4 ms·

Yeah the market for open source is shit. You have tons of corporations deriving billions in total profit off the back of open source that contribute maybe a mil

Yeah the market for open source is shit. You have tons of corporations deriving billions in total profit off the back of open source that contribute maybe a million back and feel that they have done some great great deed... like say Google. You could easily make the Gimp much much better with a few million in funding. The beauty of capitalism is exactly that it locks out this sort of behavior because of the way that corporations and consumers behave with their money... and how people relegated at to the lowly level of employee is forced to behave by the rules of working for that corporation and the small amount of money it pays for work which may deliver up to 10x its value, value captured by the shareholders.

boramalper 9y ago
And I think copyleft licenses offer a solution here: if you are worried that corporations (or rival corporations) might monetize your product (or derive any profit from it indirectly), licensing it under a copyleft license would make their lives very, very hard. It's near impossible, for instance, to keep an AGPLv3-licensed product within a walled-garden, hence good luck while trying to build a *AAS on that.
- devoply 9y ago
  The issue is not to deprive corporations of profit. Profit is good. The issue is how they behave with the profit once they get it. They lock it up in the hands of the very few rather than distributing it far and wide so good stuff can get done all over the world. The concentration of capital or the good is the problem. The more it is concentrated, the more good that gets done is on the terms of the corporations rather than a scrappy hacker or an individualist or anyone else. That shuts down freedom to do, which is bad. That limits choice and freedom, to live how you want because you are providing a good. Rather than live on the terms dictated by those who hoard the capital. Which happens all over the world the way the current system is architected.
  - sdenton4 9y ago
    Who is profit good for?
    - devoply 9y ago
      For everyone. Who is profit not good for? Someone has chosen to pay the company for the good, that's their decision to do so. The company has provided the good. The consumer is better off because of it. And he or she has paid for the good. So yeah it's good for everyone.
      - fao_ 9y ago
        > Who is profit not good for? The wage slaves.
        juliangoldsmith 9y ago
        Why?
        cookiecaper 9y ago
        Profit is good for wage slaves. People may not agree that the wage slaves get their due share of that profit, but without profit, the wage slaves would be in a sorry state indeed. Their employer needs to be prosperous so they can be comfortable accommodating the employee's needs.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  AFAIK this was the original intent of the GPL as well, but due to the common interpretation that "link" and "distribute" refer exclusively to their meanings within the context of traditional binary building and distribution (that is, they do not apply when a program is "distributed" such that its back-end is accessed through a web-based front-end), the AGPL was necessary. IANAL
  - desiderantes 9y ago
    That's a load of bullshit
    - quadrangle 9y ago
      what's bullshit? That the GPL was written with the same aims as the AGPL? I fail to see any bullshit in the post you're replying to…
grej 9y ago
I wonder if anyone has ever thought of a law that would allow for large corporations to repatriate some of their overseas dollars tax-free, or defer corporate taxes they'd otherwise have to pay, provided they went toward altruistic purposes, where one of those altruistic purposes could be contribution to broadly used open source libraries. Obviously a lot more of the details would need to be worked out to try and minimize how much companies try and game that to simply fund their own research tax-free, but I wonder if the type of behavior you're looking for could be economically incentivized given the right corporate tax legal reforms.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Wouldn't this already be effective as long as the project was under the umbrella of an appropriate 501(c)3? Not necessarily the repatriation bit. I'm not a tax expert by any means so I am legitimately asking. From a quick search, it looks like the IRS does sometimes allow businesses to make deductible contributions to a 501(c)3, but that it first attempts to determine if the business expects to receive a "substantial return benefit". [0] The IRS seems to already have specific rules around "qualified sponsorship payments". [1] [0] https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/corporate-sponsorship-income-taxable-or-charitable-contribution https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/corporat... [1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p598/ch03.html#en_US_201701_publink100011928 https://www.irs.gov/publications/p598/ch03.html#en_US_201701...
  - guimarin 9y ago
    One easy way around this is to do what all the NYC foundations do. That is, give to other people's charities, and they in turn will give to yours. That is only small potatoes compared to donating to a political campaign and taking the money you don't spend on the campaign off the table tax free. A lot more things make sense through that lens. I could imagine a situation where Google who doesn't benefit from every OSS project, gives to project that Facebook benefits from, and Facebook to one's that Google does ad infinitem.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
LoSboccacc 9y ago
I see the myth of the poor developer being robbed of the value it delivers is alive and well around this community. Here's the thing, in corporate devs are as essential as people toghtening nuts in a factory. The value one produces there is multiplyed by the internal know how, customer base, marketing reach and tight focus management, none of which it's brough by the developer. That value is stripped from developer work just to be pocketed by management and sales is a myth, besides, if it werent there'd be plenty developers going solo and the median salary would be in the millions. Edit: and lo and behold, instant downvote. No wonders the tech community is so blind and guillible when it comes to the value argument, from the extraction myth to the stock options gambling.
- m4x 9y ago
  I don't disagree with this, but it isn't universally true. Some developers are just writing code to satisfy a spec and really could be replaced by any other developer; others are uniquely valuable and significantly increase their employers value, without necessarily being recognised for it. Good software acts as a multiplier, so it's not equivalent to tightening bolts. It's more equivalent to finding optimisations that reduce the number of bolts which need to be tightened. A relatively small amount of software can drastically increase the value of a company/process
  - LoSboccacc 9y ago
    Tru but the few of us that really push the envelope are few, are pulling serious $$$ already and hardly move the mean.
    - devoply 9y ago
      Internal knowledge is not held by the company it is held by individuals within the company. At best what you are arguing for is that there are enough people that for a given salary you can use to replace your existing people and can pick up what they are doing quickly enough that they are replaceable. That is not the same as your disrespectful assertion that your average dev is the same as a person who tightens bolts. Even the most simple development tasks require a significant amount of knowledge and at least a few years of experience that only a small number of the population can actually perform. It's true that an individual can't do the same things a company can do. That's not some profound assertion. It's however impossible to go from that and assert that is because they are incapable of doing those things even if they had the funding to do so. That is to say that the marketing issue is more or less an issue of funding or money. That is what keeps that individual devs from capturing more value that is instead captured by companies or by managers, marketers, etc. As well as hiring additional people to form an actual company that performs the functions of a company. However a significant number of founders are developers, many of them including Paul Gahram and Mark Zuckerberg average developers that went to found multi-million to billion dollar companies because of funding. Now after the fact maybe you can argue that there was something special about them, but that's a post-facto assertion. They were average devs and if they had not gotten the funding would be relegated to your nut bolt tighteners not having been able to express their "true" potential.

boramalper 9y ago

And I think copyleft licenses offer a solution here: if you are worried that corporations (or rival corporations) might monetize your product (or derive any profit from it indirectly), licensing it under a copyleft license would make their lives very, very hard. It's near impossible, for instance, to keep an AGPLv3-licensed product within a walled-garden, hence good luck while trying to build a *AAS on that.

devoply 9y ago
The issue is not to deprive corporations of profit. Profit is good. The issue is how they behave with the profit once they get it. They lock it up in the hands of the very few rather than distributing it far and wide so good stuff can get done all over the world. The concentration of capital or the good is the problem. The more it is concentrated, the more good that gets done is on the terms of the corporations rather than a scrappy hacker or an individualist or anyone else. That shuts down freedom to do, which is bad. That limits choice and freedom, to live how you want because you are providing a good. Rather than live on the terms dictated by those who hoard the capital. Which happens all over the world the way the current system is architected.
- sdenton4 9y ago
  Who is profit good for?
  - devoply 9y ago
    For everyone. Who is profit not good for? Someone has chosen to pay the company for the good, that's their decision to do so. The company has provided the good. The consumer is better off because of it. And he or she has paid for the good. So yeah it's good for everyone.
    - fao_ 9y ago
      > Who is profit not good for? The wage slaves.
      - juliangoldsmith 9y ago
        Why?
      - cookiecaper 9y ago
        Profit is good for wage slaves. People may not agree that the wage slaves get their due share of that profit, but without profit, the wage slaves would be in a sorry state indeed. Their employer needs to be prosperous so they can be comfortable accommodating the employee's needs.
cookiecaper 9y ago
AFAIK this was the original intent of the GPL as well, but due to the common interpretation that "link" and "distribute" refer exclusively to their meanings within the context of traditional binary building and distribution (that is, they do not apply when a program is "distributed" such that its back-end is accessed through a web-based front-end), the AGPL was necessary. IANAL
- desiderantes 9y ago
  That's a load of bullshit
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    what's bullshit? That the GPL was written with the same aims as the AGPL? I fail to see any bullshit in the post you're replying to…

grej 9y ago

I wonder if anyone has ever thought of a law that would allow for large corporations to repatriate some of their overseas dollars tax-free, or defer corporate taxes they'd otherwise have to pay, provided they went toward altruistic purposes, where one of those altruistic purposes could be contribution to broadly used open source libraries. Obviously a lot more of the details would need to be worked out to try and minimize how much companies try and game that to simply fund their own research tax-free, but I wonder if the type of behavior you're looking for could be economically incentivized given the right corporate tax legal reforms.

cookiecaper 9y ago
Wouldn't this already be effective as long as the project was under the umbrella of an appropriate 501(c)3? Not necessarily the repatriation bit. I'm not a tax expert by any means so I am legitimately asking. From a quick search, it looks like the IRS does sometimes allow businesses to make deductible contributions to a 501(c)3, but that it first attempts to determine if the business expects to receive a "substantial return benefit". [0] The IRS seems to already have specific rules around "qualified sponsorship payments". [1] [0] https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/corporate-sponsorship-income-taxable-or-charitable-contribution https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/corporat... [1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p598/ch03.html#en_US_201701_publink100011928 https://www.irs.gov/publications/p598/ch03.html#en_US_201701...
- guimarin 9y ago
  One easy way around this is to do what all the NYC foundations do. That is, give to other people's charities, and they in turn will give to yours. That is only small potatoes compared to donating to a political campaign and taking the money you don't spend on the campaign off the table tax free. A lot more things make sense through that lens. I could imagine a situation where Google who doesn't benefit from every OSS project, gives to project that Facebook benefits from, and Facebook to one's that Google does ad infinitem.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

LoSboccacc 9y ago

I see the myth of the poor developer being robbed of the value it delivers is alive and well around this community. Here's the thing, in corporate devs are as essential as people toghtening nuts in a factory. The value one produces there is multiplyed by the internal know how, customer base, marketing reach and tight focus management, none of which it's brough by the developer. That value is stripped from developer work just to be pocketed by management and sales is a myth, besides, if it werent there'd be plenty developers going solo and the median salary would be in the millions. Edit: and lo and behold, instant downvote. No wonders the tech community is so blind and guillible when it comes to the value argument, from the extraction myth to the stock options gambling.

m4x 9y ago
I don't disagree with this, but it isn't universally true. Some developers are just writing code to satisfy a spec and really could be replaced by any other developer; others are uniquely valuable and significantly increase their employers value, without necessarily being recognised for it. Good software acts as a multiplier, so it's not equivalent to tightening bolts. It's more equivalent to finding optimisations that reduce the number of bolts which need to be tightened. A relatively small amount of software can drastically increase the value of a company/process
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  Tru but the few of us that really push the envelope are few, are pulling serious $$$ already and hardly move the mean.
  - devoply 9y ago
    Internal knowledge is not held by the company it is held by individuals within the company. At best what you are arguing for is that there are enough people that for a given salary you can use to replace your existing people and can pick up what they are doing quickly enough that they are replaceable. That is not the same as your disrespectful assertion that your average dev is the same as a person who tightens bolts. Even the most simple development tasks require a significant amount of knowledge and at least a few years of experience that only a small number of the population can actually perform. It's true that an individual can't do the same things a company can do. That's not some profound assertion. It's however impossible to go from that and assert that is because they are incapable of doing those things even if they had the funding to do so. That is to say that the marketing issue is more or less an issue of funding or money. That is what keeps that individual devs from capturing more value that is instead captured by companies or by managers, marketers, etc. As well as hiring additional people to form an actual company that performs the functions of a company. However a significant number of founders are developers, many of them including Paul Gahram and Mark Zuckerberg average developers that went to found multi-million to billion dollar companies because of funding. Now after the fact maybe you can argue that there was something special about them, but that's a post-facto assertion. They were average devs and if they had not gotten the funding would be relegated to your nut bolt tighteners not having been able to express their "true" potential.