
The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013) - Mc_Big_G
http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community
======
Justsignedup
As a father of 1, I must agree to this:

\- I lose ~ 2-3 hours a day every day on commute alone.

\- I lose an additional 1-2 hours daily on getting my daughter ready, taking
her to school, pickup from grandparents, and other daily needs of my daughter.

\- My income is SIGNIFICANTLY lessened by the expenses of my daughter

If I was not a father, I would have the following:

\- I could live 15 minutes away from work by foot, thus saving me between 1.5
- 2.5 hours a day.

\- Living close to work requires most likely paying double my current housing
cost, and having half my living space.

\- Living close to work eliminates my need for a car, so some savings there.

\- I will have 2 spare hours for extra sleep or misc. activity a day

\- I will also have 2-3 extra hours a day not taking care of my daughter
(homework, Daddy-Child time, planning meetups with friends, planning
activities).

\- No need to pay for extra food (time + money), no need to have homecooked
food (I can survive on "ramen", child cannot), no need for gymnastics or other
physical / social / mental development activity programs (lots of money
saved).

Add it all up I am at ~ 4-6 hour disadvantage to the average 23-27 year old
single male, with a significant lifestyle and monetary hit. If I was just to
use 2 hours a day that the more free have to program an OSS project, and 2-4
hours on sleep, I would be better rested, more productive, and would
contribute between 10 to 14 hours a week to OSS all while keeping my current
lifestyle.

P.S. on top of that I work at a job who doesn't count ass-in-chair time, lets
me work 9-5 (not 9-6), and is low stress. So already I am privileged over
others in my exact position without this cozy 9-5 job.

P.S.S. on top of that as a divorced man, I also need to find time to date, so
you can't argue that I too have time savings over a single man's need to date.
Which mind you is really hard when you have a child.

P.S.S.S. Some people have a job that revolves around and/or encourages OSS
contributions. So they get to contribute, all while getting paid for it in
their standard job. This puts then in an even further advantage because they
are now unfairly elevated above the average worker.

~~~
SrslyJosh
> As a father of 1, I must agree to this

Yep, and people who are disabled (or act as a caretaker) are in a similar
boat.

Ironically, you are probably a better bet for a lot of employers than that
average young single male because you value stability. You're not gonna jump
ship because you want a foosball table or expect to have lunch catered every
day.

~~~
peri
> Ironically, you are probably a better bet for a lot of employers than that
> average young single male because you value stability. You're not gonna jump
> ship because you want a foosball table or expect to have lunch catered every
> day.

Unfortunately, the market for labor is notoriously unequal and illiquid. The
desire to save via a large workforce of what you're calling "averge young
single male"s often looks much better on a balance sheet than a few well-paid
older folks. There's lots of different kinds of capital, but SEC filings
definitely favor "objective" measures like number of desks filled.

------
Palomides
I'm not sure I have any good arguments either way, but seeing an argument that
open source software is uncompensated labor that devalues programming work and
serves the corporate establishment makes me very uncomfortable.

~~~
SrslyJosh
It's a compelling argument for stronger "viral" licenses, for sure.

------
WhitneyLand
The article bounces around to touch so many different social issues its nearly
incoherent.

Regarding the main point I think it's a non issue. Companies are only
interested in hiring OSS contributors to get a feel for their work. There are
many other ways to do this. For example since a lot of my work is visual I
maintain a demo reel. For others it may be articles you've written or even
Stackoverflow contributions. It is not hard to get a job without OSS if you
have some way to communicate your past performance.

Also the author says she knows "many" women who have had trouble contributing
to OSS based on how they were treated. GitHub should make it easy to provide
examples of this right?

I know women have a tough time in certain tech environments, but I'm really
surprised to hear of repos where this is happening because perpetrators would
have to do it publicly.

Please provide examples of the largest OSS community where this is happening
and where offenders are not called out or reprimanded. I'll be glad head over
there and back you up.

~~~
SrslyJosh
Lucky for you that you can show your work to people outside of your company,
right?

> Also the author says she knows "many" women who have had trouble
> contributing to OSS based on how they were treated. GitHub should make it
> easy to provide examples of this right?

Now you're being deliberately obtuse. Not everyone uses github, and not all
communication happens _through_ github.

~~~
malandrew
I can't tell the gender of many people in opensource unless they use a
username that indicates their gender. Looking at #thrift right now (a project
I contribute to). I see 40 people not counting the channel bots. I count only
6 nicknames that suggest that they are likely to be men because they begin
with names that are typically male names. The same is true for a lot of the
github usernames I see. I wonder how of this self reporting by women who say
they have trouble contributing because they are women is actual gender
discrimination and how much is due to people who have grown accustomed to
committing the fundamental attribution error [0] on themselves, instead of
applying the rule of parsimony [1] and looking for alternative explanations
that might better explain their difficulties.

It's also important to apply Hanlon's Razor [2], "Never attribute to malice
that which is adequately explained by stupidity.". Sometimes that stupidity
(or ignorance) is the person rejecting your contributions, but it could also
be your own stupidity (or ignorance). I have found that most people who try to
contribute to open-source and fail have never read esr's classic "How to Ask
Questions the Smart Way" [3]

If you eliminate all identifier's of gender by using non-gendered handles and
initials for your first name in your git config, you can safely look for other
explanations for your difficulties contributing to open-source besides your
gender. It's called applying the scientific method. If you hypothesis is "I'm
having trouble contributing to open-source because of my gender", you should
obfuscate your gender in your contributions to control for that variable. Once
you eliminate it as a possible confounding factor, you're free to come up with
alternative hypotheses for your difficulties.

Personally, I don't have my name, gender, or location on my github profile.
It's a community for contributing code, so all such metadata is irrelevant.
I'm genuinely curious what percentage of github users cannot be determined to
be male or female (which is a figure the author did not cite).

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error)

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)

[3] [http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-
questions.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html)

~~~
peri
Hi, I don't know your gender either, but I know lots of F/OSS developers whose
names and legally represented genders have changed, even in projects I've
committed to. There's a fairly big mix of attribution errors available, and
ignoring the presence of silent women, non-binary folks, and transgender
developers hasn't made my communities more welcoming to those folks.

Community building is very, very hard work and it involves a lot more than
linking to classics like ESR's smart questions. In fact, in my experience,
those responses tend to put off newcomers with backgrounds that are different
than programmers like me (and presumably you) who have been tinkering in this
community since the early 90s.

YMMV, of course, but I think personalities are incredibly important and the
most valuable thing you can do in building big communities is making sure that
as projects grow they gain stewards, shepherds, or whatever metaphor you
prefer that can welcome as well as gatekeep.

~~~
malandrew

        In fact, in my experience, those responses tend to put off newcomers with 
        backgrounds that are different than programmers like me (and presumably you) 
        who have been tinkering in this community since the early 90s.
    

TBH, I have absolutely no problem if linking to an article like esr's smart
questions it off-putting to some people.

Meredith Patterson's "When Nerds Collide" best describes how I'd like to see
our community grow:

[https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-
collide-31895b01e68c](https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-
collide-31895b01e68c)

If esr's smart questions is off-putting, then you're probably bringing values
into the community that I don't want to see become common, especially the
value that you've made a solid attempt to help yourself before you asked
others to help you. If you can't or won't do that, then you'll never ever
succeed in this community and this profession/hobby, because constantly asking
questions and answer them yourself is a fundamental skill.

Linking to an essay like esr's might be off-putting to women, no-binary and
transgender developers, but it's also off-putting to cisgender developers.
It's off-putting to any one who has grown accustomed to letting others do the
work for them and who haven't developed a thick enough skin to accept a FAQ as
an indirect response to their request for help. Lots of things about our
community are off-putting to people regardless of gender identity or
orientation. I myself am pansexual, identify as agender, but come across as
cisgender (mainly because I choose my clothing based on comfort, fit and
simplicity (I pretty much have all the same clothes and only need to make a
determination on the color, since varying color is sufficient to eliminate the
judgement that I wear the same clothes everyday)).

If the aspects of our community that Meredith describes in her essay is off-
putting to some, that's a good thing in my opinion because I don't want a
culture in tech that is so accommodating that it evolves into including so
much of the rest of society that it develops into having a notion of
intersectionality that no longer accommodates weirdos. I have on more than one
occasion seen very capable engineers rejected as a candidate because one or
more people interpreted their aspie behaviors and mannerisms as "creepy". For
example, being aware and accommodating of the mind-blindness off others is as
important as being aware and accommodating of the gender and gender identities
of others.

My personal experience has been that identity politics drives people apart. It
used to be that when I came across someone of a different gender or gender
identity as my own, I paid it no attention. What mattered was that we all had
engineering and programming things to nerd out over. Now I don't like going to
engineering conferences anymore because the environment of gender politics is
palpable. Instead I've directed more energy and time to IRC and Github where
people are focused on more interesting things like the qualities of someone's
contributions (code and ideas) and not their identity. If there is no culture
of constructivism and proofs, it's probably not a forum I have interest in.
Most conferences no longer represent a culture of constructivism and proofs.
Only conferences like StrangeLoop, RacketCon, ErlangFactory, etc. interest me
these days. Since they don't represent language communities that are also an
active job market (ruby, python, javascript, go, php, java), they don't suffer
nearly as much from identity politics overshadowing the computer science.

~~~
peri
Thanks for this comment. I think that we'd find each other in strident
agreement, which is why I typically only go to smaller or more academically
inclined conferences these days.

That said: a lot of us have constructed our identities through exploration
online, so the notion that IRC and GitHub are _not_ expressive of personal
identity sounds a little weird to me. It's very, very hard to actually
separate identity from the developer, especially when it comes to activities
like bug triage. I don't have a good answer, but I think there's an assumption
that what we _can_ measure necessarily is what is important, when what we
measure in terms of programmers is often what's _easy_ to measure.

------
dreamdu5t
I stopped contributing OSS lately after seeing how many startups use some of
my modules. Why should I work for free to help others profit? Yet if I use
restrictive licenses people just avoid the software altogether. If my open-
source software is successful I just end up being exploited financially.

EDIT: Downvotes? I guess it's socially unacceptable to not want to contribute
to OSS because someone else will just make money off your work.

~~~
pc86
Why not use a license that merely prohibits commercial use? And presumably the
startups in question are actually adding some value to your code beyond just
implementing it with a wrapper. It's not like they are building a business
around your piece of code (or are they?)

~~~
dreamdu5t
Because people actively avoid OSS with licenses like that, always opting for
projects that have MIT/BSD type licenses.

~~~
pc86
I would imagine people actively avoid them if they plan on charging for
something.

I'm honestly not sure what you wanted. You contributed code to something, and
people used it. Some of those happened to make money on code that included
yours (I'm sure the impact yours had on their bottom line is debatable). Did
you expect financial compensation? Did you just hope for whatever reason that
nobody would make any money off any code that you wrote? If you didn't want
people to "avoid" your software, you _wanted_ them to use it, right?

~~~
dreamdu5t
I didn't want anything. I was stating _why_ I mostly stopped contributing:
Other people were making money off of my work without me being compensated.
OSS is a vehicle for companies to exploit unpaid labor. The hacker community
just hates to hear that.

~~~
pc86
> OSS is a vehicle for companies to exploit unpaid labor.

OSS is freely given, sometimes by people who are paid to do exactly that. The
term "unpaid labor" has a specific connotation akin to slavery or indentured
servitude. The two are not comparable.

Complaining that someone somewhere makes money (at best, _indirectly_ ) from
an OSS contribution is the same as complaining that Good Will resold my
donation at a profit.

~~~
forgottenpass
_The term "unpaid labor" has a specific connotation akin to slavery or
indentured servitude. The two are not comparable._

Is this a legal term of art or common knowledge definition? It was unknown to
me so I've tried some googling and am turning up primarily volunteer work and
unpaid internships under that title. I know wikipedia isn't the greatest
source, but over there "unpaid work" is a class of things including both
slavery and working at a family business or coop.

------
jallmann
What's puzzling is how often FOSS advocates, especially from the permissive
camp, frame the idea of contributing _code_ as a purely altruistic action, in
that code should be open-sourced and contributed back to because it is the
Right Thing to do, resulting in warm fuzzies. The code is both the means and
the end: you have the code, do as you wish with it, and please do contribute
back if you've made any useful improvements.

Now consider the original motivation behind the GPL, which is to ensure
software freedom [1]. Being open-source is merely a necessary prerequisite for
software freedom. The GPL is much less idealistic than permissive licenses,
and more practical about ensuring its goals. RMS had no illusions about the
motivations of people and companies; the GPL's absolute requirement for open-
ness is an acknowledgement that there will be licensees who are more than
happy to use FOSS software against the spirit in which it was intended.

One side effect of the GPL's demands for open-ness is that when FOSS usage
reaches a critical mass, companies will have no choice but to employ
programmers that work on free software. These programmers will then contribute
back as necessary, creating a self-sustaining FOSS ecosystem. This is already
happening with Linux.

In a perfect world full of truly free/libre software, we probably wouldn't
have articles like this complaining about "unpaid OSS labor" and GitHub resume
padding. The playing ground will be evened out, and there will be
proportionately fewer developers contributing because of "love and a lot of
free time." In that sense, developers who contribute to FOSS under non-
copyleft licenses are doing a disservice to the rest of us who don't have that
luxury.

[1] The phrase 'software freedom' is used very specifically to refer to
software that satisfies the four freedoms:
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-
sw.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html)

------
forgottenpass
Getting blindsided by that complete botching of a strong argument seems oddly
familiar, I must have read this back in 2013 too. The case to be made that
unpaid labor to an OSS project should not be a barrier to entry to employment
is very strong on it's own. The sidetrack into OSS diversity seems to imply
that if open source were more diverse it wouldn't still be a terrible hiring
practice to expect candidates to have contributed to open source.

------
craigcabrey
Is it just me or does this article twist the (rather simple) idea of
meritocracy?

What you contribute and the quality of what you contribute defines the respect
and influence you receive as a result (in a given community, of course). I
don't see how that can be tied into "normal" social statuses as this author is
trying to imply.

Thoughts?

~~~
glyph
"Meritocracy" is not a real concept of how to run a community, but rather a
satirical term used to lampoon the idea that "merit" is a 1-dimensional
concept which can be measured linearly and used to judge people and rank them.
The term was _invented_ as satire.

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

Thinking that it's a good idea is like what happened with "waterfall"
development. Someone described all the problems with what big companies were
doing, and then someone else picked up that description of all the problems
and said "ooh! all the big companies are doing this! this must be a great way
to do things!" and then everyone perpetuated that disaster for the next two
decades.

The fact that "hacker" culture has uncritically picked up on "meritocracy" and
_doesn 't realize it's a snarky joke about unfairness_ says a lot about the
unbelievably sheltered and privileged position that most people reading this
site enjoy, and our collective lack of social skills. By "social skills" I
don't just mean, like, how to behave at parties, but also how to manage groups
and how to be aware of the perspectives of other people.

Not to mention the fact that if your open source community isn't measuring
merit on an objective, defined-in-advance, linear scale, with measures in
place, then you are not _even_ practicing the (unfair, broken) system of
"meritocracy", you're just doing "rule by cognitive bias" ("biasocracy"?
surely nobody is going to take _that_ term and think it's a worthy goal to
aspire to).

You can trust me, because my community _does_ practice objective, quantitative
meritocracy, and therefore I am provably the best and most deserving person in
this conversation:
[https://twistedmatrix.com/highscores/](https://twistedmatrix.com/highscores/)

~~~
edleafe
Symphony orchestras used to claim to be the equivalent of a 'meritocracy'
(don't think that they used that term, though). They selected strictly by
audition, relying on the ears of the (male) conductor/director, and less than
10% of the musicians selected were women. When they changed to have the
musicians perform behind a screen, and without identifying them by name, the
number of women selected increased dramatically.

A similar dynamic happens in the tech world. The people determining 'merit'
have that same built-in bias against females, and will judge their work as
lower than it should be. The bias need not be conscious, and in most cases the
men think that they are being fair and honest, but it's there.

~~~
glyph
This exact example features in the blog post draft I copied most of my comment
from :-).

Even more pernicious than that though - you say " _the men_ think they are
being fair and honest", but research repeatedly shows that _women are also
less fair to other women_. This is important to keep in mind because it
reinforces the fact that most of the biases that work against objectively
determining merit are _part of the fabric of our society_. They are biases
that you will tend to hold _even if they hurt you personally_.

Many men bristle when they are confronted with this sort of research and say
"I'm not a sexist" or "I'm not a racist". That's the wrong way to think about
it. We live in a deeply unfair society, and unless we constantly, mindfully,
consciously work against that unfairness all the time, we will fall victim to
it ourselves and perpetuate it.

------
pc86
> 52% of women caregivers with incomes at or below of the national median of
> $35k spend 20+ hours each week providing care. The largest racial
> demographics in this group are black and hispanic.

Are there many people, regardless of gender or race, who earn less than
$35k/year and are in a position to contribute to OSS?

~~~
malandrew
Excellent question. If you're in a position to contribute to OSS and earn less
than that salary, you're likely living in another country where that salary is
one of relative affluence (affording you the luxury of time to contribute to
open source).

------
TD-Linux
It is true that the culture of OSS contributions and IRC lurkers is a very
small subset of the available talent pool. On the other hand, jobs that hire
based on open source contributions are still a very small subset of the total
available jobs. The vast majority of my friends in college were hired with
little experience into large corporations, who are better equipped to have a
smooth onboarding experience and on-site training.

FWIW, I contributed to an open-source project and was then hired to work on it
full-time, and it has been a great experience.

------
malandrew
Does the design community, which expects job candidates to have a portfolio of
work in order to be considered for a position, have these same debates that we
have in software engineering?

~~~
Mc_Big_G
Designer portfolios aren't typically closed source and represent paid work.

------
timwaagh
i liked the article until it became feminist. the notion that because there
are less women in industry recruiters cannot use a selection criterium that
has intrinsically nothing to do with gender, however somehow guys score better
on that criterium, doesn't sit well with me. like i'm evil and deserve less
favourable treatment because i'm white and male.

~~~
me1010
I think the author is attempting to make the very valid point that not all
good programmers can be expected to be giving freely of their non-work day
time.

In short -- life happens but then the jobs dry up and good talent is over
looked or lost.

And, yes, it does happen to women more than men.

~~~
pc86
I don't think even companies that "require" a strong GitHub portfolio are
saying that they're not filtering out good or great programmers. It's about
signal and noise.

If you are hiring for a senior development position and you have a filter you
can employ that will cut out 90% of mediocre or bad programmers (or perhaps
more importantly make it much easier to identify them), but will also cut out
40% of good and great programmers, it's not a foregone conclusion that you
shouldn't employe that filter. If you still get enough resumes to make a
decision, you've just decreased the odds that you get a shit hire by $MATH
percent.

If social justice is something you care about you probably don't want to do
this. If building good software is something you care about, you probably do.
I think most here would agree that a random developer with a large body of
public OSS contributions is probably "better" than a random developer without.
I say that as someone who has pushed to a public GitHub repository probably
four times in the past two years.

