7 ms·

Paying people to work on open source is good

343 points by webology 3y ago

bugbuddy 3y ago
Yes, please start by practicing what you preach. I actually donated 1% of my income to various open source projects I use.
- fydorm 3y ago
  This is a good thing to do, but not really the point of the article.
- devmor 3y ago
  I’m really happy that github in particular has made it so easy to give some cash to the people responsible for tools that I enjoy.
- abound 3y ago
  My (very small) tech nonprofit has started doing something similar [1], where everyone contributes to a list of OSS tools we use heavily, and then everyone gives a weight/score to each tool. We then split the pot ($1,000 in 2022, probably ~$2,000 when I get around to doing 2023) among all the OSS projects, according to the relative scores. [1] https://siliconally.org/policies/open-source/#yearly-donations https://siliconally.org/policies/open-source/#yearly-donatio...
- brational 3y ago
  https://jacobian.org/2024/jan/10/philanthropy-update/ https://jacobian.org/2024/jan/10/philanthropy-update/ took 15 seconds to find on the website.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
netbioserror 3y ago
The premise of paid open source devs is fine and well, but every single one of these blogs devolves into delusional utopian nonsense from people who do not understand the staggering infrastructure and maintenance cost of the modern society they think should be some sort of guaranteed right. People, please learn and understand where your food comes from before writing this kind of garbage.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  FWIW, the author was at least thoughtful enough to include this disclaimer at the top: > Warning: rant ahead. I’m writing from a place of frustration and not particularly interested in trying to moderate my tone. If you don’t want to hear me yell about open source for a while, please skip this one.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  TFA’s author is one of the co-creators of Django and a preeminent member of the Python community. I think it would be charitable to assume that he does, in fact, understand these things.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - netbioserror 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      I don't really have anything to say here, other than to reiterate: it is simply not charitable to assume the author is "stupid," "deluded," or similar. It adds zero information to the conversation, and actively detracts from your underlying point.
      - netbioserror 3y ago
        His little soapbox rant sucked every last bit of energy out of his underlying point.
davepeck 3y ago
See also Nadia Eghbal's (IMHO definitive) work on the economics and sociology of open source software, "Working In Public": https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public
delichon 3y ago
A pro capitalist message from Jacobin? [Looks closer.] No. I'd pay for an open source project that could filter & sort news by surprisingness-for-that-news-source. This opinion would rank high for jacobin.com. The story about Zuckerberg's preference for the Quest 3 over the AVP would disappear.
- mkeeter 3y ago
  https://jacobian.org https://jacobian.org is Jacob Kaplan-Moss's website https://jacobin.com https://jacobin.com is a socialist magazine This blog post is from the former!
  - delichon 3y ago
    *jacobian.org for JKM's site
    - mkeeter 3y ago
      thanks, edited!
- emseetech 3y ago
  Jacobian, not Jacobin. But even so, paying people for their labor is entirely uncontroversial amongst socialists. Some might even argue it's the fundamental underpinning of their critique of capitalism.
gorjusborg 3y ago
I want to agree, and I understand the position, but there's no room for nuance when you throw around the work 'always'. I think I disagree that it is always good. For instance, if a company is paying someone to work on open source, and they use that to leverage the project in a direction that is against its other users' best interest, can that be good? I don't think so. There are numerous examples of situations and behaviors you could come up with that are not 'good'. I'm all for people making a living, but I don't like bad behavior, no matter if it generates 'freeish' source code or not.
- smburdick 3y ago
  This is why grants are really important. That usually means deliverables in a specific timeframe. To me, that elevates open source from a full-time hobby to a job.
  - jraph 3y ago
    Grants are great but are often not nearly enough and they can vanish from a year to another. You'd better secure other sources of income. Grants will also usually fund specific features of your product but not the whole thing. Other kinds of income are also good ways to fund open source like service, consultancy, support and even paid open source apps (which works particularly well for apps that have enterprise oriented features, turns out it doesn't matter that the source code is available under a free software license if it's convenient enough to click and buy). Coincidentally, this is how I get paid :-) Still, grants should not be ignored indeed.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jszymborski 3y ago
  I think the article addresses this. It's a matter of not letting "perfect" get in the way of "good". You're totally right, we should work towards getting everyone who wants to work on open source code bases the public funds they deserve at every opportunity, but in the mean time, we'll have to put up with corpos funding some of the FLOSS code. > We have to accept the world as it is – even if it’s not the world we want. This means we have to be okay with the idea that maintainers need to be paid. Far too often I see arguments like: “maintainers shouldn’t be paid by private companies because the government should be supporting them.” Sure, this sounds great – but governments aren’t doing this! So this argument reduces to “open source maintainers shouldn’t be paid”. I can’t get on board with that.
gustavus 3y ago
I don't understand when it became this was FOSS was always about "Free as in speech." But for some reason it became "Free as in beer." and many of the arguments I see around dev pay seem to be conflating the 2. Open source merely means the source is open and free for you to view look at modify, etc. At no point does it mean it costs nothing. Now with code it's not exactly a super reasonable business model to sell a software product but make it's code freely available, but that would still meet the definition of open source.
- wmf 3y ago
  [Never mind, I didn't express this clearly]
  - ahepp 3y ago
    I’ve worked for multiple companies that pay for dual licensed GPL software
  - reedciccio 3y ago
    Tell that to Red Hat, WordPress, Canonical, MySQL and many more products built on pure Open Source. The issue is complex.
  - jraph 3y ago
    That's not true. The company I work for manages to sell free software [1]. All the stuff we sell is under LGPL, and it's not open core, it is fully free software. It works under specific conditions and you need to come up with a business plan that makes it work, but it is possible. And it is one of the most ethical ways to fund free software so it would be too bad to discard this option too early. For us, what works is enterprise oriented extensions for a platform we develop. Turns out companies will fork off hundreds of dollars and enjoy the support that comes with it instead of compiling all this thing by themselves. It's more convenient and employees understand that it funds the open source software they are using, and it's an easily justified expense. But should they want to enjoy any of the freedoms that come with free software, they can. [1] https://store.xwiki.com https://store.xwiki.com
- 3y ago
ChadNauseam 3y ago
I've put some serious thought into solving this problem. There are two main structural issues I know of: 1. Open source libraries tend to be complement goods. You're more willing to pay for a good physics engine if you already have a good rendering engine and vice versa. But a sad truth of complement goods is that they are a centralizing force - it's actually better for everyone if the physics engine maker and rendering engine maker join forces and offer a bundle discount. But the most common strategy seems to be for them to just merge into one company, and this is why you see giant conglomerate products like Unreal and Unity instead of buying each component from a different vendor. 2. Since open source software is a public good (non-rivalrous, non-excludable), the "free market" cannot really incentivize its production nearly as much as would be optimal. Let's say there are 1000 people who would each pay $10 for a feature to be added, and the maintainer would happily add it for $5000. If 90% of those people each paid $6 they would get what they want and the maintainer would be happy too, but each individual has an incentive to be part of that 10% that gets to keep their $6 and still gets the feature, so what happens is that almost no one ends up paying. These problems can't be solved without slightly modifying open source, but they can be solved by maintaining the spirit of open source I think. What you need is to have some kind of foundation that takes money and gives it to "quasi-open-source" projects, and then only allows businesses to use those projects if they contribute a certain percentage of their revenue to the foundation. Of course, now the foundation needs to decide which open source projects to give the money too. It's an extremely tricky problem, but there's been a lot of interesting research by Glen Weyl on that exact subject and I'm confident it could be solved in a satisfactory way. I think this proposal would create a virtuous cycle once it got off the ground. The more projects licensed "quasi-open-source", the larger the incentive to pay the foundation to use them. The more the foundation is paid, the more money these "quasi-open-source" projects get, and so more people will license their projects "quasi-open-source", increasing the incentive again, etc. Of course, it would only be "quasi-open-source", and not truly open-source. But there's no reason the license couldn't be extremely in line with the spirit of open source. For example, it could say "if you're an individual or small company, you can use our code for any purpose for free. If you're a big company, you can use it in a way that complies with the AGPL or you can pay us, your choice". I think employees would also encourage their employers to become paying members of such a foundation, if it lead to those employees being able to determine where some of the money goes. Everyone at my current company is a Rust developer and so we naturally like Rust, but Rust jobs aren't always easy to find. As employees, it could be in our best interest to subsidize the development of Rust open source projects, if that increased Rust's attractiveness to other companies. If you're interested in this idea, my email is in my bio :D
axus 3y ago
Given free hosting and compute by the NSA? Win
4kimov 3y ago
> Every time a maintainer finds a way to get paid, it’s a win. Amen. It's becoming more common, and there's lots to celebrate [0] [0] https://fossfox.com/ https://fossfox.com/
newaccount7g 3y ago
[dead]
samatman 3y ago
A note to writers: when you find yourself writing a paragraph defensively justifying alienating your intended audience, take a walk around the block and think really hard about whether doing so is a good idea. I will never compromise on the definition of open source. I'm not particularly hard-nosed about proprietary software, or source available software either, they're fine, with some caveats I'll leave out. But it's important to have a term for software which is unencumbered by use restrictions, and we do: open source. Lumping other licenses in with it should be resisted. It's like (I've never seen this, to be clear) pescatarians rebranding as "seafood vegans". What is supposed to be gained there, or by trying to bolt on various source-available licenses to the definition of open source? So this guy picks an important topic, and right up front, he's telling me he knows that it's going to piss me off, but he's going to call not-open-source software open source anyway, and if I object, I don't care about developers getting paid. Y'know what? You succeeded. Fuck you, tab closed.
- barnabee 3y ago
  Agree and I don’t understand the downvotes. The goal isn’t for every dev or project to make money or be sustainable in open source, just as it isn’t for every business idea to succeed. I donate to numerous open source projects and make a point of donating more than I believe they’d charge me to buy/subscribe if the software wasn’t open source. I encourage others to do so too, I sincerely hope and believe we can see that happen. I’d love to see more truly open source software become sustainable, of course. But I don’t kid myself that it all will be. And I don’t care to relax the definition to include open core, VC exploitative, bait and switch, or whatever (have we learnt nothing in the last two decades?!). If the project dies it dies, if it stays a hobby project that’s ok too.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  > A note to writers: when you find yourself writing a paragraph defensively justifying alienating your intended audience, take a walk around the block and think really hard about whether doing so is a good idea. I really dislike this kind of "geez, read the room!" thinking. Not everybody needs to have the same opinion about everything. Not everybody should. The opinion of "the room" or in your terminology, the "intended audience", is ever-evolving and the way that happens is via people talking and writing about their own opinions that aren't identical to the prevailing views of the time. But it's fine that you disagree with the author about this and are unswayed by the author's arguments. Others will agree with the author and be unswayed by your counter-arguments, and that's fine too. Still others will change their views after reading the article or responses to it, and that's also fine. Maybe the prevailing view will shift as a result of all this discussion, maybe it won't. This is how discourse works!
FOSSwins 3y ago
I'm a developer with 15+ YOE, working mostly on legacy code in a govt job but I have extensive experience with modern code bases (C, Rust), and I have contributed to lots of FOSS of projects over the years in my free time as a way to learn new tech. I would work full time on Open Source if I was paid enough to leave my 9-5 job, which is not a lot in a third world country like mine. Say, $1500 / month.
coretx 3y ago
It certainly is good, but money also turns many people bad and impacts organizational dynamics.
barnabee 3y ago
I donate to a decent number of open source projects. Others I think are more than fine without me (Linux kernel, etc.) but I wouldn’t hesitate to donate if I believed they weren’t. For the rest, I would indeed as happily see them fail than compromise on the definition of open source. The two are equivalent to me.
philipwhiuk 3y ago
So many strawmen being set-up in this article the crow population is gonna take a major nose dive. If I hate any specific business model that is used by a company that does some some open source suddenly I don't think people deserve to be paid for their work? Yeah no, that's garbage. There's plenty of garbage business models and they aren't suddenly okay because one company uses it and 1% of their money funds some small bit of OSS work that underpins their business model.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
benatkin 3y ago
I'll respond to the little part where it puts using a "non-OSI approved license" under the umbrella of open source. It's not OSI approved because it isn't open source, as the community defined it long ago, and as it still makes sense for it to be defined. If you want me to agree with you, don't do that. Otherwise, I don't feel compelled to consider a bunch of disparate things as a Win. Here's one that could be more of a trap than a win, depending on the particulars of the job: "Employed by Microsoft to work on Python?" Look no further than https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
- lolinder 3y ago
  He anticipated your comment and already replied. You're free to disagree with him, but he clearly thought that part through already and already knows he disagrees with you and with the OSI. This entire post is his justification for his disagreement, while all you have is an appeal to the OSI definition that he's specifically rejecting. > “open source” / “free software” > Note the deliberate use of lower case. I’m not referring to Open Source™ as defined by OSI, nor to Free Software™ as defined by the FSF. I mean these terms in the broadest, most inclusive sense: “software with source code that I can read and modify and release variants of, perhaps under some conditions.” So I’m including OSI and FSF licenses, but also the Polyform licenses and the JSON license and, yes BSL in my version of “open source”. > This is perhaps a side point, but the “minimalist” definition of Open Source meaning “only OSI-approved licenses” – or, worse, “the GPL is the only ’true’ Free Software license” – is part of the problem here. I want to see more experimentation and variety in licensing options, and if that means introducing some additional restrictions beyond “anyone can use this for any purpose” I’m pretty okay with that. In my book, a broad spectrum of licenses from Blue Oak to BSL (and even more restrictive) “count” as open source. > ... I’ll put it this way: if my sloppy use of these terms bothers you in the context of talking about how people make their living, it implies that you care more about terminology and definitions than about the people, and I’d like you to sit in that discomfort for a while.
  - benatkin 3y ago
    I used lower case deliberately as well. It's a term that excludes source available not just because of OSI but because of the original community. And members of the current community can argue for a new, weaker, openwashed meaning of it, but people can always look back to the early days and see the true meaning of it.
hansonpeter 3y ago
[dead]
hardcopy 3y ago
A few weeks ago a wrote in to my Senator on the complete lack of government funding for independent engineers/small projects building FOSS (USA). NLNet in the EU is awesome. We really should have something like the NLNet in the USA.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  IDK maybe we just should let the EU pay for it
  - redkoala 3y ago
    We need more funding, not less.
- lucb1e 3y ago
  OSTIF is vaguely similar and iirc from the USA
  - hardcopy 3y ago
    OSTIF scope is really narrow. It's mainly for patching security related bugs/vulnerabilities in existing large projects. And AFAIK it has a significantly smaller source of funding, relying on corporate donations. It's not comparable to the projects that NLNet funds.
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - lolinder 3y ago
    As an alternative perspective—the government currently spends ridiculous amounts of money* on proprietary software, often having chosen the vendor before the bidding process even begins, shaping the RFP to suit only the chosen vendor. The resulting software produced in these contracts remains entirely proprietary even though it was paid for by taxpayer dollars, so the company that built it is effectively guaranteed a perpetual stream of taxpayer funds since only they are legally able to maintain it. I would love to see a world in which these gargantuan vendors are put out of business because the government is only allowed to buy software whose source code is released to the taxpayers who funded it. * EDIT: To quantify "ridiculous": > Each year, the U.S. government spends over $100 billion on information technology. Most of that will be used to operate and maintain existing systems, including aging—or "legacy"—systems. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-106821 https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-106821
mkoubaa 3y ago
Sidenote. Some companies offer a "volunteer time PTO". You can use it to contribute to OSS
jebickett 3y ago
[dead]
throwitaway222 3y ago
I'll just say this: I don't think the government should pay for open source development.
andoando 3y ago
I think cooperatively owned tech orgs are the future. Contribution to open source software will always lag behind private entities as people aren't prone to work for free. Are there any open source projects that are monetized/pay their contributors? If I ever get a successful startup going, I am going to explore this model.
lolinder 3y ago
This is as good a context as any to remind people of the origins of the Open Source Initiative and its definitions. Here's how the OSI described its history on its website in 2007 (emphasis added): > The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. ... A month later ... the participants voted to promote the use of the term 'open source', and agreed to adopt with it the new rhetoric of pragmatism and market-friendliness that Raymond had been developing. I find it a bit amusing that here we are, decades later, and people who use non-OSI licenses to try to thwart exploitation by enormous corporations are condemned on highly moralistic grounds for not being "truly open source". http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource.org/history/ http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...
- cipherboy 3y ago
  Even businesses care about the distinction between OSI-approved and SSPL/BUSL licensed code bases. In the latter, they often cannot host services that use BUSL licensed code which puts risks on the business. Some examples: Do they need to consult with a lawyer to understand if their particular use case is acceptable? If not now, then how do they know when that threshold is met? When the service is offered for revenue? Or only when offered directly to customers? What about if theirs is a consulting-structured business e.g., IBM or Collins, where any internally service provided to another team is billed and paid for internal to the company (even though its not paid for by an external customer)? Can they hire developers to contribute to the code when the upstream is unresponsive to their bugs/features? Or, if they have to integrate with other custom internal infrastructure/tooling? Are they free to remix these tools into larger projects of theirs? It is possible to separate the moralizing aspects of these licenses and articulate concerns strictly in business cases that make them unsuitable for OSI and thus not "open source" in spirit.
nomilk 3y ago
The community I've been most involved in over the past few years has been R/tidyverse. Some developers are paid (by RStudio [now Posit] and other orgs, like R Consortium) to work on software, docs, community initiatives etc. The experience as a programmer in this domain is amazing. Having these funded full time OSS contributors lets thousands of R enthusiasts (like me) benefit because someone incredibly high-leverage was paid to give a lot of their time to a project. So when you go to use that library, its docs are immaculate (I'm thinking all the tidyverse packages, Shiny, RMarkdown etc), and the examples are simple and brilliant. Getting up and running is often as little as taking an educated guess at how it would work, and often that's exactly how the function/package was designed! Having at least one dedicated person seems to dramatically improve the quality of OSS, possibly because it helps organise the dozens of people each making smaller contributions. I suspect this works so well because open source projects sometimes don't attract attention to key areas like documentation, and UX (some of my most-loved OSS projects still have horrendous UX because, I suspect, contributors love to add things but nobody wants to be the person who organises it into a coherent package for users, much less remove people's contributions because they're unnecessary and confuse users). When I contrast the experience with communities that have much fewer (or no) full time funded OSS contributors, there's much more niggle and inconsistency with libraries, interoperability, and especially in documentation. Sorry, I'm rambling, but the R community has been an amazing example of how paying a few dozen full time OSS people can have a dramatically outsized benefit to the community for years to come. I'm very appreciative I get to stand on the shoulders of these humble giants.
flynnz 3y ago
I've always thought a neat model would be something like: pay for convenience, for example, something like: to run git pull/clone, you have to purchase "premium" access to their repo, but the code's available and you can just download a tar.gz of it if you want. No way would a company balk at paying a little to have a more reasonable system for updates, etc, but the code is still fully open source, free software, etc.
openrisk 3y ago
There is another potential source of funding for open source that is quite congruent to its ethos and that is the public sector. For many types of software used by public sector entities it would be quite efficient to support open source development as a public good. There will always be points of view that would consider this (too) as a problematic source of funding (e.g., being suspicious of government actors and their motives) and it can be a major hassle to handle public sector bureaucracy, but given the distribution of demand for software in the economy it seems something natural to some extend and it could alleviate some of the sustainability issues with open source development.
palata 3y ago
I know it's not about the definition of open source, but that's actually what I found interesting from the article :-). It would have been so simple for the author to acknowledge the actual definition of "open source" and to just mention that their opinion extends to other models... Anyway: - I did not know the BSL! That actually sounds like a pretty great idea: my understanding is that the company makes the code source-available but with a deadline (of maximum 4 years): after that deadline, the code becomes GPLv2. If more companies used that instead of proprietary, it would be a win for open source in the long run (because more code would become GPLv2)! - I am also discovering Polyform. That's fun, but less exciting to me than the BSL. - The JSON license seems to be purposely annoying. Reads like some kind of "Fuck you" to the very concept of licenses.
palata 3y ago
Did the author actually want to rant about the "paying people to work on <something>" part, or was it just an excuse to be controversial about the very definition of open source? Not clear to me. But if it was the former, what a way to shoot oneself in the foot!
- simonw 3y ago
  The author was fed up of people saying "well actually your achievement in getting paid to work on open source shouldn't be celebrated because of <list of pedantic reasons>" - one of which was license definition arguments. That's why he chose to be controversial about that.
  - palata 3y ago
    I read the article again. Twice. To me the point is really that he is fed up of people criticizing the people instead of the system. And there are interesting discussions to be had around that, e.g.: is it fine to work on open source projects at Meta, or is it bad because Meta is bad? Instead, for some reason he just spends a whole section redefining concepts instead of just admitting that he may have used them wrongly in his toot. Which is not only completely uninteresting but also confusing. If he had spent as much time redacting his toot than he did writing the "definitions" section, chances are that he would not have been pissed off by the reactions to his toot and would not have had to go on a crusade explaining why whoever disagrees with his poor formulation is a jerk.
    - wslack 3y ago
      > is it fine to work on open source projects at Meta, or is it bad because Meta is bad? I think OP would say its better to work on open source at Meta than closed source at Meta, and we should celebrate someone being paid to write open source. We can also condemn their specific employer while not denigrating their open source compensation. re your second point, looking at this thread, "what is open source" is taking up a lot of the brainspace.
      - 3y ago
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
> Almost nobody makes a living writing free software. As a percentage of all software engineers, it’s so few we can basically round down to zero. As a member of the zero, I approve the title of TFA.
jpetso 3y ago
If we're going to ignore the "official" meaning of open source, then let's take a step back to consider why open source is worth supporting in the first place. Open source guarantees to me, the user, that competition among vendors will be possible and fair in the future. This is exactly the point that many "fake OSS" licenses try to take away. Okay, maybe it's possible to fork for personal on-prem use, but god forbid someone creates a competing hosted solution that gives any customer more choice. Furthermore, these pieces of software are fucked the day that the company folds, or gets acquired by a malevolent buyer. Open source guarantees a baseline level of respect towards me, the end user. By letting anyone fork a project that's gone too far in the wrong direction, I know that my software will continue working in the short run and of it's important enough, a competing alternative will emerge that continues without one-sided money or data grabs. There's nothing inherently wrong with having someone from Microsoft or Google work on open source software, or any VC-funded company that will without fail turn against their users sooner or later. However, if a controlling majority of developers is employed this way, it provides an opportunity for what elsewhere is known as regulatory capture. If Microsoft's goal is to make people dependent on proprietary GitLab and VS Code Marketplace offerings, and Google's goal is to provide the greatest possible amount of ads and tracking to the largest possible user base, it does not matter if the software is open source or not. The end result is the same, I'm left without viable alternatives and big business gets to do with us whatever the hell they please. Especially when this software becomes ubiquitous and entrenched, paying developers to work on company-controlled OSS instead of community-driven, user-respecting OSS is a net negative for everyone in the long run. I'm only interested in OSS in so far as it protects my interests as an end user, and/or our common interests as a society, now and in the future. The collaborative aspect is nice, but that's not the reason that we should ask for better compensation for maintainers. The "Open Source" label as such is indeed meaningless per se, and it doesn't always protect me either, as seen with BSD+MIT software allowing cryptographically-enabled control of devices that I nominally own, or GPL being useless when there is no actual distribution of software involved. That said, I have yet to see a case of non-OSI "open source" that doesn't try to tilt the playing field in biased, controlling and long-term unsustainable or user-hostile ways. If you can't build a business on a level playing field, perhaps it's in everyone's interest that your business and software dies, or retreats into lower-intensity hobbyist maintainership, instead of leading everyone into a hard dependency on your oh so well-intended monetization of originally useful software. Then at least someone else can take a shot at doing it better.
debo_ 3y ago
Did anyone following this in Mastodon-land specifically see any reaction to "luxury automated gay space communism?" I would be surprised if he wasn't blasted for that. This article came across as much less ranty than I expected based on his disclaimer. I think he pretty much perfectly articulated the noise around funded open source.
- acdha 3y ago
  It’s been quieter there than here other than done licensing derails. I think most people are desensitized to it after a decade of memes: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/fully-automated-luxury-gay-space-communism https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/fully-automated-luxu...
  - debo_ 3y ago
    Ah, my self-imposed limits on internetting have saved me here. This is the first I've heard it. Thanks for the link.
gavinhoward 3y ago
Shameless plug, but I already came up with two terms describing the author's vision of open source. https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-that-bad/ https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-t... I also think that forcing companies to accept liability would fund FOSS. https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-from-the-cra-and-improve-cybersecurity/ https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-fro... Do it right, and the most important projects would be the ones flush with cash.
mise_en_place 3y ago
No it’s actually terrible. Because then they will eventually abandon the project and you’re stuck with it in your stack. Now you become the maintainer.
johngossman 3y ago
Good piece, but it buries the lede. I suspect the reaction would be different if it started with the conclusion. Otherwise, the title and introduction sounds like another article about direct contributions to maintainers instead of being agnostic about how the maintainers get paid. I think “Purity only serves to limit open source’s value to society” is a great debate topic.
mirekrusin 3y ago
Companies should be giving employees oss budget they can use for donations.
sattoshi 3y ago
While I have made a few OSS donations, I want to avoid doing so out of principle. I, a lone developer, should not be funding the work my peers do. How much does openssl benefit me personally? How much does eslint? However much, it’s negligible to how much it benefits my employer. Which in turn is negligible to Google. This is a responsibility that big tech ought to pick up, not random people.
skybrian 3y ago
This blog post interprets saying “it’s not open source, though” as if it were a criticism of releasing software under various other source-available licenses. Maybe some people mean it that way, but for me it’s purely about not watering down terms that have a clear meaning. Sometimes source-available licenses are better for the business and it’s understandable why some businesses do that. It’s less generous, but still a good thing. (Just like it’s understandable that people don’t make source code available for all their software.)
sumuyuda 3y ago
“Far too often I see arguments like: “maintainers shouldn’t be paid by private companies because the government should be supporting them.” Sure, this sounds great – but governments aren’t doing this!” Governments are doing this. The German government funds https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/ https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/
musicale 3y ago
Getting them to work for you for free is better! -tech companies
Towaway69 3y ago
> It’s one of the few places where essentially all of humanity works together on something that benefits everyone. A world without open source would be substantially worse than the world we live in. Well said and very true.
Towaway69 3y ago
Recently there was a discussion[0] around the value of open source software and how much companies would have had to pay to have it developed from the ground up. The number that was thrown around was $177M. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39340146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39340146

343 points by webology 3y ago

Yes, please start by practicing what you preach. I actually donated 1% of my income to various open source projects I use.

fydorm 3y ago
This is a good thing to do, but not really the point of the article.
devmor 3y ago
I’m really happy that github in particular has made it so easy to give some cash to the people responsible for tools that I enjoy.
abound 3y ago
My (very small) tech nonprofit has started doing something similar [1], where everyone contributes to a list of OSS tools we use heavily, and then everyone gives a weight/score to each tool. We then split the pot ($1,000 in 2022, probably ~$2,000 when I get around to doing 2023) among all the OSS projects, according to the relative scores. [1] https://siliconally.org/policies/open-source/#yearly-donations https://siliconally.org/policies/open-source/#yearly-donatio...
brational 3y ago
https://jacobian.org/2024/jan/10/philanthropy-update/ https://jacobian.org/2024/jan/10/philanthropy-update/ took 15 seconds to find on the website.

deleted 3y ago

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netbioserror 3y ago

The premise of paid open source devs is fine and well, but every single one of these blogs devolves into delusional utopian nonsense from people who do not understand the staggering infrastructure and maintenance cost of the modern society they think should be some sort of guaranteed right. People, please learn and understand where your food comes from before writing this kind of garbage.

deleted 3y ago
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lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
FWIW, the author was at least thoughtful enough to include this disclaimer at the top: > Warning: rant ahead. I’m writing from a place of frustration and not particularly interested in trying to moderate my tone. If you don’t want to hear me yell about open source for a while, please skip this one.
woodruffw 3y ago
TFA’s author is one of the co-creators of Django and a preeminent member of the Python community. I think it would be charitable to assume that he does, in fact, understand these things.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- netbioserror 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    I don't really have anything to say here, other than to reiterate: it is simply not charitable to assume the author is "stupid," "deluded," or similar. It adds zero information to the conversation, and actively detracts from your underlying point.
    - netbioserror 3y ago
      His little soapbox rant sucked every last bit of energy out of his underlying point.

davepeck 3y ago

See also Nadia Eghbal's (IMHO definitive) work on the economics and sociology of open source software, "Working In Public": https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public

delichon 3y ago

A pro capitalist message from Jacobin? [Looks closer.] No. I'd pay for an open source project that could filter & sort news by surprisingness-for-that-news-source. This opinion would rank high for jacobin.com. The story about Zuckerberg's preference for the Quest 3 over the AVP would disappear.

mkeeter 3y ago
https://jacobian.org https://jacobian.org is Jacob Kaplan-Moss's website https://jacobin.com https://jacobin.com is a socialist magazine This blog post is from the former!
- delichon 3y ago
  *jacobian.org for JKM's site
  - mkeeter 3y ago
    thanks, edited!
emseetech 3y ago
Jacobian, not Jacobin. But even so, paying people for their labor is entirely uncontroversial amongst socialists. Some might even argue it's the fundamental underpinning of their critique of capitalism.

gorjusborg 3y ago

I want to agree, and I understand the position, but there's no room for nuance when you throw around the work 'always'. I think I disagree that it is always good. For instance, if a company is paying someone to work on open source, and they use that to leverage the project in a direction that is against its other users' best interest, can that be good? I don't think so. There are numerous examples of situations and behaviors you could come up with that are not 'good'. I'm all for people making a living, but I don't like bad behavior, no matter if it generates 'freeish' source code or not.

smburdick 3y ago
This is why grants are really important. That usually means deliverables in a specific timeframe. To me, that elevates open source from a full-time hobby to a job.
- jraph 3y ago
  Grants are great but are often not nearly enough and they can vanish from a year to another. You'd better secure other sources of income. Grants will also usually fund specific features of your product but not the whole thing. Other kinds of income are also good ways to fund open source like service, consultancy, support and even paid open source apps (which works particularly well for apps that have enterprise oriented features, turns out it doesn't matter that the source code is available under a free software license if it's convenient enough to click and buy). Coincidentally, this is how I get paid :-) Still, grants should not be ignored indeed.
deleted 3y ago
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jszymborski 3y ago
I think the article addresses this. It's a matter of not letting "perfect" get in the way of "good". You're totally right, we should work towards getting everyone who wants to work on open source code bases the public funds they deserve at every opportunity, but in the mean time, we'll have to put up with corpos funding some of the FLOSS code. > We have to accept the world as it is – even if it’s not the world we want. This means we have to be okay with the idea that maintainers need to be paid. Far too often I see arguments like: “maintainers shouldn’t be paid by private companies because the government should be supporting them.” Sure, this sounds great – but governments aren’t doing this! So this argument reduces to “open source maintainers shouldn’t be paid”. I can’t get on board with that.

gustavus 3y ago

I don't understand when it became this was FOSS was always about "Free as in speech." But for some reason it became "Free as in beer." and many of the arguments I see around dev pay seem to be conflating the 2. Open source merely means the source is open and free for you to view look at modify, etc. At no point does it mean it costs nothing. Now with code it's not exactly a super reasonable business model to sell a software product but make it's code freely available, but that would still meet the definition of open source.

wmf 3y ago
[Never mind, I didn't express this clearly]
- ahepp 3y ago
  I’ve worked for multiple companies that pay for dual licensed GPL software
- reedciccio 3y ago
  Tell that to Red Hat, WordPress, Canonical, MySQL and many more products built on pure Open Source. The issue is complex.
- jraph 3y ago
  That's not true. The company I work for manages to sell free software [1]. All the stuff we sell is under LGPL, and it's not open core, it is fully free software. It works under specific conditions and you need to come up with a business plan that makes it work, but it is possible. And it is one of the most ethical ways to fund free software so it would be too bad to discard this option too early. For us, what works is enterprise oriented extensions for a platform we develop. Turns out companies will fork off hundreds of dollars and enjoy the support that comes with it instead of compiling all this thing by themselves. It's more convenient and employees understand that it funds the open source software they are using, and it's an easily justified expense. But should they want to enjoy any of the freedoms that come with free software, they can. [1] https://store.xwiki.com https://store.xwiki.com
3y ago

ChadNauseam 3y ago

I've put some serious thought into solving this problem. There are two main structural issues I know of: 1. Open source libraries tend to be complement goods. You're more willing to pay for a good physics engine if you already have a good rendering engine and vice versa. But a sad truth of complement goods is that they are a centralizing force - it's actually better for everyone if the physics engine maker and rendering engine maker join forces and offer a bundle discount. But the most common strategy seems to be for them to just merge into one company, and this is why you see giant conglomerate products like Unreal and Unity instead of buying each component from a different vendor. 2. Since open source software is a public good (non-rivalrous, non-excludable), the "free market" cannot really incentivize its production nearly as much as would be optimal. Let's say there are 1000 people who would each pay $10 for a feature to be added, and the maintainer would happily add it for $5000. If 90% of those people each paid $6 they would get what they want and the maintainer would be happy too, but each individual has an incentive to be part of that 10% that gets to keep their $6 and still gets the feature, so what happens is that almost no one ends up paying. These problems can't be solved without slightly modifying open source, but they can be solved by maintaining the spirit of open source I think. What you need is to have some kind of foundation that takes money and gives it to "quasi-open-source" projects, and then only allows businesses to use those projects if they contribute a certain percentage of their revenue to the foundation. Of course, now the foundation needs to decide which open source projects to give the money too. It's an extremely tricky problem, but there's been a lot of interesting research by Glen Weyl on that exact subject and I'm confident it could be solved in a satisfactory way. I think this proposal would create a virtuous cycle once it got off the ground. The more projects licensed "quasi-open-source", the larger the incentive to pay the foundation to use them. The more the foundation is paid, the more money these "quasi-open-source" projects get, and so more people will license their projects "quasi-open-source", increasing the incentive again, etc. Of course, it would only be "quasi-open-source", and not truly open-source. But there's no reason the license couldn't be extremely in line with the spirit of open source. For example, it could say "if you're an individual or small company, you can use our code for any purpose for free. If you're a big company, you can use it in a way that complies with the AGPL or you can pay us, your choice". I think employees would also encourage their employers to become paying members of such a foundation, if it lead to those employees being able to determine where some of the money goes. Everyone at my current company is a Rust developer and so we naturally like Rust, but Rust jobs aren't always easy to find. As employees, it could be in our best interest to subsidize the development of Rust open source projects, if that increased Rust's attractiveness to other companies. If you're interested in this idea, my email is in my bio :D

axus 3y ago

Given free hosting and compute by the NSA? Win

4kimov 3y ago

> Every time a maintainer finds a way to get paid, it’s a win. Amen. It's becoming more common, and there's lots to celebrate [0] [0] https://fossfox.com/ https://fossfox.com/

newaccount7g 3y ago

[dead]

samatman 3y ago

A note to writers: when you find yourself writing a paragraph defensively justifying alienating your intended audience, take a walk around the block and think really hard about whether doing so is a good idea. I will never compromise on the definition of open source. I'm not particularly hard-nosed about proprietary software, or source available software either, they're fine, with some caveats I'll leave out. But it's important to have a term for software which is unencumbered by use restrictions, and we do: open source. Lumping other licenses in with it should be resisted. It's like (I've never seen this, to be clear) pescatarians rebranding as "seafood vegans". What is supposed to be gained there, or by trying to bolt on various source-available licenses to the definition of open source? So this guy picks an important topic, and right up front, he's telling me he knows that it's going to piss me off, but he's going to call not-open-source software open source anyway, and if I object, I don't care about developers getting paid. Y'know what? You succeeded. Fuck you, tab closed.

barnabee 3y ago
Agree and I don’t understand the downvotes. The goal isn’t for every dev or project to make money or be sustainable in open source, just as it isn’t for every business idea to succeed. I donate to numerous open source projects and make a point of donating more than I believe they’d charge me to buy/subscribe if the software wasn’t open source. I encourage others to do so too, I sincerely hope and believe we can see that happen. I’d love to see more truly open source software become sustainable, of course. But I don’t kid myself that it all will be. And I don’t care to relax the definition to include open core, VC exploitative, bait and switch, or whatever (have we learnt nothing in the last two decades?!). If the project dies it dies, if it stays a hobby project that’s ok too.
sanderjd 3y ago
> A note to writers: when you find yourself writing a paragraph defensively justifying alienating your intended audience, take a walk around the block and think really hard about whether doing so is a good idea. I really dislike this kind of "geez, read the room!" thinking. Not everybody needs to have the same opinion about everything. Not everybody should. The opinion of "the room" or in your terminology, the "intended audience", is ever-evolving and the way that happens is via people talking and writing about their own opinions that aren't identical to the prevailing views of the time. But it's fine that you disagree with the author about this and are unswayed by the author's arguments. Others will agree with the author and be unswayed by your counter-arguments, and that's fine too. Still others will change their views after reading the article or responses to it, and that's also fine. Maybe the prevailing view will shift as a result of all this discussion, maybe it won't. This is how discourse works!

FOSSwins 3y ago

I'm a developer with 15+ YOE, working mostly on legacy code in a govt job but I have extensive experience with modern code bases (C, Rust), and I have contributed to lots of FOSS of projects over the years in my free time as a way to learn new tech. I would work full time on Open Source if I was paid enough to leave my 9-5 job, which is not a lot in a third world country like mine. Say, $1500 / month.

coretx 3y ago

It certainly is good, but money also turns many people bad and impacts organizational dynamics.

barnabee 3y ago

I donate to a decent number of open source projects. Others I think are more than fine without me (Linux kernel, etc.) but I wouldn’t hesitate to donate if I believed they weren’t. For the rest, I would indeed as happily see them fail than compromise on the definition of open source. The two are equivalent to me.

philipwhiuk 3y ago

So many strawmen being set-up in this article the crow population is gonna take a major nose dive. If I hate any specific business model that is used by a company that does some some open source suddenly I don't think people deserve to be paid for their work? Yeah no, that's garbage. There's plenty of garbage business models and they aren't suddenly okay because one company uses it and 1% of their money funds some small bit of OSS work that underpins their business model.

deleted 3y ago
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benatkin 3y ago

I'll respond to the little part where it puts using a "non-OSI approved license" under the umbrella of open source. It's not OSI approved because it isn't open source, as the community defined it long ago, and as it still makes sense for it to be defined. If you want me to agree with you, don't do that. Otherwise, I don't feel compelled to consider a bunch of disparate things as a Win. Here's one that could be more of a trap than a win, depending on the particulars of the job: "Employed by Microsoft to work on Python?" Look no further than https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

lolinder 3y ago
He anticipated your comment and already replied. You're free to disagree with him, but he clearly thought that part through already and already knows he disagrees with you and with the OSI. This entire post is his justification for his disagreement, while all you have is an appeal to the OSI definition that he's specifically rejecting. > “open source” / “free software” > Note the deliberate use of lower case. I’m not referring to Open Source™ as defined by OSI, nor to Free Software™ as defined by the FSF. I mean these terms in the broadest, most inclusive sense: “software with source code that I can read and modify and release variants of, perhaps under some conditions.” So I’m including OSI and FSF licenses, but also the Polyform licenses and the JSON license and, yes BSL in my version of “open source”. > This is perhaps a side point, but the “minimalist” definition of Open Source meaning “only OSI-approved licenses” – or, worse, “the GPL is the only ’true’ Free Software license” – is part of the problem here. I want to see more experimentation and variety in licensing options, and if that means introducing some additional restrictions beyond “anyone can use this for any purpose” I’m pretty okay with that. In my book, a broad spectrum of licenses from Blue Oak to BSL (and even more restrictive) “count” as open source. > ... I’ll put it this way: if my sloppy use of these terms bothers you in the context of talking about how people make their living, it implies that you care more about terminology and definitions than about the people, and I’d like you to sit in that discomfort for a while.
- benatkin 3y ago
  I used lower case deliberately as well. It's a term that excludes source available not just because of OSI but because of the original community. And members of the current community can argue for a new, weaker, openwashed meaning of it, but people can always look back to the early days and see the true meaning of it.

hansonpeter 3y ago

[dead]

hardcopy 3y ago

A few weeks ago a wrote in to my Senator on the complete lack of government funding for independent engineers/small projects building FOSS (USA). NLNet in the EU is awesome. We really should have something like the NLNet in the USA.

paulddraper 3y ago
IDK maybe we just should let the EU pay for it
- redkoala 3y ago
  We need more funding, not less.
lucb1e 3y ago
OSTIF is vaguely similar and iirc from the USA
- hardcopy 3y ago
  OSTIF scope is really narrow. It's mainly for patching security related bugs/vulnerabilities in existing large projects. And AFAIK it has a significantly smaller source of funding, relying on corporate donations. It's not comparable to the projects that NLNet funds.
Ferret7446 3y ago
[flagged]
- lolinder 3y ago
  As an alternative perspective—the government currently spends ridiculous amounts of money* on proprietary software, often having chosen the vendor before the bidding process even begins, shaping the RFP to suit only the chosen vendor. The resulting software produced in these contracts remains entirely proprietary even though it was paid for by taxpayer dollars, so the company that built it is effectively guaranteed a perpetual stream of taxpayer funds since only they are legally able to maintain it. I would love to see a world in which these gargantuan vendors are put out of business because the government is only allowed to buy software whose source code is released to the taxpayers who funded it. * EDIT: To quantify "ridiculous": > Each year, the U.S. government spends over $100 billion on information technology. Most of that will be used to operate and maintain existing systems, including aging—or "legacy"—systems. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-106821 https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-106821

mkoubaa 3y ago

Sidenote. Some companies offer a "volunteer time PTO". You can use it to contribute to OSS

jebickett 3y ago

[dead]

throwitaway222 3y ago

I'll just say this: I don't think the government should pay for open source development.

andoando 3y ago

I think cooperatively owned tech orgs are the future. Contribution to open source software will always lag behind private entities as people aren't prone to work for free. Are there any open source projects that are monetized/pay their contributors? If I ever get a successful startup going, I am going to explore this model.

lolinder 3y ago

This is as good a context as any to remind people of the origins of the Open Source Initiative and its definitions. Here's how the OSI described its history on its website in 2007 (emphasis added): > The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. ... A month later ... the participants voted to promote the use of the term 'open source', and agreed to adopt with it the new rhetoric of pragmatism and market-friendliness that Raymond had been developing. I find it a bit amusing that here we are, decades later, and people who use non-OSI licenses to try to thwart exploitation by enormous corporations are condemned on highly moralistic grounds for not being "truly open source". http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource.org/history/ http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...

cipherboy 3y ago
Even businesses care about the distinction between OSI-approved and SSPL/BUSL licensed code bases. In the latter, they often cannot host services that use BUSL licensed code which puts risks on the business. Some examples: Do they need to consult with a lawyer to understand if their particular use case is acceptable? If not now, then how do they know when that threshold is met? When the service is offered for revenue? Or only when offered directly to customers? What about if theirs is a consulting-structured business e.g., IBM or Collins, where any internally service provided to another team is billed and paid for internal to the company (even though its not paid for by an external customer)? Can they hire developers to contribute to the code when the upstream is unresponsive to their bugs/features? Or, if they have to integrate with other custom internal infrastructure/tooling? Are they free to remix these tools into larger projects of theirs? It is possible to separate the moralizing aspects of these licenses and articulate concerns strictly in business cases that make them unsuitable for OSI and thus not "open source" in spirit.

nomilk 3y ago

The community I've been most involved in over the past few years has been R/tidyverse. Some developers are paid (by RStudio [now Posit] and other orgs, like R Consortium) to work on software, docs, community initiatives etc. The experience as a programmer in this domain is amazing. Having these funded full time OSS contributors lets thousands of R enthusiasts (like me) benefit because someone incredibly high-leverage was paid to give a lot of their time to a project. So when you go to use that library, its docs are immaculate (I'm thinking all the tidyverse packages, Shiny, RMarkdown etc), and the examples are simple and brilliant. Getting up and running is often as little as taking an educated guess at how it would work, and often that's exactly how the function/package was designed! Having at least one dedicated person seems to dramatically improve the quality of OSS, possibly because it helps organise the dozens of people each making smaller contributions. I suspect this works so well because open source projects sometimes don't attract attention to key areas like documentation, and UX (some of my most-loved OSS projects still have horrendous UX because, I suspect, contributors love to add things but nobody wants to be the person who organises it into a coherent package for users, much less remove people's contributions because they're unnecessary and confuse users). When I contrast the experience with communities that have much fewer (or no) full time funded OSS contributors, there's much more niggle and inconsistency with libraries, interoperability, and especially in documentation. Sorry, I'm rambling, but the R community has been an amazing example of how paying a few dozen full time OSS people can have a dramatically outsized benefit to the community for years to come. I'm very appreciative I get to stand on the shoulders of these humble giants.

flynnz 3y ago

I've always thought a neat model would be something like: pay for convenience, for example, something like: to run git pull/clone, you have to purchase "premium" access to their repo, but the code's available and you can just download a tar.gz of it if you want. No way would a company balk at paying a little to have a more reasonable system for updates, etc, but the code is still fully open source, free software, etc.

openrisk 3y ago

There is another potential source of funding for open source that is quite congruent to its ethos and that is the public sector. For many types of software used by public sector entities it would be quite efficient to support open source development as a public good. There will always be points of view that would consider this (too) as a problematic source of funding (e.g., being suspicious of government actors and their motives) and it can be a major hassle to handle public sector bureaucracy, but given the distribution of demand for software in the economy it seems something natural to some extend and it could alleviate some of the sustainability issues with open source development.

palata 3y ago

I know it's not about the definition of open source, but that's actually what I found interesting from the article :-). It would have been so simple for the author to acknowledge the actual definition of "open source" and to just mention that their opinion extends to other models... Anyway: - I did not know the BSL! That actually sounds like a pretty great idea: my understanding is that the company makes the code source-available but with a deadline (of maximum 4 years): after that deadline, the code becomes GPLv2. If more companies used that instead of proprietary, it would be a win for open source in the long run (because more code would become GPLv2)! - I am also discovering Polyform. That's fun, but less exciting to me than the BSL. - The JSON license seems to be purposely annoying. Reads like some kind of "Fuck you" to the very concept of licenses.

palata 3y ago

Did the author actually want to rant about the "paying people to work on <something>" part, or was it just an excuse to be controversial about the very definition of open source? Not clear to me. But if it was the former, what a way to shoot oneself in the foot!

simonw 3y ago
The author was fed up of people saying "well actually your achievement in getting paid to work on open source shouldn't be celebrated because of <list of pedantic reasons>" - one of which was license definition arguments. That's why he chose to be controversial about that.
- palata 3y ago
  I read the article again. Twice. To me the point is really that he is fed up of people criticizing the people instead of the system. And there are interesting discussions to be had around that, e.g.: is it fine to work on open source projects at Meta, or is it bad because Meta is bad? Instead, for some reason he just spends a whole section redefining concepts instead of just admitting that he may have used them wrongly in his toot. Which is not only completely uninteresting but also confusing. If he had spent as much time redacting his toot than he did writing the "definitions" section, chances are that he would not have been pissed off by the reactions to his toot and would not have had to go on a crusade explaining why whoever disagrees with his poor formulation is a jerk.
  - wslack 3y ago
    > is it fine to work on open source projects at Meta, or is it bad because Meta is bad? I think OP would say its better to work on open source at Meta than closed source at Meta, and we should celebrate someone being paid to write open source. We can also condemn their specific employer while not denigrating their open source compensation. re your second point, looking at this thread, "what is open source" is taking up a lot of the brainspace.
    - 3y ago

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

> Almost nobody makes a living writing free software. As a percentage of all software engineers, it’s so few we can basically round down to zero. As a member of the zero, I approve the title of TFA.

jpetso 3y ago

If we're going to ignore the "official" meaning of open source, then let's take a step back to consider why open source is worth supporting in the first place. Open source guarantees to me, the user, that competition among vendors will be possible and fair in the future. This is exactly the point that many "fake OSS" licenses try to take away. Okay, maybe it's possible to fork for personal on-prem use, but god forbid someone creates a competing hosted solution that gives any customer more choice. Furthermore, these pieces of software are fucked the day that the company folds, or gets acquired by a malevolent buyer. Open source guarantees a baseline level of respect towards me, the end user. By letting anyone fork a project that's gone too far in the wrong direction, I know that my software will continue working in the short run and of it's important enough, a competing alternative will emerge that continues without one-sided money or data grabs. There's nothing inherently wrong with having someone from Microsoft or Google work on open source software, or any VC-funded company that will without fail turn against their users sooner or later. However, if a controlling majority of developers is employed this way, it provides an opportunity for what elsewhere is known as regulatory capture. If Microsoft's goal is to make people dependent on proprietary GitLab and VS Code Marketplace offerings, and Google's goal is to provide the greatest possible amount of ads and tracking to the largest possible user base, it does not matter if the software is open source or not. The end result is the same, I'm left without viable alternatives and big business gets to do with us whatever the hell they please. Especially when this software becomes ubiquitous and entrenched, paying developers to work on company-controlled OSS instead of community-driven, user-respecting OSS is a net negative for everyone in the long run. I'm only interested in OSS in so far as it protects my interests as an end user, and/or our common interests as a society, now and in the future. The collaborative aspect is nice, but that's not the reason that we should ask for better compensation for maintainers. The "Open Source" label as such is indeed meaningless per se, and it doesn't always protect me either, as seen with BSD+MIT software allowing cryptographically-enabled control of devices that I nominally own, or GPL being useless when there is no actual distribution of software involved. That said, I have yet to see a case of non-OSI "open source" that doesn't try to tilt the playing field in biased, controlling and long-term unsustainable or user-hostile ways. If you can't build a business on a level playing field, perhaps it's in everyone's interest that your business and software dies, or retreats into lower-intensity hobbyist maintainership, instead of leading everyone into a hard dependency on your oh so well-intended monetization of originally useful software. Then at least someone else can take a shot at doing it better.

debo_ 3y ago

Did anyone following this in Mastodon-land specifically see any reaction to "luxury automated gay space communism?" I would be surprised if he wasn't blasted for that. This article came across as much less ranty than I expected based on his disclaimer. I think he pretty much perfectly articulated the noise around funded open source.

acdha 3y ago
It’s been quieter there than here other than done licensing derails. I think most people are desensitized to it after a decade of memes: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/fully-automated-luxury-gay-space-communism https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/fully-automated-luxu...
- debo_ 3y ago
  Ah, my self-imposed limits on internetting have saved me here. This is the first I've heard it. Thanks for the link.

gavinhoward 3y ago

Shameless plug, but I already came up with two terms describing the author's vision of open source. https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-that-bad/ https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-t... I also think that forcing companies to accept liability would fund FOSS. https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-from-the-cra-and-improve-cybersecurity/ https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-fro... Do it right, and the most important projects would be the ones flush with cash.

mise_en_place 3y ago

No it’s actually terrible. Because then they will eventually abandon the project and you’re stuck with it in your stack. Now you become the maintainer.

johngossman 3y ago

Good piece, but it buries the lede. I suspect the reaction would be different if it started with the conclusion. Otherwise, the title and introduction sounds like another article about direct contributions to maintainers instead of being agnostic about how the maintainers get paid. I think “Purity only serves to limit open source’s value to society” is a great debate topic.

mirekrusin 3y ago

Companies should be giving employees oss budget they can use for donations.

sattoshi 3y ago

While I have made a few OSS donations, I want to avoid doing so out of principle. I, a lone developer, should not be funding the work my peers do. How much does openssl benefit me personally? How much does eslint? However much, it’s negligible to how much it benefits my employer. Which in turn is negligible to Google. This is a responsibility that big tech ought to pick up, not random people.

skybrian 3y ago

This blog post interprets saying “it’s not open source, though” as if it were a criticism of releasing software under various other source-available licenses. Maybe some people mean it that way, but for me it’s purely about not watering down terms that have a clear meaning. Sometimes source-available licenses are better for the business and it’s understandable why some businesses do that. It’s less generous, but still a good thing. (Just like it’s understandable that people don’t make source code available for all their software.)

sumuyuda 3y ago

“Far too often I see arguments like: “maintainers shouldn’t be paid by private companies because the government should be supporting them.” Sure, this sounds great – but governments aren’t doing this!” Governments are doing this. The German government funds https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/ https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/

musicale 3y ago

Getting them to work for you for free is better! -tech companies

Towaway69 3y ago

> It’s one of the few places where essentially all of humanity works together on something that benefits everyone. A world without open source would be substantially worse than the world we live in. Well said and very true.

Towaway69 3y ago

Recently there was a discussion[0] around the value of open source software and how much companies would have had to pay to have it developed from the ground up. The number that was thrown around was $177M. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39340146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39340146