It seems like you haven't quite got the concept of open source. If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last?
A while back I bought a cheap robot vacuum. Their scheduling feature didn't meet my needs, so I reverse-engineered the protocol and open-sourced a cron-friendly CLI tool and a library so people could do other things with it: https://github.com/wpietri/sucks
Honestly, this was a mistake on my part. It was a demanding audience of home-automation hobbyists mostly without programming skills. The company was thoroughly unhelpful. When my vacuum finally broke, I was relieved, as I had a good excuse for trying to hand off the project. Nobody stepped up, so I shut it down. I just ran out of interest in doing free work to support a company worth billions.
I really admire the community spirit of open source But it's not sustainable if companies making their money off it keep depending on the niceness and generosity of others without giving back enough to keep them happy, healthy, productive people.
It seems like you haven't quite got the concept of open source.
Making something open source is about granting freedoms for users of that thing. One of those freedoms is usually "you owe nothing and can do with it what you wish: sell it, fork it, modify it" in exchange for "the author provides no guarantees and is not liable for this software".
Open source authors that expect some benefactor to appear and sprinkle money so that they can quit their day job and work on their hobby full time are, for lack of a better term, delusional.
The default is that no one will use your thing, no one will contribute, no one will fund you, etc.
> "you owe nothing and can do with it what you wish: sell it, fork it, modify it" in exchange for "the author provides no guarantees and is not liable for this software".
I do have some open-source code out there where people have been mostly pleasant and reasonable. It's targeted at developers in particular niches and they do act mostly as you describe.
But once it shifts from a peer relationship to a producer/consumer relationship, things can easily get ugly. Ugly in a way that drives people out of open source and keeps people from open-sourcing useful code. You appear to be fine with that. But if anybody's delusional here, it's the people who expect to keep taking from open-source software without worrying about its sustainability.
> Log4j maintainers have been working sleeplessly on mitigation measures; fixes, docs, CVE, replies to inquiries, etc. Yet nothing is stopping people to bash us, for work we aren't paid for, for a feature we all dislike yet needed to keep due to backward compatibility concerns.
Why don't they 'resolve' the security issue by removing the feature and then set up a bug bounty for backporting fixes to the shitty feature? Then the companies that depend on it will actually be on the hook for once.
Too much collateral damage for downstream F/OSS? Too unseemly a move, in a moment of ‘crisis’?
So your proposed solution is for the open source maintainers to release a hotfix build and to put up their own money to host a bug bounty program so someone else can fix it?
Commenting may work if the issue has one or two large backers that can independently be vetted to be trustworthy. But if there are several dozen small backers, having to track them all down after closing the issue seems less than ideal.
I can't think of anyone I've ever met that started an open-source project expecting it to become their day job in short order.
When your project blows up and mints a herd of new gazillionaires, yes, it's reasonable to ask those companies to fund what is now an important community project.
Anybody that says "nope, their money, they do what they want" is spouting the same flavor of dipshittery as "free speech only means the government can't censor, private companies are free to do what they want".
Technically correct and functionally disastrous. Societies worth living in can and do not endure this behavior for long.
Americans used to understand this. Know why there are schools all over the country named after Andrew Carnegie? Because that ruthless capitalist mercenary, after crushing every one of his competitors to dust, invested a large chunk of his fortune on infrastructure for national wealth that would propel another three generations.
I think the point is that while it would be awesome to just have everyone pay open source maintainers what they can afford to when they use their project, in practice relying on people's (or worse, companies') good will is a losing strategy. It seem wildly unrealistic to just expect that everyone will just naturally give back to open source in a meaningful way absent any actual incentives or requirements, and even if it did start happening there would be nothing the situation from returning to the way it was before. I think most of the arguments you'll see against the idea of "just give back to open source maintainers even though you aren't required to" aren't skeptical of the idea that people should be compensated for their work, but just skeptical that peer pressure is the only thing needed to turn the current open source model into one where all maintainers are fairly compensated.
You are absolutely right. The naivety of most open source developers when it comes to understanding how people/companies/markets work is jaw dropping. If you ask people to pay $0 for your work then that is exactly what they will pay. Wishing for things to be different is a waste of time. Accept how the world works and act accordingly.
That isn't "the world". It's a relatively small set of people in a relatively small chunk of history that see themselves as entitled to make endless profit without ever worrying about where that comes from or who it hurts. It's not a sustainable mindset, so it never lasts.
Look at the shift in attitudes toward the environment in the last 100 years as an example. There was a point where executives thought it absolutely fine to pollute wildly. That consequences were for the little people. Through a mix of culture change and improved regulation, that has changed, and it continues to change.
> It's a relatively small set of people in a relatively small chunk of history
I think it’s a fairly large chunk of history (e.g. all the time humans were a thing) that this applies to. The fact that it weren’t executives but kings, queens and nobles thinking this way doesn’t really change much.
It’s not even necessarily malicious, but you really don’t want to think about the fact your life is so comfortable at the expense of other people.
I agree with your general point, but Kings and Queens absolutely had to consider other people.
Specifically, most rulers had some kind of patronage network where they gave out 'gifts' like land, or the right to collect taxes, in return for loyalty. Princes did not generally just sit on a huge pile of money, like a dragon. If they wanted to go to war or build a palace, they had raise taxes, which meant concessions to their power.
Anyway, slightly off-topic! Still, the analogy holds - you don't get to be a prince of the internet without the work of a lot of minor nobles.
Historically, leadership was tightly bound to productive land, because that's what everybody needed to survive. Your "nobles" could in the long term only be as successful as the people they ruled over, and the feedback loops there weren't long ones. Were there sometimes bad nobles and bad kings? Sure. But overall, the badness was limited because harming the "infrastructure" of the day, land and people, was felt quickly by people higher up the hierarchy. Sustainability was a must.
That's distinct from modern capitalism in the age of industry and information technology, because the portability of wealth and the long feedback loops mean executives can get quite rich in unsustainable situations. The elevation of an IGMFY ideology to become the dominant view of the moneyed was only recently possible because for most of history one couldn't escape the consequences like people can now.
You haven't worked enough shit jobs if you think that un-"moneyed" plebs aren't similarly willing to fuck someone else over if it means they have the opportunity to three-quarters-ass their work and leave the rest to a coworker who they are on a first-name basis with and is otherwise friendly to them.
"IDGAF, it's not me" and "ask for forgiveness, not permission" is not in any sense a minority viewpoint. Even people who insist they don't follow those creeds have the issue of being, more often than not, unreliable narrators of their own actions—not to mention: economically irrational in ways that extend to the economics of non-monetary, give-and-take systems.
Which world are you talking about? History is full of people exploiting other people. Mention any period of history where people were not trying their damn hardest to exploit other people?
What are you talking about? You are the one that's making the following claim:
> That isn't "the world". It's a relatively small set of people in a relatively small chunk of history that see themselves as entitled to make endless profit ...
Which is a claim that can't be proven either way since you are talking about how people in all of history was thinking. In other words, you are making a claim that is just wishful thinking.
You're largely correct, but I'm not speaking about peer pressure.
'Tis the season, so we've been listening to a lot of Christmas carols.
One of my favorites is Good King Wenceslas, which concludes with the verse: "Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing, Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing."
Charity used to be a behavioral expectation in the West. Charity is not "giving money to somebody else so they can do charity on your behalf" nor is it "paying taxes to fund social programs". Charity is you, directly, investing your resources in your community, with no expectation of return.
Today, this assumption no longer holds. The result is the current state of open source, which needs to figure out a license that extracts value from players big enough to pay it, without punishing upstarts into oblivion (and thus forming a protective moat for existing large players).
Some percentage of net revenue share strikes me as the right sort of license, with sensible caps and/or some sort of shared pooling mechanism.
>Charity is not "giving money to somebody else so they can do charity on your behalf" nor is it "paying taxes to fund social programs". Charity is you, directly, investing your resources in your community, with no expectation of return.
Can you give some concrete examples? Because I can't tell what distinction you are trying to define, at all.
In which bucket would you put:
1) Giving money to a local hospital
2) Volunteering with a non-profit organization
3) Giving cash to a wandering schizophrenic
4) Buying lunch for someone who's been holding up a cardboard sign at an off-ramp
5) Giving money to the United Way through paycheck deductions.
6) Giving money to an organization that funds research into a disease
7) Giving money to a local organization that gives grants and loans to disadvantaged people to start small businesses.
8) *Lending* money to a local non-profit that gives loans to disadvantaged people to start small businesses.
9) Giving money to a local food bank.
10) Donating blood to the Red Cross
11) Giving money to the Red Cross
Some projects use a copyleft license like the GPL or AGPL by default but also sell their product under another license to parties that want to avoid copyleft. This way the product is FOSS but companies that want to use it in their proprietary software have to pay.
> When your project blows up and mints a herd of new gazillionaires, yes, it's reasonable to ask those companies to fund what is now an important community project.
You never need an excuse to ask, but neither side should feel compelled. The transaction is already complete.
Once you give something away, it doesn't matter if someone else gets rich off it. You gave it away. You're not, and shouldn't feel, entitled to anything.
If this bothers you, maybe you shouldn't have given it away for free?
> Anybody that says "nope, their money, they do what they want" is spouting the same flavor of dipshittery as "free speech only means the government can't censor, private companies are free to do what they want".
I don't know how to respond to this. This statement seems entirely paradoxical to me. Yes, it is their money, and they can do whatever they want. And also you accurately describe how free speech applies to private enterprises. Why are you so bothered by this?
There is a question of morality, sure, but that's a fruitless conversation to have. It's one thing to wish the world were different, but another to be angry with people who live in this world. Does this make me a person who merely spouts dipshittery?
You seem to acknowledge that the world is a certain a way, but feel shocked to find, and subsequently rebel against the idea that yes, it is actually that way. I don't understand this at all.
I for one appreciate that this site and others are moderated and restrict and remove posts containing hate speech. I imagine that the majority of readers and contributors would agree with me.
> Americans used to understand this. Know why there are schools all over the country named after Andrew Carnegie?
Perhaps it's because I, and the rest of the world, are not American, but I can't say I've ever given a moment of thought to the names of schools in your country, or Carnegie for that matter.
Perhaps America's fetish for capitalism is at the root of these divides. If you want to get paid and work on open source software full time, I can't think of a better way than under some form of universal basic income, but your capitalist infatuations make that unlikely. Charity is not the solution.
I've long known people who modified cars. Sometimes they did it as a business. Sometimes they helped friends out. Sometimes the work was on nights and weekends. The car manufacturer never had a responsibility to support them. They never had to support people in forums. Anything they did was their choice. Sometimes as a business and sometimes volunteering.
You didn't have to open source that work. Once it was out there, you didn't need to provide support.
Doing volunteer work and hoping for generosity from companies isn't working.
>> You didn't have to open source that work. Once it was out there, you didn't need to provide support.
That's true. The problems brought up in the article all stem from companies relying on open source and then getting into trouble when there are problems with it. They would pay if they had to.
The core problem is that everyone wants something for nothing. Sure companies appreciate that they can get billions of dollars worth of infrastructure software for free. Individuals appreciate that they can get useful software for free (though many don't care if it's FLOSS or illegally obtains commercial). People will take what they can, and pay for what they must. Open source is sometimes better than commercial, and even if the developers were paid industry rates it would be much cheaper because companies charge rent for software - not for development.
It is not a problem. It just is how humans function. So act accordingly. Trying to change how humans work is a waste of times. You are fighting millions of years of evolution. Good luck with that. Try not to be bitter when you fail.
That is one of those evo-psych just-so stories. American corporate culture in the late 20th/early 21st century is not representative of all humans at all times.
I get that it's the dominant experience for you, but please don't confuse that with some sort of deep evolutionary imperative. One of the things that distinguishes humans as a species is how extremely social, how extremely cooperative we are. See, for example, E. O. Wilson's "The Social Conquest of the Earth" for more on where we fit in evolutionarily.
I agree with most of what you are saying. Groups cooperate internally and go to war with other groups externally. However that has nothing to do with my point. I am basically making an economic statement about how modern companies work.
No, you made a claim about "how humans function" over "millions of years of evolution". I guess you're abandoning that claim now? If so, maybe do it honestly.
No not at all. My comment was a reply to your argument:
> One of the things that distinguishes humans as a species is how extremely social, how extremely cooperative we are
Where I point out that what you are saying is not true in general. But it is true within a group (say a company) and not between groups (say between companies and OSS maintainers). Groups that corporate well within the group have an evolutionary advantage fighting other groups.
However I am not sure what the point is you are trying to make? My original point is that corporations/people don't throw $ at OSS maintainers for the work they do and expect them to maintain it for $0. That's a clear objective fact. So either treat your OSS project as a business and get paid to do your work or accept that outcome and stop complaining.
Again, you made a claim about the evolved nature of humanity. It seems like you can't back it up. Bluster all you want, but if you can't come up with actual citations, I think we're done here.
Sorry, what makes you think you're telling me something I didn't know? Do you honestly think I was somehow compelled to release the code? Do you think I was expecting the open source police would kick down my door if I didn't provide support?
> reverse-engineered the protocol and open-sourced ... free work
oof, I know that feeling - that sadness that comes with the realization that the manufacturer could have saved you so much trouble but chose not to... which you then rewarded with free labor and promotion. I got it every time I disassembled binary blobs in order to get hardware to work with anything beyond Windows. For a long time there wasn't much of an alternative, but that isn't really the case anymore. Setting up a new openpower system was a very strange experience, reverse-engineering wasn't even an option - the manufacturer provided schematics for the board and a wiki directing you to the source code for every bit of firmware (including the ring -3 processor).
My sympathies! It sounds like you got much deeper than I did.
I don't regret trying it once. It's possible, after all, that the manufacturer would have said, "Look, there's demand for an open protocol, just like some engineers have been saying. Let's take on that work ourselves." And honestly, they could have gotten away with some very modest support of the project: occasional discussions with engineers and enough free hardware that we could test new builds. But no shits were given on their part, so I also don't regret shutting the project down.
I'm glad to hear things are getting better in some spaces. Let's hope it keeps going that way!
IMO, I think the golden age of completely FOSS apps (no open core) is ending/has ended as users expect more features and apps struggle to meet demands without effective monetization. I think open source will always have a place for libraries and tools, but end user applications will either become open core or no longer open source.
I think the exact opposite. All of my open source tools in 2021 are of extraordinarily higher quality than they were 10 years ago.
All I see with the FOSS ecosystem is it picking up steam at an extraordinary pace from 2005. Postgres in particular has absolutely dominated its incumbents in recent times, an insane reversal from the situation at the turn of the millennium.
There's a guarantee of correctness, availability of auditability, and a tide of slow, iterative improvements.
The key is supply and demand.
Open source software is often not a trailblazer. Open source is often reactive to a need, and punctuated by a demand for quality, bad treatment by the commercial incumbent, and constant iterative improvement.
See the pattern of so many technologies, Docker following VM ware, open source databases following Oracle (1980s Oracle was a real pioneer).
Open source has always and will continue to be a slow rolling borg that chases commercial software. Projects will never be rushed, but the benefits of an open base has time and time again crushed closed source incumbents.
> I think open source will always have a place for libraries and tools, but end user applications will either become open core or no longer open source.
Very sad if this ever comes to pass. It's a world in which I would never have learned about computers or decided to work with them. I think it makes more sense to charge big companies but keep software free and libre for individuals.
(I don't think this future will happen though: I think it's based on a deep misunderstanding of what drives FOSS developers to do what they do).
Shouldn’t Open Source be considered the 8th wonder of the world?
- OSS allowed an entire industry to flourish,
- It has had so many contributions that it is easily the category which is the biggest benevolence of the world, and possibly the biggest achievement of humanity,
- It allowed the entire world to go securely on the internet (launch a Debian and it’s secure and up to very high professional standards without effort, try doing that in the legal field),
- Its results are permanent. In 2100, documents written in Office 365 or Adobe will be lost, but they’ll be able to recompile LibreOffice, Chrome (at least Webkit) or Wordpress. Benefits of OSS accrue over time, as opposed to closed-source software which is sold under closed license and DRM.
> Its results are permanent. In 2100, documents written in Office 365 or Adobe will be lost, but they’ll be able to recompile LibreOffice, Chrome (at least Webkit) or Wordpress. Benefits of OSS accrue over time, as opposed to closed-source software which is sold under closed license and DRM.
In practice, I think that only entirely cloud based ecosystems will be lost to time. As long as the requisite hardware can be emulated and there is an archived version of a local viewer, it's possible to interpret a closed source format document. People already do it with WordStar and retro games.
Entirely possible. Although I suspect more libraries and tools will go that way as well. Note that mine was in theory a library/tool. And the examples mentioned in the blog post were similarly infrastructural.
Most of us work at such high levels of abstraction we couldn't even name all our dependencies. Which in effect makes us the same sort of consumers app users are: expecting a lot out but not putting anything in.
I think mobile was a reprieve for commercial software and UX specialists and the increasingly negative comments on new OS versions indicate it is close to done like desktop.
For every user that likes a change there are 19 that prefer the flow they already learned to stay exactly the same and at least half are looking for exploitive attempts to modify their behavior in anything a publisher changes.
Those aren't the only answers. The notion that people only respond to direct incentives is incorrect and ahistorical. It's a convenient dogma for the selfish to promote, but I don't have to take it seriously at all.
Another perfectly good option is for tech people to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy. Which is what's happening right here in this discussion, so you could be part of that solution if you wanted.
How has the strategy of "companies should just be nicer" worked for things like minimum wage, health insurance, workers rights, ect... It's getting to the point of insanity (in my opinion) that people keep thinking this is going to magically appear if they ask for it. It arguably flies in the faces of thousands of years (or millions if you count pre-humans) of evolution.
At the least people suggesting this should acknowledge that this kind of society has possibly never existing in this entire universe on the scale they want it to exist (larger then dunbar(ish) number tribes). The onus is on them to build a path towards this new kind of society instead of just throwing the ideal out into the ether and expecting it to just magically appear.
I'm not suggesting it's magic. Indeed, what I specifically said was that we should work to build strong cultural expectations. Which are very much necessary in all the cases you name.
That's not because they just had some good feelings. It's because people expect them to be at least slightly non-awful. We can accomplish something similar here. If programmers start insisting that companies take open-source funding seriously, it will happen. Not quickly and not easily. But if people start taking action (e.g., turning down jobs when companies are parasites on the open-source ecosystem), things will change.
Yes and no. A lot of that spending is done with a monetary incentive in mind. Companies aren’t completely devoid of understanding that there is a certain breaking point where being shitty can have financial consequences. They aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, not predominantly anyways. They can use charitable contributions to project a public persona (earned or not) of being good, for the purposes of increasing/maintaining business. They can do it as a smokescreen/cover for other scandals for the same reason.
Is that a good thing? Yes.
Is it enough? Not even close.
The culture needs to change sure, but the change of culture that needs to happen seems effectively impossible unless companies are dragged into it kicking and screaming through organized labor efforts or government oversight/regulation. Those are both of course highly polarized political issues and that aspect of culture sure isn’t getting better either.
I think the quicker, sadder, and easier change is that a lot of Open Source projects just aren’t going to get started like they used to, and are going to have increasingly restricted licenses with stratified feature sets. We’re definitely seeing more of the “Taking my ball and going home” approach by small developers with tiny open source packages these days and it’s sad but also hard to blame them for. Even worse there are an increasing number of groups who attempt to buy projects for sometimes stupid money for the explicit purpose of using them as a Trojan horse to ship malware. They’re preying on the same people who have become incredibly cynical about the whole thing and that’s dangerous for everybody.
What do you think underlies most of the changes via "organized labor action or government oversight/regulation"? People understanding that things should be different, which is a cultural change.
The history of the minimum wage isn't that some bureaucrat mandated it and then everybody said, "Gosh, that's a good idea, let's keep it." There was a long period of advocacy for it, a period of persuading people that it was the right thing to do. That was the ground in which all the work for the change grew.
Today, software developers are the key labor force for this change, and we aren't organized. So in practice, the first work we have to do is to persuade the bulk of programmers that it's part of their professional duty to make sure their employers support the open-source projects that their businesses depend on.
Companies will do it if we insist. In the grand scheme of things, it isn't even much money, not compared to what they're paying programmers in salary, benefits, and cushy amenities.
Good luck with that. I for one am not holding my breath. Meanwhile, perhaps accept the world for what it is and act accordingly? Just make the companies pay for it by licensing the code correctly. It isn’t rocket science.
Oh? Shame nobody's ever tried that. But since you've had a brand new idea that you're sure will solve the problem, how about you take a swing at it? Show us how easy it is.
Where did I say it was a brand new idea? Where did I say it would be easy? Starting a business is hard. I founded and ran my own succesful business so I know how hard it is. I am not sure what your point is?
My point is that you're trivializing the problems and insulting all of the people who have been trying to make it work for decades. I too have started successful businesses. What I learned from that was to respect the people doing the actual work, rather than to run around arrogantly blustering, "It isn't rocket science."
You are attacking a point I am not making. My point is that some OSS maintainers don't understand that they have to think about their work as a business if they want to see any $ thrown their way. That's the part that isn't rocket science. I agree with you that actually doing it is hard. My message is to stop whining that companies/people don't give them $ out of the kindness of their hearts and instead accept it and either treat their work as a business or accept that they will get very little gratitude or $ in return. The idea that OSS maintainers are special snowflakes that can work on whatever they feel like and the world automatically owns them something in return is childish.
This notion that one has to think about it as a business is just false. That is one way to do it, but open source funding happens other ways too. Your attitude that anybody must be an idiot if they want to solve in a way incongruent with your hypercapitalist fantasies is both rude and ignorant. If anybody's being childish here, it's the person treating them as "whining".
> tech people [need] to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy
Agreed on this, but the "and companies" thing is a total red herring. Two things to note: even though you mention "people and companies", it's incredibly clear from popular sentiment that the conception held by most people of the problem/solution comes down to the latter (companies) and not the former (people). Focusing on companies at all—let alone allowing it to occupy a majority share of one's focus—is a huge mistake. Depersonalized abstract entities like companies are almost entirely immune to whatever methods of persuasion people have in mind here. Gay rights only just became kosher to "take a stand" on, and even then it's invariably limited to being trotted out as a vehicle for the most empty and self-serving marketing horseshit and other corporate speak that anyone should expect to come out of these institutions. Cultural pressure for open source by way of shaming companies doesn't stand a chance; it has to come down to people.
I've brought up the subject before: why do we rake companies over the coals for their inaction, but ignore the individuals? It's worth reflecting on the relationship between a company and its employees.
A company, no matter how many layers of management are involved, delegates some problem to an employee. That employee surveys the lay of the land and then elects to use some tech that is available from the commons towards solving the problem. In turn, they are rewarded by their employer in both tangibles and intangibles that are considered proportionate to the achievement and budgeted accordingly. Thus, that person is, in a very real way, converting the labor of others into personal gain—in the form of wealth, career prospects/advancement, and personal stature in wider society.
Why is it easy to frame a company as the perpetrator and hard to say anything about any given developer who benefited from this (and did not share)? Because it's uncomfortable, since it's too personal? That might make sense if we were talking about, say, a custodian with limited career prospects just doing their best to keep their head above water and provide for their family already, but that tends not to be the case where software development is involved. The implication here is clear. (Forget, for now, the prior argument I just made about effectiveness for a moment and feel free to focus just on the fairness aspect here, if it uncomplicates things.) If there's any appropriate allocation of social pressure to be meted out—resulting in social expectations to be met—then it needs to come in the form of beliefs like, "hey, if as part of your employment you are singlehandedly making something like twice the US national average of an entire household, and you're not giving away at _least_ 10% of your salary to the people who made that possible, then you're kind of a piece of shit." Is that a stand that people are willing to make, though?
It's acceptable to disagree with this, but to understand why you feel it's justified to defend the individuals involved means that you have everything you need to understand why there is no movement on the problem. Perennially and impotently opining that companies need to quit screwing around and do something already is a ridiculous strategy.
I don't think that releasing that tool was a mistake. The mistake was worrying about providing support for it, beyond what you needed it to do.
This is the same as the poor log4j devs, getting bashed and still trying their best effort to please everybody.
Lost and lots of open source authors release some work to the open, and then start to worry about everybody's opinions and complaints. But that's a very unhealthy thing to do, IMO.
In essence, this is your own garage project and you've taken it out to the street for people to enjoy or admire. You should care about people's complaints as many f*cks as stacks of money they are putting on your table. Anything else, will end up deteriorating your mental health, one way or the other.
It seems like you haven’t quite got the concept of capitalism and how humans and markets actually work. If you give away your work for $0 then the value of your work is $0. Yes a tiny minority may want to pay more than that to make themselves feel morally superior or to virtue signal their goodness. But most won’t. Accept it and act accordingly: make companies pay to use your work and sue the companies that fail to comply with the licence conditions. It isn’t rocket science.
> If you give away your work for $0 then the value of your work is $0.
I should've been paying my mother market rates. After all, she and my father have been running at a loss for this whole "family" enterprise.
IMO, open source is (or should be seen as) more of a "friends and family doing favours for each other" kind of human activity. Some people do it for the sheer joy of it, share without expectation of more than a "thank you" (at max), and calling their work valueless is just crass marketism.
You are not getting my point. I am reacting to the OSS maintainers that get upset when the intrinsic value of their work doesn't automatically convert to market value ($ in their pockets). My point is to stop blaming the world and instead put a market value on their work for corporations.
Can you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've been it a lot in these threads. I'm afraid it's repetitive and it lowers the quality of the discussion.
I am surprised you would see my comments as engaging in a flamewar dang. If you look at my comment history it should be clear that I in general don’t do that. Perhaps also take into consideration the many upvotes my comments have received. However I acknowledge that I might have been a bit more snarky in my comments than was strictly necessary to get my point across.
This is a classic mistake of people worship at the church of Econ 101: confusing price with value. Our system depends entirely upon things that are priced at $0 but are valued much higher. If you actually spend your life only doing things you are paid in cash for, I truly pity you. And in fact I can help you out by reminding you that you aren't getting paid for posting here, so you are morally obligated to stop doing it.
No you are not getting my point. OSS code often has a high intrinsic value (it is useful) and $0 market value (you pay $0 for it). The problem is that OSS maintainers often mistake the two. They seems to think that the world should automatically give the work they do a high $0 market value because of its intrinsic value. But that is not how it works.
> If you actually spend your life only doing things you are paid in cash ...
> And in fact I can help you out by reminding you ...
Hahaha I love it when people get all passive aggressive :) It should be obvious to you that the fact that I am writing this, without getting paid for it, show that I don't spend my life only doing things I am paid for. You might want to look into the Econ idea of Utility Value. It has nothing to do with $.
A while back I bought a cheap robot vacuum. Their scheduling feature didn't meet my needs, so I reverse-engineered the protocol and open-sourced a cron-friendly CLI tool and a library so people could do other things with it: https://github.com/wpietri/sucks
Honestly, this was a mistake on my part. It was a demanding audience of home-automation hobbyists mostly without programming skills. The company was thoroughly unhelpful. When my vacuum finally broke, I was relieved, as I had a good excuse for trying to hand off the project. Nobody stepped up, so I shut it down. I just ran out of interest in doing free work to support a company worth billions.
I really admire the community spirit of open source But it's not sustainable if companies making their money off it keep depending on the niceness and generosity of others without giving back enough to keep them happy, healthy, productive people.