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.
Author also comes from perspective that somehow "project" in itself is good and should be sustained. Open source projects are not endengered species to keep it alive.
If no one is interested in paying for project, then people don't need it. Simple as that, when project breaks like open ssh companies will chip in...
>when project breaks like open ssh companies will chip in...
Although, in that case, they really didn't. At least not enough. That's why you ended up with a Core Infrastructure Initiative. (Which, to be sure, is indirectly companies chipping in because that's mostly how the Linux Foundation gets funded but it's not individual companies bankrolling critical infrastructure software.)
Good example. People expect FLOSS developers to contribute work on their weekends and never complain about not being paid. Meanwhile Linux runs the power plants that keep the lights on.
That is the problem that devs are nice people who are doing it for free on weekends. This should end, and pointy haired bosses should deal with fallout at best from their own pockets.
Let's try replacing FLOSS with scientific research and see how wrong it sounds:
"Author also comes from perspective that somehow research in itself is good and should be sustained. Scientific research projects are not endengered species to keep it alive.
If no one is interested in paying for research, then people don't need it. Simple as that, when science breaks like open ssh companies will chip in... "
All those crap papers that people write just to get PHD should vanish.
On the other hand how much science went into SpaceX and reusable rockets? How much science is in chemistry to get new drugs because there are tons of people who would pay for that. Somehow LHC got funded and it was not cheap.
In past inventors were guys that had too much free time and too much money.
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.
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)
> ... 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.
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')
> 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".
> 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.
> Exploitation
> 1 the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work: the exploitation of migrant workers.
A license exists that denotes the requirements for using the software. This license is decided by the creator. It's the creators "requirement" or "demand" for using their work. Some open source projects choose to use multiple licenses, like the GPL + another license business can use.
Some go with MIT which demands a lot less from both parties.
As long as the license is followed, it's assumed that both parties are being treated fairly as they've agreed to follow the license. Considering the creator chose the license themselves, it's safe to assume they agree with its premise, and anyone following the agreement they went with isn't unfairly exploiting them.
e.g. It's a fair trade.
The creator also benefits by attracting additional talent to the project because of the license being used. If the license was not an open source license, would they have attracted that talent?
To suggest that these companies are unfairly exploiting these individuals, you'd have to show why agreeing to the terms the creator set out is unfair, especially when other common and easily accessible licenses exists that solve these very issues.
They're being "exploited" in the sense the word is used in the critique of capitalism.
They're producing immense value but other people monetise that value while they're barely receiving any meaningful compensation if at all.
It comes more easily if you accept the definition that working as an employee is inherently exploitative as you need to produce more value than you are paid in wages for your employment to be profitable to the employer (who ideally profits so much from the difference that they are compensated for the economical risk they carry and their initial investment, i.e. capital).
Certainly calling it exploitation carries a value judgement but objectively this is how open source works: in a capitalist system, most labor is exploited and because it's largely uncompensated open source is being particularly exploited.
Yes, and what I meant by exploitation is this: open source is a culture of gifting, either in the form of new projects, or pull requests, donations, or other forms of volunteering. Companies (not all) quite often consciously do not participate in that culture, but still use the code and community to create their surpluses.
Well, that's why the GPL was created: to make it impossible to siphon off profits by building on open source. Of course that is wildly incompatible with how most businesses operate, so the corporate world pushed open source authors towards more business-friendly licenses like MIT and Apache.
Of course what most people overlook with GPL in businesses (as an individual) is that as using the GPL excludes you from large sections of the economy and thus carries a cost not everyone can afford. In turn companies frequently use the GPL for "open source washing" via public/private licensing.
In the 90s I used to hear a lot of people joking that the GPL view on open source is communism. After having shifted politically to the left I now think that joke is actually truer than most people realise. And the incompatibility of a communist "gift economy" (i.e. take what you need, give what you can) with the capitalist host system lies at the core of most of the problems we see with open source sustainability.
In other words: open source "economics" (voluntary mutual exchange with no strings attached) is entirely alien to capitalism because in capitalism this behavior is essentially economic suicide except for a few scenarios (e.g. general marketing like Google, onboarding and recruiting like Facebook or promoting commercial services like Microsoft). Much like how CJ characterised npm Inc in her JSConf EU talk, these companies aren't walking all over open source authors because they're evil, they're doing it because they have no useful way to interact with them except for marketing.
Your piece reads mostly like it's trying to get employees to force their employers to support open source via the usual means of labor struggle (i.e. threatening to withhold their labor, shame them so others withhold their labor) but that to me looks more like a band-aid.
Maybe "exploited" is a little strong but some of these projects are essential components of modern development stacks.
So it's not just the injustice of people toiling away and eating ramen that is at issue here. What happens if people take you up on your advice? What is incentive for quality people to keep churning out open source tooling?
I have to agree with you here, I find no exploitation in committing to open source projects. I believe nobody does that for money and the expectations are clear in that regard to begin with.
That said, of course I'd like to see good open source maintainers enjoy a comfortable life.
However, the author appears to live in Finland. Accepting donations is illegal in Finland, so that income model would not work there anyway.
It does a disservice to the millions of people on the planet who do not have alternatives, and who are truly being exploited.