
I don't think it's quadratic for individuals. Individuals give (base + incr *
other_pledgers)... the total donated grows "quadratically", but for the
pledgers it's just linear growth based on the number of other donators. Since
pledges are bounded per-user, it's subquadratic as the project starts hitting
the pledge limits of their users. (Which makes sense since of course all the
accounts have to balance and users aren't going to be willing to write blank
checks.)

~~~
Mikhail_Edoshin
Yes, they say that the amount grows "up to the amount you have in your
Snowdrift.coop account which you of course control".

------
rumcajz
Not being paid is integral part of open source development. It keeps the
incentives to produce quality, lean code straight.

~~~
forgottenpass
Open source isn't entirely a labor of love, there are people that do get paid
for their open source development. Unless you're ready to back up your claim
with analysis of contribution quality based on employment status I could just
as easily point to different properties of the open-source model as the
driving factor.

~~~
rumcajz
No, I don't have statistical data, but I've experienced both sides in person.

The crucial difference is sensitivity to ROI.

When not paid, every hour spent programming is an hour not spent with your
family, not spent attending to your hobbies, not spent resting or sleeping.
Thus you do your best to keep everything as lean as possible.

When being paid, keeping things lean is still a nice idea, but you don't care
that much any more. After all, you are going to spend same amount of hours on
the project whether you keep it lean or not.

------
sesteel
If anybody is interested in exploring anything like a 'gitcoin' please message
me.

------
Ono-Sendai
An alternative: pay for open source software development out of tax revenues.

~~~
paulhauggis
I disagree with this. There are only a handful of OSS projects that are
acceptable and I don't trust anyone in government to make a decision on which
ones to fund with my tax dollars.

If you need funding for a project, go commercial or have a commercial
counterpart. The market will decide which ones get funded and which ones
don't.

~~~
poulson
Academic research is funded through taxpayer money, and, as an academic, I can
assure you that much of it has a much lower impact than many open source
projects.

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snarfy
It's a free software problem. Software would be funded if it was paid for.

~~~
quadrangle
Well, exactly. The entire issue only applies when talking about public goods.
Proprietary software is not a public good.

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Matrixik
There is also gratipay.com (formerly Gittip)

~~~
quadrangle
Snowdrift.coop discusses Gratipay (which they say mostly supportive things) in
their review of all the other crowdfunding sites
[https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/othercrowdfunding](https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/othercrowdfunding)

------
yournemesis
tl;dr Arby's sells horrible roast-beef sandwiches

------
maerF0x0
[https://snowdrift.tilt.com/launch-snowdrift-
coop/checkout/pa...](https://snowdrift.tilt.com/launch-snowdrift-
coop/checkout/payment?amount=100000000000000000000000&reward=0)

