6 ms·
Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
- darth_avocado 10mo agoConsidering that most people hate jury duty and will do anything to get out of it, are you sure you want similar behavior from developers on OSS?
- Cameri 10mo agoSure, let's make free labor required (not a preference) for everybody
- vkou 10mo agoWeird that this onus is being put on the developers, and not on their employers. I constantly use FOSS for the commercial gain... Of someone who isn't me.
- doctorpangloss 10mo agoha ha, in a lot of cases it is "required," but people keeping choosing not to use the software where the contributions are "required"
- portaouflop 10mo agoLooking at the quality of most “contributions” - “hey I added a bunch of unnecessary ai slob to your readme” - oh god please no
- lysace 10mo agoAlways look at the bottom of the page for what is surprisingly often the most insightful comment. Addendum: Particularly when the forum has gone sour.
- hughes 10mo agoShould it be mandatory also for the maintainers to accept these contributions? Every project would degrade into pure entropy.
- analog31 10mo agoIf it's like jury duty, the maintainers will reject all of the developers who show any sign of independent thought or domain knowledge.
- softwaredoug 10mo agoSure but the real problem are the companies that consume, not just the developers. A lot of developers would love to contribute back, but companies put schedule pressures and have limited interest in contributing back. Companies actually want a kind of vendor relationship, but they don’t want to pay any money. Devs want something dev focused, and open source is usually code for being dev focused. I don’t think either truly wants actual “open source”
- juvoly 10mo agoI think the point is not about us being developers or employees, but about us being a civilian.
- lawlessone 10mo agook, if they pay to train me up.
- OfflineSergio 10mo agoMake it required to see AI generated PRs and README updates
- hobs 10mo agoSoftware developers (plural) have not made their fortunes on open source, just big companies (who should obviously be paying, not me.)
- stivatron 10mo agoNo. Freedom is valuable.
- ozb 10mo agoSo, like compulsory jury duty and the draft, this would be directly against the 13th Amendment. Then again, according to the Supreme Court, even forced, unpaid road duty (chain gangs anyone?) is an inherent power of the government, so maybe this is ok. > In view of ancient usage and the unanimity of judicial opinion, it must be taken as settled that, unless restrained by some constitutional limitation, a state has inherent power to require every able-bodied man within its jurisdiction to labor for a reasonable time on public roads near his residence without direct compensation. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/240/328/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/240/328/ (spoiler alert: according to the ruling, the US Constitution, including Amendments, does not limit this power; and this is in fact cited as justification for upholding the draft)
- John23832 10mo ago> So, like compulsory jury duty and the draft, this would be directly against the 13th Amendment. I'm pretty sure my Federal grand jury duty was compelled.
- dataflow 10mo agoDo you have any reason to believe that amendment was ever intended to cover things like mandatory jury duty? Or are you advocating for reading the text verbatim with zero consideration of the context or history? That kind of reading impacts a lot more than this, and not entirely in a good way.
- ozb 10mo ago
- KyleW9 10mo agoWhile I do agree that every dev should contribute to open source at least once in their lives, I fear more and more will try to push poorly generated AI slop and make everyone’s jobs harder
- frde_me 10mo agoI don't think dropping a random software developer into a random project to do their open source duty would end well It takes a _lot_ of time for someone to meaningfully contribute to a project, and would just result in maintainers having the overhead of training that many new people on a project I'd much rather figure out a way to finance those open source projects in a sustainable way where those projects can decide to hire full time employees.
- nzeid 10mo agoDead on. Financing is the most urgent need, not contributors.
- InexSquirrel 10mo agoCompletely agree. I'd rather have the people that want to be there, to be involved. An alternative take I'd rather see is "Employers guarantee 8 hours per week of time to work on open-source projects, including ones I start myself". Employer gets no IP stake in the project, and it's done for public good + a means to allow employees to upskill. Otherwise it just becomes a case of another grindset. You're expected to do more, with the limited free time you have.
- lovich 10mo ago> Completely agree. I'd rather have the people that want to be there, to be involved. It’s like the strategic difference between relying on a volunteer army vs conscription
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- blenderob 10mo agoHard disagree! Making open source contributions mandatory for those who lack genuine interest or motivation would lead to lower quality contributions ultimately increasing the workload for maintainers. Many maintainers already face burnout. This will only make it worse. On another note: There's very little substance in this post. It comes across as a lazy, shallow, "hot" take! Which is fine. It's your blog and you should write however you like on your blog. But is this really a good fit for HN? It's frustrating to see shallow posts with no substance like this rise to the top but higher-effort go unnoticed.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- lukan 10mo agoAs a moral obligation, yes. But as a law? I see so many ways this will go wrong and not be helpful.
- pdonis 10mo ago> As a moral obligation, yes. So you think that, for example, every single person who uses LibreOffice is morally obligated to contribute code to the project? Even though the vast majority of them don't even know how to code?
- lukan 10mo agoNo. Not obviously not every person is obliged to give back to every project they ever remotely used. But in general, yes. One receives and one can give back. And contributions can be way more than code. Documentation, testing, good bug reports, moderating forums, hosting events for a coding session, ... or just money.
- candiddevmike 10mo agoLook at what happened when they were giving free t shirts based on open source contributions (hacktoberfest) to see how well this idea would go.
- evantbyrne 10mo agoCongratulations, you just reinvented slavery. But if you take the government out of the equation, and instead mandate contribution via project licenses, that might be worth a try.
- jqpabc123 10mo agoThey're just trying to work around a fundamental flaw of all "communal" organizational structures --- freeloaders, aka human nature. Forced labor is typically a last ditch effort to prop up a system that is inherently unsustainable.
- 12_throw_away 10mo agoI get that the author is making a "modest proposal" here, but even so it's kind of antithetical to at least my own feelings about open source. If I release something as open source, the whole point is my users owe me nothing. They have limited obligations that are explicitly spelled out in the license and that's it.
- exabrial 10mo agoNo, it should not. SHOULD a person do it? Yes. SHOULD they be forced to do it or go to the Gulag? No. Save jail for violent criminals, not this white collar BS.
- chemotaxis 10mo agoAs an open-source developer... no. No, no, no, no. The toil of dealing with low-quality, half-assed first-time contributions is often higher than the effort of implementing the same features or bug fixes from scratch. And that's if you agree the features or fixes are useful in the first place. I've already seen college students forced by their teachers to contribute to open-source projects and it's almost always just sad. The patches don't follow your project's practices, they usually have an array of subtle bugs to diagnose... and on top of that, you're dealing with a person who probably doesn't want constructive feedback in the first place. They just want a good grade on their assignment (or, in this proposal, want you to sign off the completion of their "OSS duty"). If you compel 100x as many people to submit half-assed contributions, you'll just drown in noise. Nothing good will be accomplished this way.
- KyleW9 10mo agoTotally agree, I’ve seen people put it as a sort of badge of honor that they are contributing to open source, but are clearly not passionate about the projects that they are contributing to and not ashamed of using AI to do so. Overall open source projects suffer more as a consequence of these low grade contributions, and it sucks for the people reviewing them
- cantor_S_drug 10mo agoGovernments should set aside some pool of money for distributing to people maintaining critical projects. We have so much surplus and some portion of it should be allocated to such projects as digital infrastructure. Google did that with Summer of Code. Shareholder value can go and take a jump into a nearest lake.
- palata 10mo agoI have done a lot of open source and I disagree. The problem being that as a maintainer, I refuse most contributions. Not only because they are low-quality (it happens), but also because they are often out of scope, or I just disagree with the direction. It's my project, I maintain it, I choose what goes in it. But you're free to fork it with your changes, that's exactly why I made it open source. If you make an interesting fork, I may totally import some or all of your changes! And if you first ask in an issue, I may offer you to open a PR directly. I almost always use copyleft licences: it makes it mandatory to share the modified sources with the user, who can then upstream them. Many times in companies, if I need to patch a permissive dependency, my company will not allow me to spend time upstreaming my patch. Whereas if it is a copyleft licence, I can tell my manager that I am obligated to open source my changes (which is not correct, but managers usually don't know that, don't care so much about the nuance, and anyway it's a win if we follow the copyleft conditions to the letter).
- lowbloodsugar 10mo agoSurely the value of patching upstream is so you don't have merge conflicts for eternity?
- palata 10mo agoOh yeah, that's for sure. But my experience has been that most managers are not competent in that regard. If you have a good manager that understands that, then that's great. But it's rare. Most of the time, it works better to bullshit them with the legal consequences of not allowing you to upstream your changes. Again, that's my experience.
- jrochkind1 10mo agoMany would love to be able to get an LLM to do their jury duty.
- munchler 10mo agoUser: Please suggest the most absurd, over-the-top blog post title that will nonetheless get me to the top of Hacker News. System: "Contributing to Open-Source Should be Required, Like Jury Duty"
- jama211 10mo agoIndeed, well said. This is like a spotlight to moths haha
- olivia-banks 10mo agoI'm bound to get downvoted here, but I ran this by my own local model. > No One Understands Software Because No One Understands Time > All Programming Languages Converge to English Eventually > The Best Database Is Just Two People Talking > Stop Writing Code. Start Legislating Software And my personal favorite: > AI Safety Is Just the New Gluten-Free
- jama211 10mo agoIt’s depressing how good these would be at getting clicks. Perhaps all article titles should be banned!
- xigoi 10mo agoI would totally believe all of these to be real headlines if I saw them on Hacker News.
- olivia-banks 10mo agoI know! Tempted to write them…
- xigoi 10mo agoPlease do!
- WilliamIPark 10mo agoI never comment on this site and I use an app to view it that doesn’t even have sign in capabilities. But I disagree with this nonsense so much that I had to go login just to vocalise that. People should have choice and freedom in what they want to spend their time doing. I respect the open source community and some day I’d love to find the time to contribute at my own will, not because I’m called to.
- chrisfosterelli 10mo agoOK this would obviously be bad, I think everyone gets that. But the note in the article is getting at something that feels interesting. I think there's a more fruitful conversation around "how might this work in spirit?" instead of "would this work literally?"
- Iolaum 10mo agoI think a more viable strategy would be, any software that is paid for with tax money, should be open source.
- handyandy82828 10mo ago[dead]
- HacklesRaised 10mo agoto quote hot fuzz "don't go being a twat now!"
- throwaway838112 10mo ago...or pay Free Software with tax money.
- ptrl600 10mo agoThe vast majority of my open-source contributions have been for completely selfish reason, namely: I want X feature/fix, and don't want to maintain a fork (or, if applicable, do wild monkey-patching). It just happens organically, no social pressure required.
- firefax 10mo agoAnyone smart enough to contribute to an open source project will probably get struck early in the process.
- gchamonlive 10mo agoContributing to open source could also substitute the current bankrupt method of screening candidates for a position.
- dpark 10mo ago“I sure do wish FOSS was less free.”
- Detrytus 10mo agoOff topic but: Jury trials are one of the weirdest things about America: If I’m ever on trial for some crime I want my case decided by professional judges not a team of random idiots.
- tpmoney 10mo agoOn the other hand, there’s a good argument to be made that if you think the judiciary can be captured for political ends, a trial and verdict by your peers at least gives you the opportunity to get a fair(er) shot. And in many (most?) US jurisdictions you can waive your right to a jury trial and ask for a bench trial instead.
- darkamaul 10mo agoI think most of the comments here miss that contributions is not equal to code. Contributions to the documentation, translations, or helping managing the community are also extremely valuable and do not require the same technical skills.
- bloppe 10mo agoThat's true, but even those non-technical roles are in a totally different league of scope than jury duty. A jurist has an extremely narrow role: deciding whether the defendant is guilty. The jurist has zero input on the laws or court procedure or sentencing or anything else. The judge is supposed to explain how all those things work to the jury, and hold their hands pretty much the whole time up until the part at the very end, where the jury go off to deliberate and deliver the verdict. The jury is completely passive even when it comes to examining the case itself, which is the job of the lawyers. It's a pretty good system because essentially the whole process is handled by seasoned professionals, except that one crucial part of saying guilty or not guilty. That's fundamentally different from contributing to open source. Nobody's holding your hand from start to finish, because that would kinda defeat the point of contributing.
- leothetechguy 10mo agoI remember a few open source projects struggling with hundreds of merge request of people simply adding their name to the README because they want to add "open-source" contributor to their resume as part of some bootcamp. Any mandatory service will result in at worst malicious compliance and at best in low quality work. And I'd rather take quality over quantity.
- wink 10mo agoIt's not exactly the same, but my reasoning for generally not donating money to FLOSS projects is that I kind of see it as a zero-sum game. I maintain some stuff, I report bugs and contribute to several projects (with a varying degree of activity), you maintain some stuff and in the end we all benefit from it. And yes, of course some people do a lot more, but even more people do a lot less. And if you like donating money to people who like to accept money, sure, go ahead. (I think I received something from an Amazon wish list once, and we ordered some swag for some collective donation money once - which is overall not a lot for over 20 years of occasional open source work. Not complaining here, just for reference - I prefer not to be paid for doing my hobby stuff in my free time.)
- exasperaited 10mo agoI don't know about "required" but I do know that people who depend on any piece of open source software (or would like to) should be encouraged at every turn to contribute somehow — put a tutorial video on youtube, hang out in a user group and answer questions, work on translations, confirm bug reports, do test builds, whatever. I have written a small open source package that became hugely widely deployed without my knowledge — a really very pleasant surprise — but hadn't done an awful lot more in terms of open source contribution for a long period of time until two or three years back when I began to contribute in various ways to a project that has really changed my life for the better. I now feel a whole lot more ethical about the amount I get out of it personally, because I am putting in about ten hours a week of my own time.