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I feel like this is a very modern problem with the community. I’ve been in open source for a long time, I’ve been employed by some of these companies to write open source things.
Most open source stuff was created by someone who was employed to write that open source thing. There are exceptions, of course, but most things came about because of a need, and that need is often related to work. Companies used to be a lot better with allowing open sourcing of components.
Then, there are all the community contributions that come from commercial reasons. If someone working at a company fixes a bug they encounter, that’s someone being paid to write open source software.
I do not understand the reaction people are having to this now. The open source ecosystem was built on this.
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It was not intended as anti-capitalism software.
Anti-capitalist doesn’t mean nobody gets paid, though.
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I see this way too rarely nowadays: “Free as in speech, not free as in beer”.
It’s definitely a much older expression, but I first remember hearing it around 2000, and that helped me ynderstand the philosophy of OSS. Whereas many would shrug at the fact that you could buy FreeBSD (because they thought “as in beer”), they tended to ignore the benefit of the liberty aspect of it all.
Sure, you could pay for the convenience of having your favorite OS on official disks shipped to your door. But you didn’t have to. Free doesn’t always mean unpaid.
It’s free as in freedom, not as in free beer.
But you can’t have one without the other. Putting a cost on software is adding a restriction, thus making it less free (as in freedom).
Free software should be available to everyone, even to people who don’t have money to pay for it (poor third world countries, students, kids).
I personally believe, that you should pay for software that helps you earn money. For everything else - it’s everyone’s own decision to donate or not, based on a financial situation, beliefs, political position and what not.
Yeah I think that people should be a lot more willing to pay someone to contribute to open source than they are to pay for usage of closed code. It really should be seen as the best form of charity, like when I donate to an open source project that makes a good education tool what I’m really doing is donating that tool to every school in the developing world and every student that wouldn’t have been able to afford a paid version.
I think that we need to get into a world where showing off which projects you support is a way of flexing, like all these super rich attention seekers need to start funding development teams for apps ‘oh yeah I was so annoyed the librivox app didn’t have ai search tools that I paid two PhD students to implement it, apparently it’s been a real boon for foreign language learners and literary academics but I just use it to find me historic novels similar in theme to events in my own life, you know it suggested shadow over innsmouth, I don’t know what it’s trying to say!’
People need to see that it’s much better to buy something for everyone in the world than just for you, especially because it makes it possible for other people like you to repay the favour and pay for further improvements which benefit you
The problem is companies that fully take advantage of open source, as is their right, and then fully expect the volunteer dev to provide support them when they have a Sev 1.
Sure they read the license and saw that it was free, but they didn’t read the part that it was free but offered literally no support.
The amount of money that my company has made on the backs of open source developers is probably in the literal billions. But we don’t give fuck squat to them outside of one day a year that we contribute code back to a few select libraries.
Putting a cost on software is adding a restriction, thus making it less free (as in freedom).
Don’t confuse “free from cost” with “free from restrictions”.
Writing software costs costs - be them time, money, evne mental health as we have often seen because of too many entitled people in these communities. Putting a price on the software means valuing it for what it is, and does not incur in any additional restriction on the usage of the software.
All that said, I think the cost of free software, at least when it comes to infrastructure software, is something that shouldn’t be necessary for the end user to pay. Similar to how we pay taxes, instead of paying for the installation of semaphores on our streets directly.
If I were to design any such global system, it would be eg.: distro maintainers who would pay a maintenance cost to the developers of the dependencies they ship. Probably in the form of a funding pool that is distributed across projects prioritizing those that 1.- have ethics and development practices more similar to the distro’s and 2.- are in need of more immediate attention for solving security or usability bugs.
Furthermore, national-level funds for this would be collected via a taxation system managed by an academic office or other such entity and taken in a measure scaled according to the nation’s average technological “estate” (after all, developing and maintaining a more complex system requires more cares and attentions).
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Well, then you have to find another name for that kind of software and define it that way. I certainly would support such an effort, i.e. to make software available to everyone at no cost.
There’s no need to come up with new terms or change the existing ones. Free software is inherently free in price. And you can’t enforce paying for software without the restrictions put in place (e.g. drm). Here’s a quote from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html :
With free software, users don’t have to pay the distribution fee in order to use the software. They can copy the program from a friend who has a copy, or with the help of a friend who has network access. Or several users can join together, split the price of one CD-ROM, then each in turn can install the software. A high CD-ROM price is not a major obstacle when the software is free.
Free software can have a price, but paying it is optional.
You definitely can. “Free” refers to the freedom of the users, not the freedom of people who might want to be users (that doesn’t even really make sense, how can you provide the freedoms to people who don’t even use the program?).
I meant that free software is inherently can’t have a price. Even if you provide source code only to your users, they are free to share that source code for free.
Thus there can’t be piracy because piracy of free software is inherently allowed.
And if you try to prevent your users from sharing the source either legally or with drm - you add restrictions to software, making it less free for your users.
The recent situation with RedHat provides good demonstration and example of this.
Yes, the users can redistribute however they like. That doesn’t stop you charging an initial fee (and most people would probably rather get software from the official source)
My fundamental position is that paying people to work on open source is good, full stop, no exceptions. We need to stop criticizing maintainers getting paid, and start celebrating. Yes, all of the mechanisms are flawed in some way, but that’s because the world is flawed, and it’s not the fault of the people taking money. Yelling at maintainers who’ve found a way to make a living is wrong.
Fully agreed. Puritans of any kind are annoying and can’t think for themselves. Opensource can’t exist in this world without somebody that has money and time to write it. If we want more opensource, we need to pay those writing it to spend more time doing so.
If you really think you can live outside of capitalism in a capitalist world, go off the grid. Posting on the internet is already proof that you’re failing your own ideals.
Why? I use the internet to share media and culture via P2P. Is that failing my ideals? Also I don’t remember Stallman being a commie, to be fair.
And opensource CAN exist without people paying the mantainers, people have being giving things away to the community since time is time This trend of companies paying mintainers is relatively new.
Plus, on the other hand, as long as it is full open source, I can’t see why anyone would have a problem with the maintainers getting paid, specially through a foundation via donarions and/or crowdfunding.
Why? I use the internet to share media and culture via P2P. Is that failing my ideals?
“If you really think you can live outside of capitalism in a capitalist world, go off the grid.” are these your ideals?
Also I don’t remember Stallman being a commie, to be fair.
What does that have to do with anything?
And opensource CAN exist without people paying the mantainers, people have being giving things away to the community since time is time
Giving money in return for code is payment. A donation is payment. A maintainer getting money during their day job and then working on opensource in their free time is payment.
- No, but I mean it IS possible to take steps against and live outside capitalism while inside capitalism is possible. It’s a grayscale, not “all or nothing”.
- Meaning, that open source not being paid is not inherently outside capitalism.
- Yeah, sure is. But they are crowd sourced paymemts, instead of corporate payments.
I think we are agreeing with each other: life is not black and white and puritans want to make it.
Donations is a good way to handle paying maintainers, but unfortunately most people don’t even know what open source software is or what software they depend on greatly that would deserve donations.
At my work we use a few open source projects in critical infra, but I’m sad that we are pretty shit at budgeting for donating to said projects
At my work, I can be probably safely assume there is no such budget and in fact open source projects are actively used to create our own branded products (that may or may not be exclusively used internally).
You probably only need a few guesses at where I work.
If budgeting donations is difficult, maybe donating time is more viable?
Employees are already paid for. Less people involved to approve too.
If you have the autonomy you may even be able to to without explicit approval.
Yeah we are pretty bad at upstreaming too…
if you have your engineers developing a feature for selfish reasons, and the code is good, you can share it right?
“No we’re not giving out our IP for free”
open source project repos on your company github is how you attract top talent i thought :(
IMHO the reality is more complicated than what’s described here.
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Open source is sustainable (in the sense that people will continue to do it), even without the maintainers getting paid, for better or worse. This is evidenced by the history and the majority of open source projects now.
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The bait-and-switch problem, which gets the maintainers paid, hurts the ecosystem in the long run, which relies heavily on the good faith.
Many open source projects are not developed by unpaid volunteers. The Linux kernel, for example, is primarily developed by professionals on paid time. I’m not convinced the Linux kernel development would continue without business contribution. I’m not convinced all open source projects could just continue without any payment.
I think if you look at your average “package” from GitHub, that is published to npm, nuget, or the associated language rep, by and large they’re not making any money.
Sure big projects are making money and have paid development teams, but that’s not true at the individual library level in many cases.
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Amen
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I also think the arrangement of some words can be very panful.
