
Open Source Exploitation and Burnout - jrpt
http://supportedsource.org/blog/open-source-exploitation-and-burnout
======
phantom_oracle
This is the beauty of Open Source too.

There is no "social contract" for you to provide "support" for any of your
work to individuals you can clearly see are working for companies (just view
their profiles).

If you want to chill for 3 weeks and not write any code for your project, go
ahead and do so. Any company or coder that depends on you and your code to
earn his inflated-SV-salary job (or make millions for their SaaS) will have to
deal with his/her boss (or investors) when he/she can't function without
depending on you.

The only time a "social obligation" is placed on you is when all these asshole
companies rank you by "how much you contribute to Open Source" but if you had
to ask many of them how much money they contribute as a percentage of benefits
they derive from Open Source, it will probably be in the single-digits.

The guys who wrote tools like "ls", "cd", "ping", "ssh", etc. are not sitting
on Github answering questions to the millions of coders who use their tools
everyday. StackOverflow is where those questions get answered by another
"exploited" class of coders.

------
rectang
It's on us, as individual developers and individual participants in the
software industry, to come up with economic models for open source that 1)
provide high value, and 2) allow us to capture that value. Companies have a
different role in a capitalist system, and though we can have a mutually
beneficial relationship, their interests are not perfectly aligned with ours
and never will be.

------
abstractbeliefs
A lot of people have been looking to attack this problem from a legal (via
licensing) or economic point of view, but really, I don't see either of these
being nearly as effective as a cultural approach.

There are few other industries that consider 80h+ work weeks as a badge of
honour, and in ownership of our ongoing work.

Instead, we should continue to encourage:

1) Better management of work/life balance

2) Better delegation of tasks and project ownership - as a side effect, this
reduces the bus factor and also likely increases the quality of a project as
more ideas are mixed in

3) Make it more acceptable to simply walk away from projects. While some might
see this as "selfish", if you want someone to work on it full time, you can
always offer to hire them, or pick up the work yourself.

------
Joof
While I'm pleased about many open source projects, SaaS and the rise of big
data seem to have shifted it from primarily benefitting the user to
benefitting corporate interests significantly more often.

I still believe that open source is worthwhile, but the culture seems very
different.

------
niftich
I just read the article. Burnout sucks, but, maybe I'm missing the point of
open source.

To me, it's not about 'creating value'; rather, developing open-source
software is part of an ideology that believes humanity's knowledge should be
available for examination; that all the moving parts are laid bare to see.
Open source is more about 'showing' how it's done -- the proof is in the code
-- than, y'know, doing it in the first place, which is a rather nice side-
effect.

And therefore, I don't subscribe to the notion that if companies take open-
source software and don't contribute back, they're exploiting the
developer(s). It'd be nice of them if they donated, but by not doing so,
they're not being evil. They are instead building on a common bank of shared
knowledge, some of which is executable code, just like every single one of us
can.

------
match
Original oss licences were developed in a world where software was distributed
and the licenses were developed based on that model. Business models shifting
largely to XaaS wasn't accounted for in the original license mindset and this
is being taken advantage of the fullest extent my commercial entities (as they
would be smart to do). The differences between the original oss philosophy and
the realities of software in the current world seems to be causing some stress
on the system as envisioned by oss advocates. Will be interesting to see how
this develops.

------
SFJulie
Funny. When I stopped coding it came to me we may have been a tad mistreated:
[http://beauty-of-imagination.blogspot.fr/2016/07/moving-
out-...](http://beauty-of-imagination.blogspot.fr/2016/07/moving-out-from-
coding-part-i-why.html)

------
neokya
Food for thought: Can we create a license which allows source distribution and
collaboration openly and is free to use for individuals and non-profits but
companies have to pay if they use it for commercial purpose.

It could solve companies vs open source developers situation and give
developers financial support. If current open source developers had means to
support themselves without full time job, I think that would solve the problem
of burnout and depression.

I mean just complaining that companies are taking full advantage without
giving back is not working. So time to think outside box?

~~~
senko
> Can we create a license which allows source distribution and collaboration
> openly and is free to use for individuals and non-profits but companies have
> to pay if they use it for commercial purpose.

These kinds of licenses have existed for a long time. They're not open source,
though.

~~~
neokya
Could you post some references I could read? I am quite interested why they
didn't work.

As far as I see, popular licenses are: 1\. Commercial source 2\. Open source -
copy left eg. GPL 3\. Open source - liberal, do whatever you like eg. MIT

which are just handful, when software is eating the world ;)

~~~
senko
QT famously had a dual, "non-commercial" and "commercial" licenses, before
they switched to LGPL.

From wikipedia / web archive:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20031005175911/http://www.trollt...](https://web.archive.org/web/20031005175911/http://www.trolltech.com/developer/faqs/noncomm.html)

------
baybal2
Just use AGPL and dont bother

------
jrpt
Writing open source is voluntary, but when companies take so much without
giving anything in return, it should be called exploitation.

I just don't want to keep reading this stories of open source developers
burning out.

~~~
zzalpha
I'm baffled by this attitude.

A developer _chooses_ to develop something and give it away for free. Why they
do that is up to them... perhaps it's ideology? A sense of charity? Community?

Whatever it is, though, they're choosing to release that work to the world.
And barring a non-commercial use clause, they're opening up that work for use
in for-profit settings.

That's a choice. By definition it cannot be exploitative as there's no
coercion involved.

If the developer doesn't like it, relicense the code to bar commercial use
(gSOAP is the first example that comes to mind that does something like this),
use the GPL to discourage commercial use, or don't release it. These are your
choices.

~~~
jrpt
The definition of exploitation doesn't require coercion.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=define+exploitation](https://www.google.com/search?q=define+exploitation)

Exploitation: the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to
benefit from their work.

It comes down to whether you think it's fair or not, which is a question of
morality.

~~~
zzalpha
How are developers being treated "unfairly"?

The work is being released as open source. The developer has already chosen to
give up the rights to any profit they might obtain from commercial use of the
software. If that isn't desired there's any number of alternative licensing
schemes that would require compensation for commercial use.

They aren't being forced to work on the software. They can contribute as much
or as little to it as they like.

So what would make it fair, exactly?

------
catern
To avoid being exploited and burning out, use the GPL for your projects.

~~~
dmlittle
How does using GPL avoid the issue? I'm just curious and trying to learn
something new.

~~~
gregatragenet3
A commercial company writing software dependent on your GPL code is obliged to
release their modifications/code under GPL. Not neccissisaraly so with other
licences. So it's a way to force them to give back if they want to use your
code.

~~~
senko
This is a common misconception. They don't have to release them under GPL if
they don't distribute the modified version. With SaaS, this is in practice
true for any server side code that remains private to the company. Affero GPL
addresses this but I haven't seen it much in the wild.

~~~
match
Also because of this many SaaS and IaaS companies do not permit the use of OSS
where the license requires them to release their source.

