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Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

319 points by ashitlerferad 9y ago

sandov 9y ago
Apparently the source got hugged to death.
ldom22 9y ago
companies too.
neya 9y ago
Cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:P1Yw346ZwAoJ:https://fosspost.org/opinions/people-be-thankful-for-free-software-developers+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:P1Yw34...
emerged 9y ago
Interestingly, free software development often pays off in the best interest of the developers. In terms of networking with other developers and building a resume which leads to real jobs with real pay. Not to mention the value of real world developer experience. Be thankful, yep - but as someone with a background in OSS, I'm quite happy with the intangible dividends it's already paid.
- josteink 9y ago
  > Interestingly, free software development often pays off in the best interest of the developers. While I know that is true first hand, I think that's largely due to network effects. You've most likely built your own open-source project on top of other existing open-source projects, an existing free platform. That means that there's a big bootstrapping cost you didn't have to pay for in terms of commercial software or developer-time (if you'd instead had chosen to make that platform yourself). And since you got off so lightly, it's easy to think "I'll just give this away too". What if making that first release had cost you 10x more effort, or hundreds of dollars? But now your project is FOSS and you get the benefits in the terms of people using your software and submitting patches back. Do you think you'd have something equally compelling to offer if you had to make it all from scratch? Or do you think you'd get contributors if using your product depended on a wide range of other commercial software? Basically, your open-source project "works out" because of other open-source software. Even as a developer, you should be thankful for free software developers. Just how much free software do you depend on? A text-editor? A programming-language runtime and toolchain? A operating system for that to run on? A platform SDK for the developers of that platform? A kernel surely? And for each of those "high level" concepts there, you probably need to account for the very same thing recursively and more: server-software running their project's webpages and mailing-lists and other developer infrastructure. Plus whatever that recursively depends on. The amount of free effort involved seems to defy enumeration. I guess it is turtles all the way down. I think open-source today has come a long way compared to where it was a couple decades ago, and can't imagine how much perseverance and persistence this has required from how just many people. It's an enormous achievement. My hats off and thanks to all of you, everywhere :)
  - emerged 9y ago
    Turtles all the way down, yea. The comment that I made IMO applies to each of those turtles. OSS is sometimes done out of a selfless sense of public service, but maybe more often just for the sheer cognitive/emotional drive to solve a problem and/or to create for its own sake. But the way that plays out just so happens to yield positive benefits not just for the community who are free recipients of the software, but for the developers as well. It's a great thing, though I don't think it's possible for us all to just hold hands in a spirit circle and develop all of the world's software for free without any care for profit. The modes are synergetic but OSS can't stand alone.
  - maccard 9y ago
    I agree, however: > Just how much free software do you depend on? A text-editor? A programming-language runtime and toolchain? A operating system for that to run on? A platform SDK for the developers of that platform? A kernel surely? there are many people who use closed source editors (sublime/VS), on a nonfree tool chain (VC++) on a nonfree OS (windows) with a closed source SDK And kernel.
    - josteink 9y ago
      What about the servers you deploy to? What about the toolchain used by the upstream platform developers you depend on? What about the software powering their CI-systems? Whatever free software they depend on, you indirectly depend on too.
      - maccard 9y ago
        Not everyone works on web applications, and I don't claim to have any knowledge of the platform that they develop with. My point wasn't that I don't depend on free software (I absolutely do, and I do donate to the software I use every year), but that it is possible to be a developer and have very little interaction with free software.
        josteink 9y ago
jordigh 9y ago
This is a starry-eyed blog post. I like it, and I miss not having more of these. We need more starry-eyed dreamers because they get good things done. I just spent some time with the Debian crew at the last Debconf here in Mtl. I've always liked their attitude and I love their operating system -- and so does everyone else who has ever created a Debian derivative. Others at Debconf felt the same. Bradley Kuhn even said something like what a breath of fresh air it was to not have to apologise for being a free software supporter. I love how organic Debian is and how the conference was perfectly run with livestreaming and IRC bots keeping us abreast of the next event. These polychromatically-haired dreamers know how to get things done. So, it's good to see that the starry-eyed blog posts haven't stopped.
- fny 9y ago
  Why would someone have to apologize for being a free software supporter? I consider my FSF membership a point of pride.
  - jordigh 9y ago
    We get told many things. That we are fundamentalists, that all software cannot or should not be free, that the GPL is too restrictive, that we are anti-business, that we spend more time arguing politics than getting things done, that we are passé because Apple and Microsoft are releasing some free software. Someone like bkuhn gets to hear things like that all the time. It's nice for a change to not have to argue against each of those points.
  - b4ux1t3 9y ago
    I'm all for free software. Really, I am. I just have a problem with the idea that free software is absolutely the only way to go. I have no problem with people who refuse to run non-free software. I have a problem when they insist that I'm doing it wrong by running Windows. Sent from my Fedora-running laptop.
    - jordigh 9y ago
      I don't think you're doing anyone any harm by running Windows. I just wish you didn't have to.
Clubber 9y ago
Just to put it out there, Apple offers quite a bit of free software when you purchase their hardware. This includes OS upgrades and their office suite as well as Xcode and Garage Band, among other things. It's quite nice and they are well made. There are a few asterisks though, most notably support life for the OS. My 2009 MacPro won't run the latest OS for no other reason than Apple decided it couldn't (end of life). The 2010 model is allowed to run it and there is no discernible difference in the hardware. Having said that FOSS was truly paradigm changing. I lived in a world before Linux and everything was prohibitively expensive on the PC. There was a lot of freeware and public domain software available, but most of it wasn't very good or niche stuff. It's quite amazing that the FOSS movement it was able to happen, let alone gain so much traction with such great software. I mean today, you don't have to buy a damn thing except the hardware.
- azrazalea 9y ago
  > Apple offers quite a bit of free software when you purchase their hardware. This includes OS upgrades and their office suite as well as Xcode and Garage Band, among other things. It's quite nice and they are well made. Most of that is not "free software" in the way this blog post is talking about (FOSS). XCode has FOSS components, parts of the OS are FOSS, etc. However, much of it is not.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    Yes, I was mainly talking about the free as in beer. Not as much free as in freedom regarding Apple's stuff. Apple used to charge for all their software. I give FOSS credit for changing that. I think Lion was the first free OS upgrade. I credit FOSS for Microsoft giving a real copy of Visual Studio away for free. They've done it in the past, IIRC, but it was so hobbled, it was useless.
    - simonh 9y ago
      >Apple used to charge for all their software. I give FOSS credit for changing that. I give the credit to Microsoft's market share. The fact is ~99% of Mac switchers like me previously owned Windows boxes and ran mostly proprietary Windows software. The free applications you get with a Mac are a way to cushion the blow of giving those up and in some cases offer features you just can't get direct equivalents for on Windows. Offering Time Machine, Photos, iMovie, Pages, etc for free has nothing to do with the existence of Libre software and everything to do with marketing the platform to switchers from Windows. Clearly Libre software has had a huge effect on OSX, in fact the OS itself is based on free software and large swathes of its base components, tools and services are free software of one sort or another to this day. But none of those are name check features marketable to consumers other than just as MacOS. In the dev tool arena yes, free software has had a huge effect. Specifically I think making very capable versions of VS available free was a response to the existence of high quality free .NET development tools. MS want people to develop on Windows using their own tool chains and if roughly equivalent free tools exist and become popular, there's really no cost to offering an equivalent for free any more given VS has to exist anyway.
pbreit 9y ago
I get the sentiment but the request is awkward. IF OSS developers don't want to code for free then there's an easy, fool-proof solution. If you're going to try to argue Debian is worth $30 billion then I'll try to argue that it's generated $30 billion in free publicity.
AlisdairO 9y ago
I really liked this post. Obviously everyone has different motivations, but at its heart FOSS is an enormous collection of cooperative and/or charitable work, and the industry as a whole should be really, really proud of it. One other option for giving back - just send an email saying thanks, and that you love the project. I get such an email once or twice each week for my open source project, and it really brightens up my day. I'm lucky enough to not really need any donations, but everybody needs their spirits lifted from time to time. Knowing that your contribution has made a positive impact on someone else's life is a powerful thing, and from the user's perspective costs very little to do.
jancsika 9y ago
> It means that someone has just donated hundreds of hours of work for you. Free of charge! I think that misses something of the ethos of free software. It's not like somebody donating their valuable time to work in a soup kitchen. It's much more like somebody too lazy to spend thirty seconds doing a menial task like everyone else, so they instead spend three months creating a program that automates that thirty second task-- with the side effect that the rest of computer-using humanity gets out of doing that menial task, too. So in a way it does require a thank you. But in another way releasing it as free software is the least they could do given all the time they wasted just to get out of doing work.
- detaro 9y ago
  I wonder what "30s menial task" the writers of Apache, the Linux kernel, Blender, … tried to avoid?
- jacalata 9y ago
  That is a bizarre attitude. Why would anyone owe you for having wasted their own time? I mean, if you were arguing that they owed it to their employer to give them anything developed on company time, at least you'd make sense...
- makecheck 9y ago
  I for one have spent over 20 years continually expanding my application, as free GPL software, and I stopped counting the hours long ago. It is a gigantic amount of effort to design non-trivial software. Heck, just keeping everything stable and up-to-date is a project in itself (periodically having to adopt modern platform APIs, for instance). And usually I receive very little feedback. I can see downloads in the thousands and I doubt I've had more than a few E-mails a year. You might be misled by the tendency for people to hack random things together and dump them on GitHub, never to be touched again.
peterwwillis 9y ago
Free non-commercial and non-free commercial software are both wildly different products in practice. I installed some package recently that fucked with my X config, or my kernel modules, I don't know. But my hybrid graphics is now fucked and I have crazy artifacts all over my screen. The default install of this distro does not result in a working config, and I had to spend three days to figure out the insane set of software and configuration I needed to make it work last time. (Also, I added extra RAM, and now hibernating doesn't work) There is no commercial support for this laptop running this distro. My free software has no "revert to a last known good working system state" button, like some non-free software. Doing all the work to fix the graphics again may literally be more expensive than buying a new Windows laptop. Thanks, Free Software.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  Windows support is provided by the manufacturer of the laptop. Linux support is provided by a finite supply of free labor. Instead of whining that not enough volunteers provided free labor to make whatever laptop you already invested in work better perhaps buy machines that are well supported or even better ones which come with Linux. This approach has worked well for me for 14 years.
  - peterwwillis 9y ago
    Or I can buy a machine which is not only supported, but actually works, with basic features and quality testing baked in. But that's not the point. The point is that free software devs asking for a thank-you is like a dog owner asking for a thank-you when you don't step in their dog poop on the sidewalk. They weren't walking the dog for my benefit, and I'm not going to thank them for getting to walk around their crap.
    - benchaney 9y ago
      > Or I can buy a machine which is not only supported, but actually works lol
    - michaelmrose 9y ago
throw2016 9y ago
It's a huge generational gift, and people should now be concerned about how to sustain the free software movement. There is clearly an ongoing shift from a generation of 'starry eyed' ideologues to hired open source developers. Some may argue that's moving forward but it's diminished in many ways by losing its core essence and 'motivation' to exist. Companies can contribute by open source by supporting developers and projects without seeking influence by hiring or acquiring them. But then many don't even bother doing that. We need to find a way to develop a ecosystem that has sustenance from businesses and especially individuals and yet leaves the developers and projects 'independent'. Leaving it to sort itself out has already led to a sort of centralization and will eventually lead to loss of control and accountability.
RachelF 9y ago
The should be thankful, but they do not know. FOSS doesn't spend money on PR. Few know that free Linux lurks under Android, and OS/X an iOS have large parts of BSD in them.
- jhasse 9y ago
  > free Linux lurks under Android Not only that, but the GUI is also FOSS: https://source.android.com/ https://source.android.com/ > OS/X an iOS have large parts of BSD in them. I think this gives the wrong impression. The interesting parts of macOS and iOS are GUI and drivers, which are proprietary.
  - contingencies 9y ago
    The interesting parts of macOS and iOS are GUI and drivers, which are proprietary. The best parts of OSX are brew, iTerm2, and FileMerge. (Edit in reply to below: Yes, that's my point. brew and iTerm2 are FOSS, FileMerge is part of XCode)
    - jhasse 9y ago
      Those aren't part of OSX though.
atomlib 9y ago
I wish it was that attractive to just switch from “expensive and evil proprietary software” as the author suggests. 1. The article claims that Microsoft Office 365 is $100 a year. In reality it's about $70, home license for up to 5 users is $80. 2. The article does not mention that every Office 365 user gets bunch of additional services. For example, a tebibyte of space in Microsoft OneDrive for each user, 60 Skype minutes per month, etc. 3. Each Office 365 user can install Office apps on 3 devices: his phone, tablet, and computer. Office apps are available on Android and iOS as part of the package. $70—$80 a year price tag includes not only Windows apps, they work perfectly fine on smartphones. Personally I make grocery lists in Excel, open them on my phone, fill my shopping cart with items, and track how much I'm going to pay or if I'm eligible for coupons. 4. I'm not aware of any decent OneNote alternatives. I researched it some time ago because I desired to self-host my notes. There are pretty much no comparable open source or free cross-platform apps which can work with notes in cloud or on a remote server from your mobile device. With OneNote all of my notes are available on my mobile devices. I strongly believe that OneNote is one of the best apps Microsoft came up with in recent years. If you look around, you can see that 1 TiB of cloud storage alone costs $100 (Google Drive) or $120 (Dropbox). Office 365 offers not only that but also quite possibly the best office suite on the market for $70 for 1 or $80 for 5 people. Note that so far I have not touched the question of quality of software at all — only the most basic functionality and packages. Microsoft Office is the most popular office software package for a reason. My exposure to open-source office packages is limited but here is at least one dealbreaking example. I tried recreating my spreadsheet for tracking caloric intake in LibreOffice Calc. It was extremely painful — among many other features Calc does not even support tables like Excel does. I use another software package mentioned in the article — Kaspersky. I'm going to assume the author is talking about the package I'm using — Kaspersky Internet Security — since the price is stated to be $40. Like with Office 365, KIS is not only an antivirus. It's also a firewall, parental control tool with a list of inappropriate websites, an adblocker, etc. It provides quite a lot of functionality, some of which, frankly speaking, should be in Windows itself. For example, KIS can autoupdate software. Like with Office 365, article does not mention that $40 buys you a license for up to 3 devices. KIS is also available for Android and macOS. But overall, an antivirus is not necessary in modern Windows system, so you may skip on these $40.
- 9y ago
shmerl 9y ago
As a user of Debian, Firefox, LibreOffice and etc. I agree :)
geff82 9y ago
I always like to think Free/Open source Software is the only known occurrnce where socialism works. You give 100% of what you have for free as a programmer, but in that very same moment you make everyone, including yourself, richer and more free. As software does not get consumed, everyone's assets rise.
- tehlike 9y ago
  +1. It is liberating to write software for free, and still feel the sense of accomplishment, community and wealth of knowledge.
- hueving 9y ago
  Socialism isn't the right term because nobody is forced to contribute to any particular project with resources or even use it. It's an economic activity with first order benefits and positive externalities.
  - candiodari 9y ago
    Exactly this is capitalism at it's finest. Working on open source projects by itself has rewards : 1) you probably use it, so you use it yourself and your own situation gets better. 2) you get the efforts of others in addition to your own because of the open source nature (e.g. your code gets maintained, fixed, reviewed, ...) 3) There are plenty of companies (Google, FB, Red Hat, ...) that will give you a great job because of open source contributions you have made (and more general, reputational benefits) Enlightened self interest at it's finest.
    - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
      >this is capitalism at it's finest If by capitalism, you mean: >an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. Then no, because FOSS is not private or for profit.
      - 9y ago
jasonkester 9y ago
I like to think of Free Software Developers as rational actors. So while they certainly deserve my gratitude, I disagree that we owe them any other compensation that they didn't specifically ask for. As the author notes, developers, doctors, lawyers, etc. know their value and charge accordingly. A developer who charges $0 for his work product must, therefore, be making up that value elsewhere. Most major Open Source projects certainly are. Chrome, Linux, MySQL, and lots of other big names all have corporate backing. Large companies paying people to build software to advance their agenda. Commoditize the Operating System to sell more servers. Control the Browser to keep the rug un-pulled from your web empire. There's really not a lot of pure charity to be found. True, you do find the occasional artiste working away for no money, living the officially sanctioned stereotype for what an open source developer is supposed to look like. But I tend to hope that he knows the score and is therefore looking out for his own interests. There are lots of good reasons to develop open source. But I don't consider "charity to big companies" to be one of them.
- foldr 9y ago
  > A developer who charges $0 for his work product must, therefore, be making up that value elsewhere._ No, even assuming that they're "rational", they must have expected to make up that value elsewhere. It's entirely possible to write something useful, in the expectation of some amount of praise and recognition, and get nothing but a lot of whining in return for it.
- FatalBaboon 9y ago
  Usually the difference between Free and Open Source also shows in who backs it. Free Sofware comes from NGOs, whereas Open Source is either corporations looking to make a convoluted buck or developers looking for recognition. In that regard, Free Software Developers definitely deserve my gratitude.
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  > you do find the occasional artiste working away for no money You cherry-picked corporate-backed projects. Statistics show that unpaid work (without side benefits like resume building) is far from "occasional".
denisehilton 9y ago
People often underestimate the effort and motivation behind open source software. They download it and never come back again. We should be thankful to those developers who are working just to facilitate us without any monetary benefits. We should always donate even if it's $1.
twii 9y ago
I hope crypto currencies will eventually enable people and companies to more easily donate with micro payments to free software developers without the need for the greedy/stealing paypal or other banks. I have dozens of free/open-source projects that make me 0 dollars while some of them are being used quite a bit. I currently cannot find spare time to improve on those projects because I need to work for a company to pay the bills.. I would love to have some income out of it, but I refuse to use paypal. First they take a proportional part of the sum as fee, second they take another proportional part by making up their own exchange rates for converting currencies. I refuse to support those companies and I truly hope crypto currencies will nullify them.
- aerique 9y ago
  Obligatory post asking for links to your projects. (But I truly am curious.)
firmgently 9y ago
I love that open source exists and am very grateful that people have given their time to make stuff that I get so much pleasure out of using for free. I feel like the article suggests that programmers are the only people who ever produce work on a voluntary basis though. "If you ask an engineer, a doctor, a professor, a teacher or a farmer to give you one of the products they do for free, probably they will just refuse. You won’t find a professor working full time in a university for free. You won’t find a civil engineer working on building houses for free. You won’t find a farmer giving you vegetables for free." If you ask Adobe to give you Photoshop or someone who makes a piece of $10 software to give it to you for free they will probably refuse. There's a difference between offering something voluntarily and offering something for sale then being asked to provide it for free. Engineers do sometimes work for free eg. on charity projects as do many other types of business. Even ad agencies I've worked at did a certain number of free projects for charity. A farmer does regularly give me vegetables for free. I've made software for free but I've also spent a lot of time making props, art and other things for free. A friend runs a small charity, she works long full-time hours unpaid and often has trouble getting her own bills paid. I've also known more than a few selfish coders... I'm certainly not arguing against the premise of being thankful for free software (thank you programmers - I really mean that, I've sent messages of gratitude to devs in the past and am reminding myself to do it more in future) but let's not start thinking that software developers are inherently better human beings than anyone else. Feels a bit myopic :)
- Latty 9y ago
  Maybe a more charitable reading would be that programmers are positioned to give away their work in a way that other professionals can't necessarily do.
- tokai 9y ago
  Doctors do provide their services for free. Doctors without Borders is a prime example of this. Professors give research, their primary product, away for free as well (Other actors do still profit from their work though. Movements such as Open Access tries to address this problem).
thingamarobert 9y ago
As much as the introduction and the first two sections motivate the post, I think the last "Don't Just Feel Pleasure, Show It" section is the one that contains the main take-home message in my opinion. If one has benefited by using FOSS, one must acknowledge that it cannot get better and magically sustain itself without support from those who use it or appreciate the principles underlying the movement. The level of transparency and freedom of choice that FOSS offers to users, the DIY ethic and a sense of community it encourages is indeed something to be grateful for, and deserves a generous (subjective) contribution! If one does not contribute directly by submitting bugs or developing FOSS itself, supporting organisations such as... * The Free Software Foundation (http://fsf.org http://fsf.org) * Software in the Public Interest (http://www.spi-inc.org http://www.spi-inc.org) * Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org https://www.eff.org) * Let's Encrypt (http://letsencrypt.org http://letsencrypt.org) ... I believe can go a long way. I'm sure there are more - when one feels grateful for the service the software has rendered them, one just needs to make the effort to find out who has written the software and whether there's a "Donate" button somewhere through which this can be expressed, however small the actual amount.
- tajen 9y ago
  - Is LE worth contributing for, given it's a joint Google initiative? - FOSS really need to send out proper invoices, donations are a corporate risk and I have to spend time to my accountant to justify the necessity of donations, every year.
  - thingamarobert 9y ago
    I didn't realise that LE was a Google initiative. I know that it's supported by the Chrome project (and thus Google), but also by Mozilla, EFF and a lot of other supporters. Could you please point me to any article that discusses its Google affiliation? Thanks!
scandox 9y ago
Inspired by this I went over to donate money to Arch Linux, since I've just been getting nothing but joy from using it for the last 2 years. They use Click2Pledge which, frankly, is a UX which is a tad frightening, but I'm not a snob so I carry on. And then I find that of all the countries in the world they seem to have left Ireland out (Eire, Republic of Ireland, no, nothing). I mean they have the Isle of Man - but not Ireland. So, I cannot complete their payment form. So what all these guys need is a separate FOSS organisation exclusively dedicated to fund-raising.
- Asooka 9y ago
  > So what all these guys need is a separate FOSS organisation exclusively dedicated to fund-raising. I'm afraid that such an organisation will gradually be taken over by people looking to make money more than to help open-source software, and in the end we'll end up worse off than not having anything, because most donations to that organisation will get used for "internal expenses".
  - marrs 9y ago
    I think this attitude is holding FOSS back. The most successful projects are the ones that are funded: Linux, Blender, and Ubuntu to name 3. On the other hand we have projects like Gimp, which steadily makes excellent progress and gets better with every release, but the rate of change is glacial because the team are all working on it in their spare time. That's not to say that the motivation of profit can't also be corrupting. Gnome 3.0 and the associated libs was a complete disaster IMO, and a lot of the stupidity came IMO from a fear that Windows Vista would leave the Linux desktop behind, but the net gain of monetary investment is clear to me. The silly thing is, I'd much rather pay for software that is free than software that is proprietary. I won't use Adobe Suite on principle, especially now that it is subscription only, but I'd pay a subscription to Gimp in a heartbeat. I may not be in the majority, but I'm sure there are enough of us that we would generate enough income to make the difference.
    - Asooka 9y ago
      It's fine when it's one project seeking funding for itself. When it's some umbrella org gathering funding for some nebulous "F/OSS community" that I start getting wary. I think it would be better if each large project could build within itself a framework for seeking funding, rather than one group seeking joint funding for everyone. That concentrates too much political power in one place leading to a higher chance of a takeover by unwanted people.
amelius 9y ago
It would be nice if big repository services such as Github offered a simple way to donate.
Windson 9y ago
This is why I built www.thankyouopensource.com At least you can write a thank you note to the maintainer.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
I love the list of ways you can help at the bottom - each of these is tremendously valuable but most people think "well, I can't help if I can't code". Another thing that's super helpful: volunteer to triage tickets on the bug tracker.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
azuajef 9y ago
Also on being thankful for Free (Scientific) Software Developers: https://stactivist.com/2016/12/10/code-of-gratitude/ https://stactivist.com/2016/12/10/code-of-gratitude/

319 points by ashitlerferad 9y ago

sandov 9y ago

Apparently the source got hugged to death.

ldom22 9y ago

companies too.

neya 9y ago

Cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:P1Yw346ZwAoJ:https://fosspost.org/opinions/people-be-thankful-for-free-software-developers+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:P1Yw34...

emerged 9y ago

Interestingly, free software development often pays off in the best interest of the developers. In terms of networking with other developers and building a resume which leads to real jobs with real pay. Not to mention the value of real world developer experience. Be thankful, yep - but as someone with a background in OSS, I'm quite happy with the intangible dividends it's already paid.

josteink 9y ago
> Interestingly, free software development often pays off in the best interest of the developers. While I know that is true first hand, I think that's largely due to network effects. You've most likely built your own open-source project on top of other existing open-source projects, an existing free platform. That means that there's a big bootstrapping cost you didn't have to pay for in terms of commercial software or developer-time (if you'd instead had chosen to make that platform yourself). And since you got off so lightly, it's easy to think "I'll just give this away too". What if making that first release had cost you 10x more effort, or hundreds of dollars? But now your project is FOSS and you get the benefits in the terms of people using your software and submitting patches back. Do you think you'd have something equally compelling to offer if you had to make it all from scratch? Or do you think you'd get contributors if using your product depended on a wide range of other commercial software? Basically, your open-source project "works out" because of other open-source software. Even as a developer, you should be thankful for free software developers. Just how much free software do you depend on? A text-editor? A programming-language runtime and toolchain? A operating system for that to run on? A platform SDK for the developers of that platform? A kernel surely? And for each of those "high level" concepts there, you probably need to account for the very same thing recursively and more: server-software running their project's webpages and mailing-lists and other developer infrastructure. Plus whatever that recursively depends on. The amount of free effort involved seems to defy enumeration. I guess it is turtles all the way down. I think open-source today has come a long way compared to where it was a couple decades ago, and can't imagine how much perseverance and persistence this has required from how just many people. It's an enormous achievement. My hats off and thanks to all of you, everywhere :)
- emerged 9y ago
  Turtles all the way down, yea. The comment that I made IMO applies to each of those turtles. OSS is sometimes done out of a selfless sense of public service, but maybe more often just for the sheer cognitive/emotional drive to solve a problem and/or to create for its own sake. But the way that plays out just so happens to yield positive benefits not just for the community who are free recipients of the software, but for the developers as well. It's a great thing, though I don't think it's possible for us all to just hold hands in a spirit circle and develop all of the world's software for free without any care for profit. The modes are synergetic but OSS can't stand alone.
- maccard 9y ago
  I agree, however: > Just how much free software do you depend on? A text-editor? A programming-language runtime and toolchain? A operating system for that to run on? A platform SDK for the developers of that platform? A kernel surely? there are many people who use closed source editors (sublime/VS), on a nonfree tool chain (VC++) on a nonfree OS (windows) with a closed source SDK And kernel.
  - josteink 9y ago
    What about the servers you deploy to? What about the toolchain used by the upstream platform developers you depend on? What about the software powering their CI-systems? Whatever free software they depend on, you indirectly depend on too.
    - maccard 9y ago
      Not everyone works on web applications, and I don't claim to have any knowledge of the platform that they develop with. My point wasn't that I don't depend on free software (I absolutely do, and I do donate to the software I use every year), but that it is possible to be a developer and have very little interaction with free software.
      - josteink 9y ago

jordigh 9y ago

This is a starry-eyed blog post. I like it, and I miss not having more of these. We need more starry-eyed dreamers because they get good things done. I just spent some time with the Debian crew at the last Debconf here in Mtl. I've always liked their attitude and I love their operating system -- and so does everyone else who has ever created a Debian derivative. Others at Debconf felt the same. Bradley Kuhn even said something like what a breath of fresh air it was to not have to apologise for being a free software supporter. I love how organic Debian is and how the conference was perfectly run with livestreaming and IRC bots keeping us abreast of the next event. These polychromatically-haired dreamers know how to get things done. So, it's good to see that the starry-eyed blog posts haven't stopped.

fny 9y ago
Why would someone have to apologize for being a free software supporter? I consider my FSF membership a point of pride.
- jordigh 9y ago
  We get told many things. That we are fundamentalists, that all software cannot or should not be free, that the GPL is too restrictive, that we are anti-business, that we spend more time arguing politics than getting things done, that we are passé because Apple and Microsoft are releasing some free software. Someone like bkuhn gets to hear things like that all the time. It's nice for a change to not have to argue against each of those points.
- b4ux1t3 9y ago
  I'm all for free software. Really, I am. I just have a problem with the idea that free software is absolutely the only way to go. I have no problem with people who refuse to run non-free software. I have a problem when they insist that I'm doing it wrong by running Windows. Sent from my Fedora-running laptop.
  - jordigh 9y ago
    I don't think you're doing anyone any harm by running Windows. I just wish you didn't have to.

Clubber 9y ago

Just to put it out there, Apple offers quite a bit of free software when you purchase their hardware. This includes OS upgrades and their office suite as well as Xcode and Garage Band, among other things. It's quite nice and they are well made. There are a few asterisks though, most notably support life for the OS. My 2009 MacPro won't run the latest OS for no other reason than Apple decided it couldn't (end of life). The 2010 model is allowed to run it and there is no discernible difference in the hardware. Having said that FOSS was truly paradigm changing. I lived in a world before Linux and everything was prohibitively expensive on the PC. There was a lot of freeware and public domain software available, but most of it wasn't very good or niche stuff. It's quite amazing that the FOSS movement it was able to happen, let alone gain so much traction with such great software. I mean today, you don't have to buy a damn thing except the hardware.

azrazalea 9y ago
> Apple offers quite a bit of free software when you purchase their hardware. This includes OS upgrades and their office suite as well as Xcode and Garage Band, among other things. It's quite nice and they are well made. Most of that is not "free software" in the way this blog post is talking about (FOSS). XCode has FOSS components, parts of the OS are FOSS, etc. However, much of it is not.
- Clubber 9y ago
  Yes, I was mainly talking about the free as in beer. Not as much free as in freedom regarding Apple's stuff. Apple used to charge for all their software. I give FOSS credit for changing that. I think Lion was the first free OS upgrade. I credit FOSS for Microsoft giving a real copy of Visual Studio away for free. They've done it in the past, IIRC, but it was so hobbled, it was useless.
  - simonh 9y ago
    >Apple used to charge for all their software. I give FOSS credit for changing that. I give the credit to Microsoft's market share. The fact is ~99% of Mac switchers like me previously owned Windows boxes and ran mostly proprietary Windows software. The free applications you get with a Mac are a way to cushion the blow of giving those up and in some cases offer features you just can't get direct equivalents for on Windows. Offering Time Machine, Photos, iMovie, Pages, etc for free has nothing to do with the existence of Libre software and everything to do with marketing the platform to switchers from Windows. Clearly Libre software has had a huge effect on OSX, in fact the OS itself is based on free software and large swathes of its base components, tools and services are free software of one sort or another to this day. But none of those are name check features marketable to consumers other than just as MacOS. In the dev tool arena yes, free software has had a huge effect. Specifically I think making very capable versions of VS available free was a response to the existence of high quality free .NET development tools. MS want people to develop on Windows using their own tool chains and if roughly equivalent free tools exist and become popular, there's really no cost to offering an equivalent for free any more given VS has to exist anyway.

pbreit 9y ago

I get the sentiment but the request is awkward. IF OSS developers don't want to code for free then there's an easy, fool-proof solution. If you're going to try to argue Debian is worth $30 billion then I'll try to argue that it's generated $30 billion in free publicity.

AlisdairO 9y ago

I really liked this post. Obviously everyone has different motivations, but at its heart FOSS is an enormous collection of cooperative and/or charitable work, and the industry as a whole should be really, really proud of it. One other option for giving back - just send an email saying thanks, and that you love the project. I get such an email once or twice each week for my open source project, and it really brightens up my day. I'm lucky enough to not really need any donations, but everybody needs their spirits lifted from time to time. Knowing that your contribution has made a positive impact on someone else's life is a powerful thing, and from the user's perspective costs very little to do.

jancsika 9y ago

> It means that someone has just donated hundreds of hours of work for you. Free of charge! I think that misses something of the ethos of free software. It's not like somebody donating their valuable time to work in a soup kitchen. It's much more like somebody too lazy to spend thirty seconds doing a menial task like everyone else, so they instead spend three months creating a program that automates that thirty second task-- with the side effect that the rest of computer-using humanity gets out of doing that menial task, too. So in a way it does require a thank you. But in another way releasing it as free software is the least they could do given all the time they wasted just to get out of doing work.

detaro 9y ago
I wonder what "30s menial task" the writers of Apache, the Linux kernel, Blender, … tried to avoid?
jacalata 9y ago
That is a bizarre attitude. Why would anyone owe you for having wasted their own time? I mean, if you were arguing that they owed it to their employer to give them anything developed on company time, at least you'd make sense...
makecheck 9y ago
I for one have spent over 20 years continually expanding my application, as free GPL software, and I stopped counting the hours long ago. It is a gigantic amount of effort to design non-trivial software. Heck, just keeping everything stable and up-to-date is a project in itself (periodically having to adopt modern platform APIs, for instance). And usually I receive very little feedback. I can see downloads in the thousands and I doubt I've had more than a few E-mails a year. You might be misled by the tendency for people to hack random things together and dump them on GitHub, never to be touched again.

peterwwillis 9y ago

Free non-commercial and non-free commercial software are both wildly different products in practice. I installed some package recently that fucked with my X config, or my kernel modules, I don't know. But my hybrid graphics is now fucked and I have crazy artifacts all over my screen. The default install of this distro does not result in a working config, and I had to spend three days to figure out the insane set of software and configuration I needed to make it work last time. (Also, I added extra RAM, and now hibernating doesn't work) There is no commercial support for this laptop running this distro. My free software has no "revert to a last known good working system state" button, like some non-free software. Doing all the work to fix the graphics again may literally be more expensive than buying a new Windows laptop. Thanks, Free Software.

michaelmrose 9y ago
Windows support is provided by the manufacturer of the laptop. Linux support is provided by a finite supply of free labor. Instead of whining that not enough volunteers provided free labor to make whatever laptop you already invested in work better perhaps buy machines that are well supported or even better ones which come with Linux. This approach has worked well for me for 14 years.
- peterwwillis 9y ago
  Or I can buy a machine which is not only supported, but actually works, with basic features and quality testing baked in. But that's not the point. The point is that free software devs asking for a thank-you is like a dog owner asking for a thank-you when you don't step in their dog poop on the sidewalk. They weren't walking the dog for my benefit, and I'm not going to thank them for getting to walk around their crap.
  - benchaney 9y ago
    > Or I can buy a machine which is not only supported, but actually works lol
  - michaelmrose 9y ago

throw2016 9y ago

It's a huge generational gift, and people should now be concerned about how to sustain the free software movement. There is clearly an ongoing shift from a generation of 'starry eyed' ideologues to hired open source developers. Some may argue that's moving forward but it's diminished in many ways by losing its core essence and 'motivation' to exist. Companies can contribute by open source by supporting developers and projects without seeking influence by hiring or acquiring them. But then many don't even bother doing that. We need to find a way to develop a ecosystem that has sustenance from businesses and especially individuals and yet leaves the developers and projects 'independent'. Leaving it to sort itself out has already led to a sort of centralization and will eventually lead to loss of control and accountability.

RachelF 9y ago

The should be thankful, but they do not know. FOSS doesn't spend money on PR. Few know that free Linux lurks under Android, and OS/X an iOS have large parts of BSD in them.

jhasse 9y ago
> free Linux lurks under Android Not only that, but the GUI is also FOSS: https://source.android.com/ https://source.android.com/ > OS/X an iOS have large parts of BSD in them. I think this gives the wrong impression. The interesting parts of macOS and iOS are GUI and drivers, which are proprietary.
- contingencies 9y ago
  The interesting parts of macOS and iOS are GUI and drivers, which are proprietary. The best parts of OSX are brew, iTerm2, and FileMerge. (Edit in reply to below: Yes, that's my point. brew and iTerm2 are FOSS, FileMerge is part of XCode)
  - jhasse 9y ago
    Those aren't part of OSX though.

atomlib 9y ago

I wish it was that attractive to just switch from “expensive and evil proprietary software” as the author suggests. 1. The article claims that Microsoft Office 365 is $100 a year. In reality it's about $70, home license for up to 5 users is $80. 2. The article does not mention that every Office 365 user gets bunch of additional services. For example, a tebibyte of space in Microsoft OneDrive for each user, 60 Skype minutes per month, etc. 3. Each Office 365 user can install Office apps on 3 devices: his phone, tablet, and computer. Office apps are available on Android and iOS as part of the package. $70—$80 a year price tag includes not only Windows apps, they work perfectly fine on smartphones. Personally I make grocery lists in Excel, open them on my phone, fill my shopping cart with items, and track how much I'm going to pay or if I'm eligible for coupons. 4. I'm not aware of any decent OneNote alternatives. I researched it some time ago because I desired to self-host my notes. There are pretty much no comparable open source or free cross-platform apps which can work with notes in cloud or on a remote server from your mobile device. With OneNote all of my notes are available on my mobile devices. I strongly believe that OneNote is one of the best apps Microsoft came up with in recent years. If you look around, you can see that 1 TiB of cloud storage alone costs $100 (Google Drive) or $120 (Dropbox). Office 365 offers not only that but also quite possibly the best office suite on the market for $70 for 1 or $80 for 5 people. Note that so far I have not touched the question of quality of software at all — only the most basic functionality and packages. Microsoft Office is the most popular office software package for a reason. My exposure to open-source office packages is limited but here is at least one dealbreaking example. I tried recreating my spreadsheet for tracking caloric intake in LibreOffice Calc. It was extremely painful — among many other features Calc does not even support tables like Excel does. I use another software package mentioned in the article — Kaspersky. I'm going to assume the author is talking about the package I'm using — Kaspersky Internet Security — since the price is stated to be $40. Like with Office 365, KIS is not only an antivirus. It's also a firewall, parental control tool with a list of inappropriate websites, an adblocker, etc. It provides quite a lot of functionality, some of which, frankly speaking, should be in Windows itself. For example, KIS can autoupdate software. Like with Office 365, article does not mention that $40 buys you a license for up to 3 devices. KIS is also available for Android and macOS. But overall, an antivirus is not necessary in modern Windows system, so you may skip on these $40.

9y ago

shmerl 9y ago

As a user of Debian, Firefox, LibreOffice and etc. I agree :)

geff82 9y ago

I always like to think Free/Open source Software is the only known occurrnce where socialism works. You give 100% of what you have for free as a programmer, but in that very same moment you make everyone, including yourself, richer and more free. As software does not get consumed, everyone's assets rise.

tehlike 9y ago
+1. It is liberating to write software for free, and still feel the sense of accomplishment, community and wealth of knowledge.
hueving 9y ago
Socialism isn't the right term because nobody is forced to contribute to any particular project with resources or even use it. It's an economic activity with first order benefits and positive externalities.
- candiodari 9y ago
  Exactly this is capitalism at it's finest. Working on open source projects by itself has rewards : 1) you probably use it, so you use it yourself and your own situation gets better. 2) you get the efforts of others in addition to your own because of the open source nature (e.g. your code gets maintained, fixed, reviewed, ...) 3) There are plenty of companies (Google, FB, Red Hat, ...) that will give you a great job because of open source contributions you have made (and more general, reputational benefits) Enlightened self interest at it's finest.
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    >this is capitalism at it's finest If by capitalism, you mean: >an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. Then no, because FOSS is not private or for profit.
    - 9y ago

jasonkester 9y ago

I like to think of Free Software Developers as rational actors. So while they certainly deserve my gratitude, I disagree that we owe them any other compensation that they didn't specifically ask for. As the author notes, developers, doctors, lawyers, etc. know their value and charge accordingly. A developer who charges $0 for his work product must, therefore, be making up that value elsewhere. Most major Open Source projects certainly are. Chrome, Linux, MySQL, and lots of other big names all have corporate backing. Large companies paying people to build software to advance their agenda. Commoditize the Operating System to sell more servers. Control the Browser to keep the rug un-pulled from your web empire. There's really not a lot of pure charity to be found. True, you do find the occasional artiste working away for no money, living the officially sanctioned stereotype for what an open source developer is supposed to look like. But I tend to hope that he knows the score and is therefore looking out for his own interests. There are lots of good reasons to develop open source. But I don't consider "charity to big companies" to be one of them.

foldr 9y ago
> A developer who charges $0 for his work product must, therefore, be making up that value elsewhere._ No, even assuming that they're "rational", they must have expected to make up that value elsewhere. It's entirely possible to write something useful, in the expectation of some amount of praise and recognition, and get nothing but a lot of whining in return for it.
FatalBaboon 9y ago
Usually the difference between Free and Open Source also shows in who backs it. Free Sofware comes from NGOs, whereas Open Source is either corporations looking to make a convoluted buck or developers looking for recognition. In that regard, Free Software Developers definitely deserve my gratitude.
eeZah7Ux 9y ago
> you do find the occasional artiste working away for no money You cherry-picked corporate-backed projects. Statistics show that unpaid work (without side benefits like resume building) is far from "occasional".

denisehilton 9y ago

People often underestimate the effort and motivation behind open source software. They download it and never come back again. We should be thankful to those developers who are working just to facilitate us without any monetary benefits. We should always donate even if it's $1.

twii 9y ago

I hope crypto currencies will eventually enable people and companies to more easily donate with micro payments to free software developers without the need for the greedy/stealing paypal or other banks. I have dozens of free/open-source projects that make me 0 dollars while some of them are being used quite a bit. I currently cannot find spare time to improve on those projects because I need to work for a company to pay the bills.. I would love to have some income out of it, but I refuse to use paypal. First they take a proportional part of the sum as fee, second they take another proportional part by making up their own exchange rates for converting currencies. I refuse to support those companies and I truly hope crypto currencies will nullify them.

aerique 9y ago
Obligatory post asking for links to your projects. (But I truly am curious.)

firmgently 9y ago

I love that open source exists and am very grateful that people have given their time to make stuff that I get so much pleasure out of using for free. I feel like the article suggests that programmers are the only people who ever produce work on a voluntary basis though. "If you ask an engineer, a doctor, a professor, a teacher or a farmer to give you one of the products they do for free, probably they will just refuse. You won’t find a professor working full time in a university for free. You won’t find a civil engineer working on building houses for free. You won’t find a farmer giving you vegetables for free." If you ask Adobe to give you Photoshop or someone who makes a piece of $10 software to give it to you for free they will probably refuse. There's a difference between offering something voluntarily and offering something for sale then being asked to provide it for free. Engineers do sometimes work for free eg. on charity projects as do many other types of business. Even ad agencies I've worked at did a certain number of free projects for charity. A farmer does regularly give me vegetables for free. I've made software for free but I've also spent a lot of time making props, art and other things for free. A friend runs a small charity, she works long full-time hours unpaid and often has trouble getting her own bills paid. I've also known more than a few selfish coders... I'm certainly not arguing against the premise of being thankful for free software (thank you programmers - I really mean that, I've sent messages of gratitude to devs in the past and am reminding myself to do it more in future) but let's not start thinking that software developers are inherently better human beings than anyone else. Feels a bit myopic :)

Latty 9y ago
Maybe a more charitable reading would be that programmers are positioned to give away their work in a way that other professionals can't necessarily do.
tokai 9y ago
Doctors do provide their services for free. Doctors without Borders is a prime example of this. Professors give research, their primary product, away for free as well (Other actors do still profit from their work though. Movements such as Open Access tries to address this problem).

thingamarobert 9y ago

As much as the introduction and the first two sections motivate the post, I think the last "Don't Just Feel Pleasure, Show It" section is the one that contains the main take-home message in my opinion. If one has benefited by using FOSS, one must acknowledge that it cannot get better and magically sustain itself without support from those who use it or appreciate the principles underlying the movement. The level of transparency and freedom of choice that FOSS offers to users, the DIY ethic and a sense of community it encourages is indeed something to be grateful for, and deserves a generous (subjective) contribution! If one does not contribute directly by submitting bugs or developing FOSS itself, supporting organisations such as... * The Free Software Foundation (http://fsf.org http://fsf.org) * Software in the Public Interest (http://www.spi-inc.org http://www.spi-inc.org) * Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org https://www.eff.org) * Let's Encrypt (http://letsencrypt.org http://letsencrypt.org) ... I believe can go a long way. I'm sure there are more - when one feels grateful for the service the software has rendered them, one just needs to make the effort to find out who has written the software and whether there's a "Donate" button somewhere through which this can be expressed, however small the actual amount.

tajen 9y ago
- Is LE worth contributing for, given it's a joint Google initiative? - FOSS really need to send out proper invoices, donations are a corporate risk and I have to spend time to my accountant to justify the necessity of donations, every year.
- thingamarobert 9y ago
  I didn't realise that LE was a Google initiative. I know that it's supported by the Chrome project (and thus Google), but also by Mozilla, EFF and a lot of other supporters. Could you please point me to any article that discusses its Google affiliation? Thanks!

scandox 9y ago

Inspired by this I went over to donate money to Arch Linux, since I've just been getting nothing but joy from using it for the last 2 years. They use Click2Pledge which, frankly, is a UX which is a tad frightening, but I'm not a snob so I carry on. And then I find that of all the countries in the world they seem to have left Ireland out (Eire, Republic of Ireland, no, nothing). I mean they have the Isle of Man - but not Ireland. So, I cannot complete their payment form. So what all these guys need is a separate FOSS organisation exclusively dedicated to fund-raising.

Asooka 9y ago
> So what all these guys need is a separate FOSS organisation exclusively dedicated to fund-raising. I'm afraid that such an organisation will gradually be taken over by people looking to make money more than to help open-source software, and in the end we'll end up worse off than not having anything, because most donations to that organisation will get used for "internal expenses".
- marrs 9y ago
  I think this attitude is holding FOSS back. The most successful projects are the ones that are funded: Linux, Blender, and Ubuntu to name 3. On the other hand we have projects like Gimp, which steadily makes excellent progress and gets better with every release, but the rate of change is glacial because the team are all working on it in their spare time. That's not to say that the motivation of profit can't also be corrupting. Gnome 3.0 and the associated libs was a complete disaster IMO, and a lot of the stupidity came IMO from a fear that Windows Vista would leave the Linux desktop behind, but the net gain of monetary investment is clear to me. The silly thing is, I'd much rather pay for software that is free than software that is proprietary. I won't use Adobe Suite on principle, especially now that it is subscription only, but I'd pay a subscription to Gimp in a heartbeat. I may not be in the majority, but I'm sure there are enough of us that we would generate enough income to make the difference.
  - Asooka 9y ago
    It's fine when it's one project seeking funding for itself. When it's some umbrella org gathering funding for some nebulous "F/OSS community" that I start getting wary. I think it would be better if each large project could build within itself a framework for seeking funding, rather than one group seeking joint funding for everyone. That concentrates too much political power in one place leading to a higher chance of a takeover by unwanted people.

amelius 9y ago

It would be nice if big repository services such as Github offered a simple way to donate.

Windson 9y ago

This is why I built www.thankyouopensource.com At least you can write a thank you note to the maintainer.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

I love the list of ways you can help at the bottom - each of these is tremendously valuable but most people think "well, I can't help if I can't code". Another thing that's super helpful: volunteer to triage tickets on the bug tracker.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

azuajef 9y ago

Also on being thankful for Free (Scientific) Software Developers: https://stactivist.com/2016/12/10/code-of-gratitude/ https://stactivist.com/2016/12/10/code-of-gratitude/