
I'm not good enough to work on open source software - davidw
http://journal.dedasys.com/2012/03/22/im-not-good-enough-to-work-on-open-source-software
======
antirez
I guess that in some way a lot of companies are taking from open source
without giving enough back. Open source is much cheaper than proprietary
software to produce, a team of a few guys do the work of what would be a much
bigger team in a proprietary software, and there is no need to have a profit,
paying the developers is enough, so... if companies using open source would
give back even a small amount of money...

But maybe some global "fund" should be used or something like that, I don't
think that giving to the project you use is going to scale (we don't want a
few guys rich, and nothing for all the rest, otherwise it's a company). But
then bureaucracy starts to be an issue, who selects the right projects? And so
forth. Not trivial.

Or maybe the solution is that if you are an enough large company, hire N open
source developers. Like charity there should be a non written rule that most
tech corps should follow. Like the 1% rule: hire 1% of your work force to
write open source (and probably this would end being a largere return about
branding than many ADs large companies run for more money than that).

~~~
ajross
I don't think resources are really the problem. There's a ton of money out
there that pays for full-time open source developers. Basically all the core
contributors of all the "serious" projects (i.e. things shipped in high-
revenue-producing contexts) are already on staff somewhere.

It's true that there's a much larger population of people (like me) who _want_
to work full time on open source and would take a job if it was offered. But
that just gets to what the linked article is talking about: companies don't
generally "staff" free software projects with new hires. They hire the
projects that already exist.

So basically the solution, if you want one of these jobs, is to get off your
butt and make something people want. Then give it away. :)

~~~
davidw
> There's a ton of money out there that pays for full-time open source
> developers.

I don't know... I'm not sure it's really a ton. And a great deal of it comes
from companies that derive their revenue from something else - in many cases,
proprietary software. Ubuntu, for instance, is all about Mark's millions made
from the sale of Thawte.

> So basically the solution, if you want one of these jobs, is to get off your
> butt and make something people want. Then give it away. :)

And then hope it's useful to someone who makes a bunch of money via
proprietary software or something else that's scarce, and that they hire you.
Why not just make something proprietary of your own to be more in control?

~~~
ajross
For some definition of "ton" anyway. Developers are cheap, comparatively. But
the point remains: all the major kernel developers are paid for. All the big
X.org people too; the Gnome people (though I'm told that investment is lacking
on KDE); virtualization folks behind Xen and kvm; Android obviously comes
right out of Google's payroll, likewise Chrome and Mozilla products.

Really, if you were handed a big check and told to build a team of open source
people, you'd have a hard time doing it without poaching from Red Hat, Google,
Novell or Intel.

And the final point was exactly what I was getting at. Getting yourself a free
software gig requires pretty much exactly the same things as getting yourself
a funded startup. In some sense it's a subset. Whether you want to make
proprietary things or not is, I think, a personal decision.

~~~
davidw
Anecdote time:

My last big open source effort, Hecl, weighs in at something like 100K lines
of code. LiberWriter, my first real "pay for it if you want to use it"
project, doesn't quite pay me enough to live on, yet, but earns decent money
at around 10% of the lines of code.

I did make some money consulting on Hecl, so it's not a total loss, and I had
fun with it, and learned a lot. But in terms of the money, there's simply no
competition: LiberWriter wins by a huge margin, even though it's simpler code
that doesn't do as much.

The big difference is with LW, people pay me directly. With Hecl, it was a
matter of hoping someone would come along and pay to have some work done on
it. It's just so much easier to deal with the former in terms of cash coming
in.

~~~
ajross
Isn't that just saying that LiberWriter is a more successful product than
Hecl? I mean, if Google or whoever wanted to base a service on Hecl, they
would have hired you, right? My analogy was to startup funding, not sales, but
I think it still holds.

Certainly if you make something people want, people will pay you to develop
it. I don't see a real problem with the model, though for obvious reasons the
incentives are going to drive more people to startups than to new open source
projects.

~~~
davidw
Several companies used Hecl code, including one that was later sold to
BlackBerry, so there was some demand for it commercially, just that apparently
the code was good enough or clear enough that they didn't need any further
involvement from me.

My point is that for people to start hiring you at a high hourly rate, there's
got to be a _burning demand_ , whereas with a product or app, the costs are
much lower, so it's easy to spread them around.

> Certainly if you make something people want, people will pay you to develop
> it

Only after a certain critical mass, that is a lot higher than what it is for a
proprietary project, where all sales feed back into the project. I mean, I
certainly don't pay people to develop Linux, Postgres, Ruby, Rails, gcc or any
of the other projects I use, although I do try and contribute back where
possible.

BTW, strange but true story: I probably made the most money off of Hecl doing
a BlackBerry port for... of all people, PASOK, the Greek center-left political
party. This was all before the country ran out of money, and I did get paid.

~~~
antirez
That's the problem IMHO. Company get sold for X, and did substantial business
with Hecl? Get x/200 or alike and give it to the Hecl developer as a donation.

It's not too hard... Open source coders are likely to write more open source
software, so it's a good investment for the collectivity.

------
davidw
I wrote this after the 'PG has lost the plot' thread. I didn't like the title,
but the content was fairly good. People really seem to have trouble
visualizing "that which is not seen":-)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Bravo and bingo. These are the exactly the frustrations I tend to feel as an
unpaid, open-source coder.

And the next level of the phenomenon is that the _entire software industry_
has shifted its business model to avoid having to compete with piracy or open-
source. There are now, to my knowledge, _two_ major for-profit companies
building their own PC operating systems: Microsoft and Apple. There are four
or five building mobile operating systems: Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry,
Google, (maybe) Symbian. The number of for-profit IDEs and programming
platforms is still mostly healthy, but much, much smaller than it once was.

"That which is not seen"? That is, the effect of this privative of profits on
the real world? Almost whole fields have shifted over into the domain of
unpaid, spare-time open source work. Thousands, millions of man-hours are
expended for no salary and no equity.

Think what would happen if all the open-source programmers (paid and unpaid)
went on strike. _Now_ you're realizing the economic value of open-source code
that goes completely uncaptured by its producers.

Yes, the result is that _less gets done_ , because everyone has to find day-
jobs, and that the software industry has changed almost entirely from product
business models to service business models.

Now, another scary thought: what if someone stole the code and databases to
your web-service? You say that your contacts and relationships are what really
makes your web-app worth something, but frankly, that's a load of crap. I'm
sure there are some starving Chinese coders who would _love_ to steal your
code _and_ your data, bring up their own web-service identical to yours (but
in Chinese), get a few million users, and then translate theirs back into
English for North American and European usage.

The "relationships and business expertise" excuse sounds much like what
everyone said when America sent its manufacturing overseas: "We'll do all the
high-value services and design and development work here." Well, no, the
manufacturing was _itself_ high-value and the other high-value points in the
supply chain eventually followed it, and we're China's bitch now.

There is an imperative to enable value-creators to capture some portion of the
value they create as cash. Otherwise the entire foundation of not only
capitalism but _all_ possible market economies breaks down into mush.

~~~
bunderbunder
I think it might be instructive to think of what the world was like before the
idea of letting people who create intellectual products maintain some
ownership of (and therefore be more able to make a living from) their work:

\- Serfdom was still legal in most of Western Europe.

\- Professional artists occupied the same social rung as prostitutes.

\- An intellectual professional's primary option for making a living off his
(that pronoun being sufficient for the era) work was patronage.

\- The vast bulk of intellectual output served the primary purpose of
glorifying the political and religious Powers that Be.

Of course that doesn't imply that the current copyright and patent law isn't
enormously out of hand, or that it doesn't largely function to the detriment
of creative professionals thanks to the grotesque ways in which it has been
amended over the past three or so centuries. But the basic idea is admirable,
and it can and should be salvaged.

~~~
npsimons
I can play this game too: you know what the software industry was like before
Microsoft and Apple? EVERYTHING was open source. When you bought a program (if
they didn't throw it in for free with the bloody expensive hardware) you
ALWAYS got source code. People still sell open source software; I've never
understood why people think that commercial software is incompatible with open
source. It isn't.

~~~
bunderbunder
_I can play this game too: you know what the software industry was like before
Microsoft and Apple? EVERYTHING was open source._

And yet, computing professionals were much less free than they are now.
Because programmers almost universally worked at the King's pleasure.

The exception to that rule was small garage shops. Like Microsoft and Apple.

------
j_baker
As someone who _has_ been paid to work on OSS, let me say that it is
absolutely not about skill. Most notably, Google and Mozilla pay plenty people
to work on Firefox and Chromium. Even Apple has some OSS projects (Webkit and
Darwin come to mind).

~~~
gcp
Maybe its better to say that "there is no need to be a superstar programmer"
to work on OSS. The companies you list aren't known for hiring unskilled
workers :-)

~~~
j_baker
Indeed, but they're by far not the only ones working on OSS. They're simply
the most recognizable. I've worked on OSS for companies with far less stellar
track records when it comes to hiring.

------
crcsmnky
Interesting perspective but I have to say there are quite a few companies
working the whole "open source the code, charge for consulting, etc." thing.
Just in data alone, Cloudera, Data Stax, Basho, 10gen and Hortonworks come to
mind.

My point is that thousands of people get paid to work on open source projects.
The project might not be their original creation but they still get to give
back by producing something that everyone can use. Isn't that really the point
anyway?

EDIT: added a missing 'not'

~~~
falcolas
FIWI, I have personally not heard of a single one of those companies.

To continue the OP's concept, these are likely companies with employee counts
in the single or double digits, whereas closed source companies have employees
in the 5-6 digit ranges, reinforcing the "I'm not smart enough to get paid
writing open source" concept the OP presented.

------
SirDinosaur
For those interested in sustaining themselves by making open / libre software,
I plan on dedicating my next summer to starting a cooperative for hackers. The
basic idea is that if we can create a decentralized ecosystem for exchanging
currency, ideas, and goods in an open and cooperative manner, we can solve our
needs as hackers without resorting to non-free alternatives. You can find my
early planning here: <https://github.com/SirDinosaur/hackercoop>, and I'd
_greatly_ appreciate any questions, comments, critiques on how to make my /
our dream possible.

~~~
DanBC
How do you solve taxes?

~~~
SirDinosaur
Let's rephrase the question: how do _we_ solve taxes?

~~~
DanBC
In the UK: Taxes are complicated but mostly solved. Either your employers
deduct taxes before you get your money or you are self-employed and pay an
accountant to sort it out; and people you buy things from add taxes before you
buy stuff. If you are rich you get an accountant and practice various forms of
avoidance (legal, but those loopholes may close soon, and of dubious
ethicality) to evasion (not legal).

Missing from the above description are people involved in barter economies.
There are several barter economy systems in the UK. The UK tax collectors (HM
Revenue and Customs) are clear: barter trades can be taxable.

Suggestion: Find an accountant that would like to work as part of a co-
operative. The collective either has one big joint account (like a business)
or lots of individual accounts - either way good accounting will legally
minimise tax burden and help with other stuff.

~~~
SirDinosaur
Awesome, thanks for the suggestion. Do you suppose the accounting could also
be automated, with help from an accountant, as part of the system that
facilitates exchanges? My current thinking is to create a system that can be
used by anyone, not just those within a single collective.

------
jasonlotito
The article is confusing. He talks about intellectual property, copyright, and
open source. He seems to confuse intellectual property and copyright (or at
least, use them interchangeably), and seems think that open source and
copyright are at odds. That open source licenses rely on copyright indicate
this isn't the case.

Maybe I just misread the entire thing, but I honestly don't see the message
he's trying to get across. It feels like their is a massive amount of context
that is missing from this.

------
aliguori
I'm paid to work on Open Source full time and have been for the better part of
a decade.

I don't really agree with anything the article says. Open Source development
is a segment of the industry. Getting a job in Open Source is really no
different than getting a job in Game Development, Robotics, or any other niche
market.

You generally have to (1) be willing to accept less pay (2) be more flexible
about relocating (3) have specialized skills and experience or just get really
lucky.

------
kisielk
An interesting perspective. I too would like to spend more time writing open
source software. The main reason I do not, and something which I think holds
true for a lot of people, is that even if our company wanted to open source
some of our software it's fairly difficult to do so and of questionable value.

Many of the components and practices in our software are quite specific to our
business and environment. They'd just be useless or, worse, an impediment to
other people wanting to reuse the software in a different context.

Even if we were to refactor parts of our code base to produce some "clean"
components that didn't rely on the specifics of our business or other
processes, there are many cases where that would just add to the overhead of
maintaining the software for us.

~~~
riledhel
You are understimating the value of your software. You never know who can find
your work inspirational or educational, even entertaining.

------
billswift
Of course, another factor is how ending copyright might redirect a lot more
resources into open source. Without being able to benefit from rents that come
from keeping proprietary code, how many companies would switch to using and
improving open source alternatives?

~~~
davidw
It's very easy and simple to pay $100 to use some bit of software. It's _way_
harder to actually contribute to it meaningfully.

Software markets solve a coordination problem. Not perfectly, but reasonably
well. Same thing goes for many other kinds of information goods. No way would
I pay an author to sit around writing a book, but I'm happy to give them $5
for a copy.

------
jdost
Oddly, in the age of the internet, it is easier for someone to do open source
at least part of the time for their employer. With the internet, a lot of the
money for web based companies is not from the software itself, but the
services the software provides. This allows for the company to open source a
large chunk of the code base and still make money to pay the developers. (see
things like 37signals/RoR)

------
phrontist
This throws the absurdity of capitalism in our faces: Guido, a guy who
developed software that benefits hundreds of thousands even by conservative
reckoning, can't work on it full time.

------
kungfooguru
Why does this have a single up vote?

