
Software Below the Poverty Line - fold_left
https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html
======
felixrieseberg
Electron maintainer here.

Most of the maintainers are being paid to maintain Electron full-time. I've
worked in jobs before where you got to do "some open source during work
hours", but in the case of Electron, most of our people are specifically paid
to work on Electron.

Yes, absolutely, find and use more ways to fund Open Source, but describing
Electron as a project below the poverty line is plain incorrect. Yes, we too
need funding, but that description strikes me as inaccurate and thus
problematic.

"Below the poverty line" means something, doesn't apply to Electron, and
saying it because it sounds good trivializes a problem in a world where 1/7
children in the US live _actually_ below the poverty line.

~~~
ghawk1ns
Does Electron have another revenue stream that isn't accounted for here? Are
the full-time employees paid a wage above the poverty line? If so then yeah,
this doesn't make sense.

But I think the sentiment isn't trivializing, that 1 child out of 7 might have
a parent who works on one of these projects.

~~~
felixrieseberg
> Are the full-time employees paid a wage above the poverty line?

Yes, very much so. It's tech. We're all really, really lucky.

~~~
thatoneuser
I really respect people who work in impressive tech jobs who can admit this.

------
vortico
I tell every entrepreneur that asks me for advice that the donation model for
any business gets no more than 1-10% (depending on the industry) compared to a
business model of selling commercial software. This is the difference between
poverty and 6-figures. The open-source model is good for launching your own
career, but you should avoid trying to make the career the open-source project
itself.

The open-core model is a good alternative if you wish to be around open-source
software. Or make your project de-facto standard and charge for consulting.
Or, you can make an entirely commercial project that uses and contributes to
open-source projects. That way, you are surrounded by open-source and can help
them _financially_ to add features you need.

~~~
kemitchell
Consider public-private licensing. Choose a license that requires sharing
back, or limits to noncommercial use, and sell individual exceptions to that
rule. [https://indieopensource.com/public-
private/indies](https://indieopensource.com/public-private/indies)

~~~
lliamander
Just remember: a license which limits the use (even commercial use) of
software is not a free software/open source license.

People may use whatever license they wish, but it's important to be clear
about what is (and is not) FOSS.

~~~
slang800
That is untrue.

The term "free software" was effectively coined by RMS & The Free Software
Foundation. It is used explicitly when referring to copyleft licenses, which
restrict certain uses of the licensed software in order to protect user
freedoms. You can argue that other people use the term in other ways, but the
most commonly accepted definition is the one used by the FSF.

The term "open source" is somewhat vague. Software that is merely "open
source" is not necessarily licensed in a way that allows
redistribution/modification. The only thing guaranteed about "open source"
software is that you can read the source.

~~~
unimpressive
>The only thing guaranteed about "open source" software is that you can read
the source.

'Open Source' was/is a rebranding of the term 'Free Software' to make it
easier to sell to suits. Eric Raymond has said as much about his invention of
the phrase. The idea that it's just about "being able to read the source" is
wrong. It's not vague at all, you just didn't do your research.

[https://opensource.org/osd-annotated](https://opensource.org/osd-annotated)

~~~
lliamander
Quibble: ESR did not coin (nor did he claim to coin) open source, that honor
goes to Christine Peterson.

Otherwise, I concur.

------
gregdoesit
I find the author’s view puzzling. For open source projects that have the goal
to become profitable and have full-time staff working on them, there are
plenty that make this happen. For example, Ghost (the blog engine) via
providing sourcing. RedHat similarly provided services and consulting on top
of their open source contributions. Databricks, founded by the creators of
Spark, is a unicorn.

The author is looking at the wrong type of metric. Expecting that every open
source project on Github will get donations to pay each contributor a full-
time salary is nonsense.

Also, on top of the value add services profitability route, the article does
not take into account how many companies have full time employees contribute
to open source as part of their working hours - a very tangible open source
investment. While the author asks for companies to donate 0.5% or more of
their profits to open source projects, I work at an unprofitable unicorn
(Uber) which is a heavy contributor to open source itself and my team
contributes to open source as part of our work: both to other projects, as
well as open sourcing tools and improvements we built.

The same can be said for some of the most popular open source projects.
Angular? Originally by Google engineers, on Google company time. Tensorflow?
Also Google. React? Built by Facebook. Atom? By Github. And the list continues
with many-many projects.

~~~
cryptica
>> The same can be said for some of the most popular open source projects.
Angular? Originally by Google engineers, on Google company time. Tensorflow?
Also Google. React? Built by Facebook. Atom? By Github. And the list continues
with many-many projects.

It's not a coincidence that most popular open source projects come from big
corporations. Their popularity has more to do with capital and social networks
than actual merit. Also, I'm highly skeptical of open source projects which
come out of corporations; their primary goal is not to help people, it's to
gain mind-share and control.

There is not an ounce of altruism in corporations.

~~~
abdullahkhalids
To follow up on your point, this is the real reason FAANG write open source
software [https://www.gwern.net/Complement](https://www.gwern.net/Complement)

------
ricardobeat
Unpopular opinion: this is absolute non-sense. If you want to create a
commercial organization to maintain a project, by all means go ahead, but the
idea that all open-source work should be paid for in equal terms is not
healthy in the long term.

The community aspect used to be the most enjoyable part of open-source, and I
gladly donated (a lot of) my own time. It’s about people coming together
around a common need - if there’s enough demand more people will join in. I
loathe the current state of marketing/funding/clout based OSS where projects
become institutions of their own and break the natural attention balance.

~~~
devoply
> is not healthy in the long term.

Healthy for whom? Creator of Vue.js pulls in like 240k. Every open source
contributor of any sort of popular project should be getting at least that
much through various deals or pull the plug. Hold your software hostage, get
freeloaders to pay a pittance for it. Ridiculous that so many billion dollar
companies use these things and feel no obligation to sustain their development
and have a mechanism set in place to do that automatically or as a part of due
course of using that software.

~~~
andrey_utkin
Coming from ex-USSR country, I really don't get people who shake their fists
saying that somebody is not fairly compensated, and deserves more, and
somebody (rich businesses and enemies of nation obviously) should pay for it.
Venezuela waits for you, evil capitalists are defeated here, and govt takes
care of everyone.

> Every open source contributor of any sort of popular project should be
> getting at least that much through various deals

If they don't have such deals, who is to blame? Users who are busy with their
life, take a lot of things for granted and don't think much about thousands of
FOSS libraries and apps they use every day? Government which doesn't subsidize
FOSS contributors? Or maybe contributors themselves who are sloppy at selling
themselves and getting deals?

> Ridiculous that so many billion dollar companies use these things and feel
> no obligation

Maybe exactly because FOSS is about terms which allow such use, and enable
companies to build business models on that?

~~~
devoply
I suggested a simple solution for the problem. Ask users to meet a certain
fund raising goal and if they don't come up with it, either stop working on
the project, or pull it entirely and let them worry about it. This is a
capitalist approach to the problem of capitalists exploiting communists.
Better approach is probably not license your stuff under exploitative licenses
and put clauses in there for bigger companies using your work.

~~~
Applejinx
The problem here is, nothing you can possibly do is worth more than money to a
dedicated capitalist who already has tons of money.

You can do stuff they exploit, or not. Doesn't change the relative size of the
pool of money from your true userbase (likely much smaller), and nothing you
do can force the capitalist to buy into your code at a less-exploitative
license.

They can and will just pass. And you can pressure your users in a wide number
of ways: they are the same dark patterns used by proprietary, totally-closed
software. You can become that to get paid… or, more accurately, you can become
that, try to squeeze blood from a stone, and find out whether you can torture
your users into providing you with the level of luxury you see fit.

This is not the motivation of Free Software, and is barely the motivation of
Open Source. Might as well just be proprietary and be done with it. All this
works on many levels and money/compensation is only one of the levels.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Ah, an issue close to my heart. I work full-time on open source, making my
money from three places:

1\. Donations directly via Patreon, Liberapay, and fosspay[0]

2\. Paid subscriptions on Sourcehut [1]

3\. Part-time consulting gigs [2]

[0] [https://drewdevault.com/donate](https://drewdevault.com/donate)

[1] [https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-
discuss/%3C2019042616072...](https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-
discuss/%3C20190426160729.GC1351%40homura.localdomain%3E)

[2] [https://drewdevault.com/consulting](https://drewdevault.com/consulting)
(numbers undisclosed)

With 1 & 2 alone, I'd be making about $34,000. Not poverse, but I am preparing
to move into a 200 sq ft apartment in a couple of months. Consulting gigs help
a lot - working on these anywhere from 0-24 hours a week brings me up to a
comfortable standard of living.

I think what helps is that I'm a person, not a project. By working on lots of
different projects, I get a lot of different people interested in paying for
my work. The income from any of my ventures alone would not pay me a livable
wage.

I've put a lot of thought into how to make money from FOSS, if anyone has
questions or wants to send me their thoughts, I'm listening.

~~~
pnathan
Question: do you see your income being suitable to live a decent lifestyle in
the USA when supporting a family(1-2 kids) - paying for their healthcare
insurance, other misc bills?

Rationale: if a career line can't sustain supporting a family, I usually think
it's a gigantic waste of time ( _as a a full-time career_ ) for the average
person (who will want to have a family and pay for their medical care).

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Maybe? It depends on how well Sourcehut does. Or, if I focused on consulting,
I could probably make a very good living. If I were able to secure full-time
contracts (i.e. 40 hours a week) at my usual consulting rates, I would be a
wealthy man.

However, at the moment raising a family isn't a goal I have in mind. And I
wouldn't characterize a desire to have kids as "average" \- the birth rate is
in freefall in the entire developed world and fewer people are planning on
having children today than at any other point in history.

------
JackFr
I find the author's attitude maddening. People writing open-source software
are not being exploited. People writing open-source software have
alternatives. They can simply stop writing open-source software.

It does a disservice to the millions of people on the planet who do not have
alternatives, and who are truly being exploited.

~~~
staltz
Author here. "People writing open source software are not being exploited."
Well, I got the curiosity to check the data _after_ having just met with
people writing open source software. So I think if you make that claim, you
should back it up with at least non-zero evidence. I have done my part.

~~~
solidasparagus
Okay. You claim that Electron is a below-the-poverty-line project - one of the
projects where people are being 'exploited'. Electron is a GitHub project and
GitHub got acquired for $7.5B. That doesn't seem particularly 'exploited' to
me.

(Why you compare GitHub's acquisition price to the amount of money being put
into open-source instead of seeing it as money being put into open-source is
beyond me)

~~~
staltz
On Electron, I wrote this in my article:

> ... such as Prettier, Curl, Jekyll, Electron. This doesn’t mean the people
> working on those projects are poor, because in several cases the maintainers
> have jobs at companies that allow open source contributions.

Then,

> Why you compare GitHub's acquisition price to the amount of money being put
> into open-source instead of seeing it as money being put into open-source is
> beyond me.

Because Microsoft, as a public company, cannot make an acquisition the size of
20% their profit that year without a clear plan for ROI on that cost, and this
will likely happen through some integration with Azure, since the GitHub CEO
reports to Microsoft's VP of Cloud and Enterprise. And even if GitHub is seen
as a platform that supports open source (therefore money into the platform
being a positive for open source), it is weird and unfair for a support
partner to earn significantly more money than the core persons involved in
open source.

~~~
solidasparagus
How are the Electron project creators and core contributors not 'the core
persons involved in open source'?

My point is that it's like saying "software developers don't make much money
when you exclude corporate salaries and stock bonuses". These open source
developers are nowhere near the poverty line and coming to a conclusion that
these projects aren't sustainable doesn't make much sense.

Edit: maybe your point is that the donation model isn't sustainable. But it
reads like you are trying to make a bigger statement about open source
sustainability given statements like:

"I was able to calculate how much yearly revenue for a project goes to each
“full-time equivalent” contributor. This is essentially their salary"

"More than 50% of projects are red: they cannot sustain their maintainers
above the poverty line"

"Unless companies take an active role in supporting open source with
significant funding, what’s left is a situation where most open source
maintainers are severely underfunded." (this reads to me like 'unless you
include salary and stock, software developers are poor')

~~~
staltz
> How are the Electron project creators and core contributors not 'the core
> persons involved in open source'?

I didn't say that and would not have agreed to saying that.

Notice what I did say, though:

> "Unless companies take an active role in supporting open source with
> significant funding"

When a company has employees working on an open source project, such as
Electron, that is an active role in supporting open source.

There are different projects, some are internal company infrastructure that
was open sourced (React, Electron, Angular, etc), and some are built by
hobbyists/indies (Unified, Prettier, Core-js, etc). Companies definitely take
a good active role in the first type, and less so in the second type. However,
quite often there are projects of the second type being used as dependencies
in projects of the first type, as well as in proprietary software, of course.
This is why I raise the need for even more company active involvement in open
source. It's more about requiring their participation in the culture of
gifting (because open source is a commons), than it is about requiring
specific donations on specific projects on a transactional basis. In my
article I address why companies typically don't participate in open source
commons: because companies have a financial brain that guides them towards
profit and competitiveness, not gifting. This is why we must "rewrite some
rules of society".

~~~
solidasparagus
> It is weird and unfair for a support partner [GitHub] to earn significantly
> more money than the core persons involved in open source

>> How are the Electron project creators and core contributors not 'the core
persons involved in open source'?

>>> I didn't say that and would not have agreed to saying that.

?

> requiring their participation in the culture of gifting

If it's required, it's not really gifting, is it?

> why companies typically don't participate in open source commons

Open source has never been better supported by corporations. Billions
(probably tens of billions) of dollars are being poured in to open source.
redis was a hobbyist project and now it's backed by over $100M in corporate
money.

I just very much dislike this view that open source is in a bad place because
it doesn't fit some moral judgement of how money should work in open source.
It's like Stallman's campaign for 'freedom' as long as your view of 'freedom'
is exactly the same as his.

------
module0000
I've worked for 2(out of many) employers that allowed me to spend significant
time committing our improvements and modifications upstream to open source
projects we used in-house. This was _very_ enjoyable, and I wish more
employers behaved that way.

One of the enjoyable aspects of this practice, was during the selection
process for "what software do we want to use?". I didn't have to select only
open source projects which were " _almost_ a perfect fit, with XYZ problems we
can live with". Instead, I got to select software with (to me) better
criteria:

* what are the upstream devs like to work with?

* what is the future of this project?

* is this project something we would be proud of our association with?

* working on this project, will myself or my team be exposed to new skills and technology?

~~~
nerdponx
I think part of the problem is that a lot of big, "old school" companies seem
to think their code is special. Every shell script, every ugly library, every
half-functional API is some precious gem of intellectual property to be
hoarded and protected at all costs.

We, of course, know that's completely ridiculous. But try convincing your
manager that.

~~~
p0nce
Hits close to home. Many closed sources libraries are nowhere near the level
of _documentation_, quality, and collaboration that is routinely expected of
open-source software.

------
base698
_" The results I found were shocking: there were two clearly sustainable open
source projects, but the majority (more than 80%) of projects that we usually
consider sustainable are actually receiving income below industry standards or
even below the poverty threshold."_

This is a general principal of the world. Almost everything, including
customers, getting dates, and wealth follow the same pattern: Pareto.

There's even a Bible verse:

 _Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever
does not have, even what they have will be taken from them._

Matthew 13:12

May be more interesting to compare the jobs allowing open source contributions
at the top of the scale.

Or put another way: comments closer to the top attract more karma than those
at the bottom.

~~~
sn41
Please do not use the quote from the Bible in an inappropriate context.

Matthew 13:11 is

He replied, "Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has
been given to you, but not to them.

The context makes it clear that 13:12 is talking about spiritual
possessions/riches, and not an endorsement of the 1 percent. Camel, eye of the
needle, not serving God and mammon etc. all deal with this.

~~~
karlmcguire
Luke 19:26 repeats the line but within the context of money. It certainly
isn't an "endorsement of the 1 percent", but more a statement of truth
observed in virtually every human domain.

~~~
sn41
I do agree. But ever since Malcom Gladwell popularised the "Matthew effect", I
am sad that an-out-of context quote is used to justify the promotion of
deliberate cold-blooded apathy towards inequality. Whereas it is very clear in
other contexts that the New Testament discourages accumulation of wealth.
(Disclaimer: I am not a Christian, but read the Bible and other scriptures
regularly).

------
linuxhansl
My company pays me handsomely for working - in part - on Open Source projects.

It's kind of the reverse of what's described here, I do not live off donations
to the project, instead I "donate" some of my paid time to the Open Source
project... That way my company, the Open Source projects, and myself benefit.

What I do benefits other users of those projects and we benefit from other
contributions.

Open Source is about sharing ideas and code, not about living off a project.
IMHO at least.

------
SolaceQuantum
_" The results I found were shocking: there were two clearly sustainable open
source projects, but the majority (more than 80%) of projects that we usually
consider sustainable are actually receiving income below industry standards or
even below the poverty threshold."_

I fear that open source is actually just the tech industry's group of
underfunded-but-vital-infrastructures that are constantly either forced to
work for poverty pay or go corporate/private(and externalize the costs to
society as a whole). Similar to single-payer healthcare systems, domestic
violence sheltering, child protection, pet shelters, and education systems.

Specifically that I fear once these entities try demand to be paid what
they're worth, there will be criticism and controversy.

~~~
lostmymind66
"I fear that open source is actually just the tech industry's group of
underfunded-but-vital-infrastructures that are constantly either forced to
work for poverty pay or go corporate/private(and externalize the costs to
society"

The whole idea of open source is to share your code with the world without
expecting payment. These developers can just as easily release a commercial
app with appropriate licensing.

"Specifically that I fear once these entities try demand to be paid what
they're worth, there will be criticism and controversy."

Once someone gets used to free, they will be shocked when you decode to give
them a bill one day. In some sense, the open source community has devalued
their own worth by giving software away for free for decades.

It's a bit like the copyright infringement discussions I see so often on HN:
Most of these companies would have never paid for open source in the first
place, so we shouldn't really consider it a loss of money/revenue.

------
UglyToad
I just don't _get_ this discussion. And part of it worries me.

Open source isn't what you do to get vc funding, it's not what you do to build
a unicorn (it shouldn't be). It's in the name, open source, it's a charitable
act.

I worry this attempt to commercialise open source is corrupting it. For sure a
lot of companies derive a lot of value from open source software but the user
is irrelevant to the act of open sourcing something.

The problem, if you believe there is one, is that work that genuinely delivers
benefit for society, is not rewarded economically. While the rich have more
money than they can feasibly spend. The problem then is actually how we
structure the economy and society, instead of applying a sticking plaster of
commercialisation around open source and getting upset when big companies use
the software under the licence available to all users, or relying on generous
patronage, why not envision a society in which delivering valuable software
for free is treated as more valuable than building Uber for dogwalking.

I haven't fully structured my thoughts around this so they're still half baked
but it seems we're discussing the problem from the wrong angle?

~~~
Applejinx
Yeah they are, but it's a marketing problem.

I'm working on it directly as I am a fairly influential (in my small pond) OSS
developer working for less than the poverty line (thank goodness I live in the
boonies, plus I've been fortunate)

You have to SHOW the benefit and continually make that case that you are doing
something beneficial, and that you are doing it open, that you are in fact
giving it away as speech that can be taken and restated and rephrased and
reused, becoming a broadening language.

The marketing angle is to continue to do this publically, in contrast to the
'rich and big companies' who absolutely try to exploit everyone and
everything, and are horrible to work with or for.

You can't stop them being rich, or exploitative, or even from having a lot of
power. But you can make people ask 'why are we using those things again?'
because to exploit at that level, competitively, involves pressuring people
really hard and taking their stuff away. It feels bad and looks bad.

You can do open source and be truly kind. You must start out wealthy enough
that you can survive it, because so far people still align themselves with the
power, they still will tend to side with the big company or whoever wields
more money. That's basic human nature: animal, even.

But we can get 'em asking questions and being open to sharing and cooperative
behavior… because that is ALSO human nature.

------
cryptica
As the open source author of a popular project (5 years old and over 5K stars
on GitHub), I can relate the problem but at the same time, I think that some
solutions could make the problem even worse.

There are actually two 'fairness' issues in open source and from my experience
each one is as bad as the other:

1\. Fairness in terms of projects getting the amount of attention that they
deserve.

2\. Fairness in financial terms.

If corporations start donating and drawing attention to some projects more
than others, it will cause both problems to worsen. This is because open
source projects which are backed by a lot of funding and have strong
connections with corporations tend to naturally draw more attention and thus
funding because developers and bloggers are more likely to talk, write and
tweet about them (regardless of actual merit). It reinforces the importance of
social connections and turns an otherwise honorable and altruistic pursuit
into a social-climbing financial scheme.

TBH, I'd prefer it if corporations did not get involved at all. If they did, I
could only pray that my project would get its fair share of funding. The
unfortunate reality of capitalism is that some people will get very lucky but
it's just not going to be you. Luck is often paid for at the expense of
others; if your competitor gets lucky and walks into a pile of a few million
dollars, that's very bad luck for you. Corporations already took the
meritocracy out of tech startups, it would be a shame if they also took the
meritocracy out of open source (more than they already have).

Open source is very far from a meritocracy but it's probably the closest thing
possible to it in the tech industry and we should keep it that way. The best
way to do this is to keep the big money out.

------
lacker
Some of this data doesn't seem right.

For example, the author lists Gatsby as "below poverty threshold". However,
Gatsby raised $3.8M recently.
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gatsby-e828](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gatsby-e828)
I'm pretty sure they are able to pay people better than poverty wages.

Another important omission is that many developers contribute to open source
as part of their work for a larger company. The core React team, for example,
is primarily working for Facebook. They spend a lot of their time working on
Facebook-internal things, but a lot of their effort is going towards the open
source community as well.

The real lesson here is that the OpenCollective model (where these numbers
come from) is not where most of the funding for open source engineering is
coming from. Most of the money paid to open source software engineers comes
from companies that produce open source code as a byproduct of their main
mission, like Microsoft building TypeScript or Google building Go.

------
jrochkind1
I think historically (like over the last 30 years) most successful open source
projects have been maintained by people who have jobs for companies which do
other things as their primary function and revenue producing business (whether
non-software 'enterprise' or other software products; or academic/non-profit),
who work on the open source _on company time_.

While I think there may be structural reasons that this is harder to do now
(including increased complexity of software, and companies more ruthlessly
chasing 'efficiency'), it seems important to at least include in the
discussion.

For instance, OP says:

> Only accept jobs at companies that donate a significant portion of their
> profit (at least 0,5%) to open source, or companies which don’t
> fundamentally depend on open source for their products

OK, but how about "or companies that have employees, ideally including you,
spending a significant amount of on-the-clock time originating, maintaining,
or contributing to open source." Is this not mentioned because it somehow
seems even less 'realistic' than companies donating 0.5% of profit to open
source?

~~~
staltz
Author here. Actually I did mention in the article that company time was a
good option:

> This doesn’t mean the people working on those projects are poor, because in
> several cases the maintainers have jobs at companies that allow open source
> contributions. What it does mean, however, is that unless companies take an
> active role in supporting open source with significant funding, what’s left
> is a situation where most open source maintainers are severely underfunded.

~~~
jrochkind1
I don't think that logic holds.

It _may_ be that most open source maintainers are severely underfunded, but
your numbers alone don't show that, because they don't account for how much
support there is from on-payroll work.

See the current top comment from Electron maintainers for instance.

"supporting open source with significant funding" (in the specific sense of
transfering funds to an outside entity responsible for development) is not the
only way of "supporting open source" financially. Paying your employees to
develop, maintain, and contribute to it is another. I suspect it is the
_primary_ way historically for historically succesful open source (although
research in this area would be helpful). It might (or might not) be the
primary way even now; we don't know from these figures alone.

Employees paid to do on-the-clock work might (or might not) be sufficient to
sustainably provide resources/"funding" to open source. Or there might be
reasons it's unlikely to work, or unlikely to work as well going forward as it
is historically.

I'm not sure straight-out donations to entities developing open source have
ever historically been responsible for successful open source resourcing --
and yet we've built software empires on open source. There may be reasons this
is not (or no longer) sustainable, but that doesn't necessarily mean this kind
of fundraising will ever be more successful than it has been historically (not
very, I think). Understanding what has worked in the past and making a case
for why it no longer will would be one way to make the case. Just talking
about current levels of direct donation without talking about how open source
has actually been resourced/funded historically, to me is not a very
persuasive case. (Then there's talking about the idea of monetizing open
source with 'open core' or 'PaaS' or some combination, which I think some
people think is what will save open source, rather than direct contribution. I
have my doubts, but it's another possibility).

I think these are all important questions.

------
xwdv
Having met with many open source contributors and maintainers, the one pattern
I see from those who do it consistently is that they are usually pretty
wealthy or gainfully employed. It's almost like a status symbol to be able to
have many open source projects that you can afford to work on for free. And a
lot of open source projects are really just part of commercialized software
that has been extracted and made available to the public for free, so there
has already been some revenue from it.

It is pointless to feel outraged about open source projects being "below the
poverty line". Virtually no one is actually being forced into poverty by
working on open source projects, and if they are, they're doing it wrong. Open
source ventures are primarily a rich man's (or woman's) game.

~~~
kaikai
Sounds like survivorship bias. The people who are able to _start and keep_
working on open source projects have other income sources, _because_ the
current donation model affords them below-poverty wages.

I would like open source to be a viable model for projects run without
maintainers needing to be independently wealthy or full time employed
elsewhere. This article is pouting out that we’re a long ways off.

~~~
shados
There is definitely survivor bias, you're completely right.

At the same time, I know for a fact that if I had my name at the top of the
list of a well known open source project, I could tack an extra 50k/year to
how much I ask for my next job.

The same holds true for conference speakers. People will say how much work it
is and how you're usually not paid for it... But last time I talked at a
conference my inbox exploded with people wanting to give me the moon and then
some.

Millage varies and there are many other factors at play for sure, but there is
a lot to gain by doing this stuff. There's a reason that so many people try to
be the next Webpack, the next big test runner, the next big site generator,
etc.

------
kazinator
Free software projects not earning significant donations is exactly the same
phenomenon, or an aspect of it, as selling software (regardless of license)
being difficult. Most software doesn't sell. Not only is it hard to sell
software, it's hard to get people to just download it and try it for free.
Most software will not find any users, let alone paying or donating users.

------
caniszczyk
I wrote about this in the past how all these open source donation systems like
OpenCollective and GitHub Sponsors are exploiting maintainers via gig economy
dynamics: [https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-
open-...](https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-source-
gig-economy-and-sustainability-tip-jar/)

The solution is simple, having companies hire open source maintainers to work
on their projects in some fashion or we need to make it easier for maintainers
to start companies and build an actual business.

~~~
RussianCow
That doesn't sound simple at all. How do you incentivize companies to do this?
And what does it mean to "make it easier for maintainers to start companies"?

~~~
caniszczyk
For companies, I've been encouraging companies for the last several years to
start formal open source programs to build a proper open source strategy:
[https://todogroup.org/guides/create-
program/](https://todogroup.org/guides/create-program/)

From that, comes hiring maintainers and contributing to open source projects,
fiscally or hiring maintainers.

Second, there are plenty of accelerators like YC itself that can help
maintainers start a company around their project.

------
samirillian
2 Important points:

1) In terms of financial remuneration, it's even worse than this. Consider
Mastodon, which looks like it's doing pretty well. Well, according to his
Changelog interview, Eugen also pays 5 moderators to help maintain
mastodon.social.

2) Sindre Sorhus, statistically living in poverty, tweeted saying open source
was the best decision of his life! Quality of life is increasingly diverging
from income. And I hope it continues to, since mean income keeps diverging
from median.

~~~
Applejinx
Absolutely. I am constantly seeing posters on HN who are clearly far unhappier
than me, even though they are pursuing wealth with some success (or even a lot
of success). I too am living in relative poverty (sub $1500 a month) and open
source was the best risk I ever took.

There are some really interesting angles to consider such as the more
predictable income of being supported as a working developer, rather than
being paid for your 'hit products' and having to generate more hits or starve.
Quality of life is also whether you're subject to ruthless pressures. You can
trade off income for creative freedom, in a very natural way. Do weird
noncommercial stuff if that is more important than maximizing revenue at any
given point. There'll be a natural balance between how hard you're trying to
please a customer base, and how much that base will reward you for pleasing
it.

------
lliamander
I find the mindset of this article to be mind-boggling.

The fact that open source developers aren't getting paid does not mean there
is exploitation. Those developers don't have to work on FOSS. They could also
work on proprietary software. The problem is that it is hard to develop a
business model around developing open source software (it's also hard to
develop a business around proprietary software, too).

If the current maintainer of a open-source project does not have the financial
support to continue working on the project, they should put their open-source
work on hold until they get their finances in order. If that software is part
of a critical chain for a business, then that business should provide
financial support. It is not a necessity that all current open-source projects
continue to be actively maintained.

~~~
flukus
Wait until they find out how little the person dispensing soup in a homeless
shelter is getting paid. OSS is usually like charity, you do it because you
can afford to and want to and don't expect anything back from it. Some people
end up full time employees in the charity sector, which is also a big industry
reliant on free labor.

~~~
lliamander
> OSS is usually like charity, you do it because you can afford to and want to
> and don't expect anything back from it.

There are reputational rewards associated with open source[1]. However, if
you're solely contributing to open source for those rewards, you're going to
have a bad time. I would agree that there needs to be a high degree of
intrinsic motivation.

[1][http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading](http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading)

------
_bxg1
Key quote here:

> Open source infrastructure is a commons, much like our ecological systems.
> Because our societies did not have rules to prevent the ecological systems
> from being exploited, companies have engaged in industrialized resource
> extraction. Over many decades this is depleting the environment, and now we
> are facing a climate crisis, proven through scientific consensus to be a
> substantial threat to humanity and all life on the planet. Open source
> misappropriation is simply a small version of that, with less dramatic
> consequences.

------
sb1752
Minor point, which always frustrates me when people say it. "proven through
scientifical consensus". Nothing in the history of science has ever been
"proven" by consensus. We get proof when observation matches theoretical
prediction.

------
vijaybritto
Will a licensing model that mandates companies who have a certain amount of
revenue to pay up for using the OSS, work?

Are there any licenses like this?

~~~
kemitchell
Polyform Project
([https://polyformproject.org/](https://polyformproject.org/)) just announced
draft terms for a suite of standardized, noncommercial, source-available
licenses, like Creative Commons' CC-BY-NC-*, but for software. The draft
includes a "Small Business" exception that gives companies below certain
headcount and revenue figures a free pass.

~~~
vijaybritto
This is nice!

------
steve1977
This only seems to take donations into account, which obviously doesn't make
sense.

~~~
nonwifehaver3
Agreed. The thrust of this article is correct, in that people should support
open source projects as much as they can (I usually donate around $100 a
month, which is really not that much). But, other sources of income are being
missed here. Sometimes companies will pay maintainers as consultants for
integration or new features. Sometimes people have companies that provide
their project as a service as well.

------
andrelaszlo
Last week I attended a talk by one of the nuxt.js core devs, Sébastien Chopin.
Nuxt, in case you haven't heard of it, is a framework built on Vue.js, with
almost 100k weekly downloads on npm and 20k+ stars on Github. He said they
have multiple sources of income, but donations and sponsors is just enough to
cover hosting and offices. The team seem to get by on chômage (France's
unemployment program, which is relatively generous... for a limited amount of
time) and on some consulting work.

Maybe that's normal, but I hope that we can find more sustainable ways to
develop great projects like this.

------
andrewstuart
A "KeepAlive" system might work for funding software projects. If your company
has a dependency on some open source software project, then it is very much in
their interests to pay a "KeepAlive" amount per month to that project,
ensuring that project remains alive and well and healthy, and thus _your_
systems - which depend literally on that software - remain healthy.

"KeepAlive" is _not_ sponsorship. Sponsorship has the perception/reality of
being optional/nonessential and indeed there is an expectation that something
further will be given to the sponsor after the money is handed over.
Sponsorship isn't a great model for funding software projects. Even worse is
donations.

Nor is a KeepAlive payment a support payment. in fact you might have a support
system on top of your KeepAlive system. A KeepAlive payment system is simply a
payment to ensure that software that a company depends on stays alive.

The _super critical thing_ that no one seems to understand - (and Patreon is
the prime culprit here) is that you simply cannot allow the money amounts to
drop to the floor - it must not be possible to contribute $1 a month. This is
just digital street begging.

Patreon - and any other sponsorship/donation/support/KeepAlive system that
permits the payer to "choose their own price" is setting the whole system up
for failure. Have you ever seen a "choose what you want to pay" system that
does anything except drop straight to the pricing floor?

Any sponsorship/donation/support/KeepAlive system must assert value, must
anchor the price, and must set a practical minimum that is required and not
optional. For example $10/month for individual person KeepAlive payments,
$200/month for small companies and $500/month for larger company KeepAlive
payments. What's the value in 300 people throwing a $1 coin per month into
your digital suitcase - that's what Patreon is.

Part of the problem is that software developers are typically afraid to set a
realistic price point/value on their work, thus the KeepAlive system needs to
do it for them - ensuring it doesn't turn into a Patreon like digital street
begging system.

------
neilv
For an expensive US city with a "tech" concentration, only the article's
"BLUE" category (6 figures) is usually viable, AFAICT. If you look at their
chart as everything except blue being red, almost nothing is viable.

You can scrape by on some 5-figures in such a place (assuming no trust fund,
and that parents didn't buy you a condo), especially if you have roommates and
a hope in growth of circumstances (e.g., startup founder or equity-heavy
employee, or the academic postdoc situation), but that's not a good plan for
open source work.

------
tehjoker
Another situation where public good meets an economic system that only rewards
tightfistedness. Why not have a system of public funding of valuable projects
that everyone uses? Charity is weak. Democracy is strong.

------
JumpCrisscross
In Islam's golden age, they came up with a trust structure known as a waqf
[1]. A waqf is "an inalienable charitable endowment under Islamic law, which
typically involves donating a building, plot of land or other assets for
Muslim religious or charitable purposes with no intention of reclaiming the
assets."

Working to endow charitable trusts might be a smart move for open-source
projects.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waqf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waqf)

------
carapace
Remember, the Free Software movement all started when RMS wanted to fix his
printer. Xerox told him to go screw, so he did.

Should anyone _expect_ to make a living writing software?

First: we don't need endless piles of software. Most of the software we
actually need could be written by less than 0.001 of the programmers and
"software engineers" working today. (And I could put more zeros in there and
still be right-ish.)

Second: if you're not one of the truly good programmers[1] you should not be
writing software for others to use. It is not needed (see point #1), and it's
irresponsible. Most of us should be pulling off-the-shelf components and
configuring and connecting them. Excel proves that most people's real software
needs are mostly handled by Excel.

We don't write all this software because we need it, we write it because we
like to write software. (And because we have tricked normal people into
thinking they need us and should pay us tons of money. It's a huge scam.)

It's understood that the really good folks pretty much write their own tickets
(meaning they can generally pick and choose what they work on, whether they
are in industry or academia or just private individuals. I.e. Jim Simons does
what he likes.)

So my question is: Should mediocre programmers get paid to produce inadequate
software? At all? Regardless of the FLOSSiness of their licenses?

[1] People like DJB, Fabrice Bellard, Mark Miller, RMS, and their ilk. They're
like professional athletes compared to you and I.

~~~
nickpsecurity
That's going too far. The public and businesses have benefited a ton from
software written by non-experts and low-quality software. I think Excel
spreadsheets still drive more value creation than most professional apps. The
people you refer to don't usually write it. They mostly go to best paying
companies in tech or finance. You could say our baseline is dependent on
people with less skill stepping up to do what better developers weren't
willing to do.

That assumes they know what we need. Biggest part of making the world's
software is getting the requirements right. The intellectual elite have been
consistently worse at that than folks with strong people skills to get the
info out of the market or just folks in it that see the need(s). A recurring
example is how they all think brick and mortar is obsolete due to Prime or
whatever but a ton of people just want out of house or break from family. They
don't know cuz they're coding amongst their peers instead of interacting with
such people. So, folks with less brains who do listen wrote software and made
plans to make shopping better with Best Buy, local grocers, and others slated
for death thriving last I checked.

I learned long ago that intellectual superiority or best code aren't all that
has value. Most people want software to get shit done or for entertainment
with relatively-low standards of quality. So, anyone that can do that should
jump in. Then, a small percentage of buyers and suppliers are about design or
quality excellence. That's our thing. We'll keep doing that. Judging them
won't help, though. Sell them on benefits after assessing if it would even
have benefits _from their perspective_.

~~~
carapace
> That's going too far.

Maybe, but I don't think so. If anything, I'm understating things.

> The public and businesses have benefited a ton from software written by non-
> experts and low-quality software.

Yes but that has to be balanced against all the problems and delays and lost
work, etc... that low-quality software has caused.

> I think Excel spreadsheets still drive more value creation than most
> professional apps.

That's what I'm saying: Excel's benefits don't require full-on programmers to
reap them, normal everyday people can "program" Excel. It's not the ultimate
be-all-end-all program, but it's damn near.

> The people you refer to don't usually write it.

By "it" do you mean Excel or the spreadsheets? I think you mean spreadsheets.

> They mostly go to best paying companies in tech or finance. You could say
> our baseline is dependent on people with less skill stepping up to do what
> better developers weren't willing to do.

I'm saying, in a nutshell, that the really good programmers should write
infrastructure and "meta-tools" like Excel (or Elm-lang) and most folks should
be able to get their daily problems solved and work done without recourse to
too much technical folderol.

------
mperham
Open source developer here making 7 figures per year on my own. I don't take
donations, I use an open core model and charge companies for access to my
commercial products. AMA!

[https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-charging-money-
fo...](https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-charging-money-for-pro-
features-allowed-me-quit-my-job-6e71309457)

------
afpx
Naive question - why isn’t more open source dual licensed commercial and GPL?
If it’s licensed commercial, you would still be give it away for free.

~~~
tzs
That works fine if you are the only significant contributor to the project.

If you start getting significant contributions from people using the GPL
version, dealing with the dual license can become problematic. Best for you is
if you can convince the contributors to assign they copyright to you. That
lets you then fold their contributions, and continue dual licensing the
result.

You'll first have to make sure that the contributors own the copyright on all
the code they contribute, because they cannot assign copyright of something
that isn't theirs. Remember, your contributors are working on the GPL version,
so they might copy/paste useful things from other GPL projects into their
contribution without thinking about it, because that is fine under GPL. They
might not stop and think, "wait a minute...this is going to a dual licensed
project that requires copyright assignment, so I can't bring in outside GPL
code!".

That's in the best case, where your contributors are OK with copyright
assignment.

You might also start getting contributions from people who are not willing to
have their code go into the commercial version. There are two ways you can
deal with that.

1\. Maintain two branches in your project, one for a GPL-only version, and one
for a dual license version. If you want some feature in the dual license
version that is in the GPL-only version via a contributor who won't assign
copyright, you'll have to implement it yourself. You can use the
implementation on the GPL-only side for guidance for things such as algorithm
selection, as long as you are careful to not do anything that would infringe
the copyright on the GPL code.

2\. Reject those contributions.

The risk with that approach is that if those contributions are useful enough,
your GPL version might get forked, and people who don't need the commercial
version will choose the forked GPL version over yours, because it has better
features.

Probably best to go with the branch approach. That way you are more likely to
remain the primary source (no pun intended) for the GPL version. There will be
some contributors who are OK with dual licensing, and with the branch approach
you get their contributions and can ask make your pitch to them for dual
licensing. If some fork becomes the primary source, you are out of the loop,
and will likely never find out what contributions to that are from people who
would dual license to you.

------
ktpsns
Vue.js is outstanding here. I spent the last weeks getting my hands dirty with
Vue.js and I am quite disillusioned about the state of the ecosystem and the
performance when it comes to large datasets --- compared with its competitors,
notably React.js. Which is not even part of this small sample set of projects
analyzed by Staltz. I wonder how it compares.

~~~
awkward
React is funded and staffed with full time engineers from Facebook.

React is a standout when handling large datasets, but tends to mildly
underperform on small ones. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff.

------
winter_blue
> Only accept jobs at companies that donate a significant portion of their
> profit

One such company might be Bloomberg. I've heard that effectively 85% to 90% of
all the profits go to charity.

I don't know how much of that goes toward open source; but it's still great
overall, if you work there, to know that most of your work is helping make the
world a better place.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I had no idea. Thanks for the info! Might subscribe just for that.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/philanthropy/](https://www.bloomberg.com/philanthropy/)

~~~
gorbachev
As it happens the annual report for Bloomberg Philanthropy just came out
today:

[https://annualreport.bloomberg.org/](https://annualreport.bloomberg.org/)

------
Buetol
It doesn’t take into account that countries like France gives you some good
benefits while you’re unemployed (like paying you the same salary you had
before for a year) while you use this time to make FOSS that’s easy to
maintain. There is a good study to be done on how people in countries with
good social benefits make more and better FOSS !

------
oweqruiowe
I'd think a Universal Basic Income could help value work like this, work that
the market traditionally does not reward, much like caregivers. Doesn't solve
the problem of course, but could go a long way.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Easiest way to make money from open source:

1\. Use open source as a way to develop your skills and increase your
developer profile (for example presenting at conferences)

2\. Use your acquired skills and prominence to land a job at one of the FAANG
companies.

3\. Bonus if you your employer allows you to work at least part-time on your
open source project.

In general, open source is a lousy way to make money by building a business.
However, it can be very useful in building your personal brand by both
increasing your skills and demonstrating your expertise.

------
cavneb
disclaimer - I'm the founder of [https://codefund.io](https://codefund.io)

This is a very interesting view of the current issues surrounding the funding
of open source. I think there are also some assumptions surrounding the
motivations of being a maintainer that may not be accurate.

As the founder of a company that's sole purpose is to bring funding to open
source developers, bloggers and app builders, I do understand the issues with
the "trickle economics" of generating funds for open source.

Let me first say thank you for your contributions. I do not believe that most
people become open source contributors/maintainers for the money. They do it
b/c they are good people trying to give back to their community.

The way I see it, maintainers need to be open to many different paths of
generating funds. Open Collective and Patreon are incredible, however they
often require an active effort in fund-raising to generate any significant
amount of money. Tidelift is doing great stuff in this field as well by
selling SLA contracts on open source projects, although it's difficult to
qualify and the developers might not want to sign a contract. There is the
promise of crypto-economics and how they might impact funding OSS (see
[https://oscoin.io](https://oscoin.io)). Finally, advertising (yuck?) has been
a proven and more widely accepted form of funding as long as the user's
privacy is protected. That's what we do. Fund open source maintainers through
ethical advertising.

It takes a village to solve sustainable funding for open source.

------
timwaagh
I did not get to contribute much to open source. I do think it is a privilege
if you are able to make something you want to make and give it away to people
who use it a lot. You get to put your name out there etc. And if you can
really afford it and that is where your heart is, why not.

Maintaining commercial software is not a choice. It's done out of pure
necessity. My company wants to get rid of me for what I think are bad reasons.
Meaning I need to pay for a lawyer to fight them. Its just misery for people
to treat each other like that. This is common in IT. It does not take much and
it really does not make as much as portrayed (globally speaking, as open
source is global). I used to like the company but clearly they don't give much
of a damn about the law (not US law) or just being good employers. Literally
all It managers are like this. All I've met anyways and I've been around. IT
is a brutal world. But you will get a new job? Yes I will get a new job. Of
course I will. I can't afford not to.

As far as I'm concerned open source maintainers are the lucky ones. They do
not need to deal with management.

Ps: not that I begrudge them extra wages. I'm all for it.

------
maxbendick
André Staltz's writing is always a pleasure to read. I still show people his
intro to reactive programming
[https://gist.github.com/staltz/868e7e9bc2a7b8c1f754](https://gist.github.com/staltz/868e7e9bc2a7b8c1f754)

------
OmarIsmail
This is why I went with dual license for my react animation library.

Full reasoning here [https://omar.dev/articles/why-im-charging-for-react-
spho.htm...](https://omar.dev/articles/why-im-charging-for-react-spho.html)

------
DocTomoe
The methodology is highly flawed - with the amount of "educated guesses" the
author takes, anything that comes out of that exercise is highly questionable.

------
rkara224
Hi guys,

I wanted to respond to this forum, to hopefully, demystify some misconceptions
or help folks, understand, what real self-sustainability is, or what it could
mean to us as people, or as a collection of individuals.

Many people believe, that, just because you are being paid, or have money,
that you or your service is part of a self-sustainable system, or
sociopolitical or economic circumstance. And, by using money to purchase
products or services that you or your business is being sustained.

Fortunately, that's not true.

Society, or real self-sustainability, doesn't work like that.

This was proven in 1930, by the Austrian mathematician, Kurt Godel, in his
incompleteness theorem, paper.

Basically, Godel concluded, that there is no such thing, as a set-of-all-sets,
or superset, in mathematics, or that such a statement, or set, can never be
proven, or exist in nature.

Fast forward to 1936, and Alan Turing, uses Godel’s statement, as the
“process” or self-sustainable mechanism, for his Turing machine.

Input > Process > Output

Basically, Turing is saying to Godel, you’re right, there is no such thing as
a set-of-all-sets or superset in nature. But, what if there was? What would
that look like?

And then, Turing goes ahead, based on that supposition, to demonstrate that
such a set exists in his 1936, computable numbers paper.

So every time people turn their computers on, they are basically proving
Turing right, and Godel wrong, about their being a set-of-all-sets or a
superset in nature.

What does this have to do with self-sustainability or human sociopolitical or
economic circumstance?

Everything.

All sociopolitical or economic responses or circumstances are built on their
being a “process”, or set-of-all-sets, present in every human or non-human
transaction or request. In other words, we as people shouldn’t be seeking to
“create” self-sustainable services or mechanisms in the world, Godel proved
that, that would be a waste of time. We, should be looking at, is ways to
“serve” the self-sustainable mechanism, that Turing has proven exists.

What, if we alter, what Alan Turing is saying about their being a set-of-all-
sets, that can be aggregated, to a set-of-all-sets that can’t be aggregated,
but could only be served. In other words a forum, or circumstance in which
‘process’ or the set-of-all-sets is the only constant in the system, and that,
the forums or requests, themselves, are the things or mechanisms, that scale
or aggregate in the system.

One of the biggest bottlenecks we face as humankind or a society is the
ability to scale our requests, so that they can be managed by multi-
individuals or organisations simultaneously.

By inverting a Turing machine, we just might be able to serve one another
globally, or as a new human circumstance that can scale to serve any human or
non-human request.

!DA

------
ThinkBeat
The "open source model" is good for far more than launching your career.

You can contribue, create, participate, enjoy open source your entire life.

Contrary to American beliefs (being an American myself) not evertying is about
making the most money.

~~~
lostmymind66
The parent was mentioning telling entrepreneurs this advice, who are
interested in starting a business and making money.

"Contrary to American beliefs (being an American myself) not evertying is
about making the most money."

It's not. But you will only really ever get to work on what you want when you
are making enough money to quit your day job.

Contributing to open source can be a great experience. It can also be very
taxing, especially when you have a family/other obligations outside of work.

~~~
orhmeh09
This is where strong welfare systems have value in that it gives one the
freedom to pursue this kind of thing without having to worry about health
insurance and so forth.

~~~
briandear
However, those welfare systems then force other people to subsidize someone
else working on something that, by definition, doesn’t contribute economic
value that exceeds the cost of producing it. It’s an inefficient allocation of
resources. Meaning money going to support someone building a “thing” nobody
values instead of going to support a thing people do value. And by “value,” I
mean willingness to pay for it. Free money in the form of welfare so someone
could work on a hobby that may have no value is paid for by people who are
creating value.

Should I get free healthcare and free food and free rent if I have a passion
for making a widget that nobody is willing to pay for? Should I be able to
spend my days walking in the woods while a barber spends his days cutting hair
for money — money that is taxed to pay for someone to spend their day walking
in the woods?

To be clear, welfare is valuable as a safety net, but it shouldn’t be a safety
harness. If you are disabled or lost your job, definitely welfare is
important. But welfare to support some guy writing a new JavaScript library
nobody is willing to pay for? That’s ridiculous. Society needs people to build
roads, cook food, and cut hair. If society rewarded people for sitting around
doing nothing, then who would do those jobs? If people weren’t doing those
jobs, who would pay the taxes for all the people that would decide to simply
walk in the woods all day?

We would all like the freedom to pursue “this sort of thing,” however, what
happens when everyone pursues “this sort of thing?” Who is going to pay for
it? The guy hauling freight isn’t going to take too kindly to be paying for
people to do nothing.

People should be able to do whatever they want, but it crosses the line of
reason when other people are literally forced to pay for it.

Of course this will be an unpopular opinion here because there is an
entitlement mentality that would suggest that someone’s latest JavaScript
library should be tax subsidized. However, try making that case to a freight
hauler who pays the taxes. Make that case to the restaurant owner that she
should pay higher taxes so someone else can sit at home writing browser
plugins or painting cute rocks with animal faces that nobody wants to buy.

~~~
jeffdavis
"by definition, doesn’t contribute economic value that exceeds the cost of
producing it"

You mean it doesn't _capture_ the value. It may indeed _contribute_ huge value
without capturing it.

~~~
icebraining
Exactly. The whole response ignores the existence of consumer surplus. We can
see the silliness by applying to the actual examples - since core-js brings in
$16204 and is used by 2442712, by such definition it only contributes $0.006
in economic value to each user. Would any of them accept 1 cent - or even a
full dollar! - in exchange for not using core-js?

