3 ms·

What do you do for a living?

by GHFigs 16y ago

michaelchisari 16y ago
I write software and give it away for free, how about you? :P Also, there's a whole culture of free fiction on the internet. It's pretty huge, although most of it is crap, there are some real nuggets of goodness out there. Of course, most of the stuff people charge for is crap, too.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  > I write software and give it away for free, how about you? For a living, eh? So do we presume you feed yourself with soup kitchens, and live in a cardboard box on the street?
  - michaelchisari 16y ago
    Open source economic models have been pretty well established, no? My income is through payment for services, not software. My software may be free, but my labor is not. The same is being applied to music, artists like Unwoman regularly write songs and albums on spec and through crowd-sourcing. A friend of mine is a huge fan, and donated money for her to write a song using a Voltairine DeClayre poem. http://www.unwoman.com http://www.unwoman.com
    - danudey 16y ago
      So what you do for a living is provide (consulting? programming?) services related to open-source software, not write free software.
      - michaelchisari 16y ago
        I write free software for a living, because the result of my programming services are GPL licensed.
    - GHFigs 16y ago
      My software may be free, but my labor is not. In other words, your previous answer was a cutesy lie. You do not, in fact, earn a living giving away software. You earn a living getting people to pay you to to write software. That you don't sell the software is irrelevant: you're still creating the software because there is money in doing so. What would the effect be on your creative output if nobody would pay you for it? How much software would you be writing if you had to crank widgets for a living instead? More? Less?
      - michaelchisari 16y ago
        I stand by my original statement, and I think the tone of your response doesn't particularly invite debate on that point, but I do want to address this: How much software would you be writing if you had to crank widgets for a living instead? I've done pizza delivery, tech support, coffee barista, construction, and a bunch of jobs I barely even remember. I was writing software while I was doing all of it. My side project is Appleseed, which I've written in my spare time, which is tens of thousands of lines of code, and six years in the making, without any particular economic incentive. I've always worked whatever job I could to pay the bills, but no amount of poverty has ever stopped me from coding, at one point I had to sell my only computer to make rent, and managed to find someone who could lend me an older laptop so I could continue coding. And everything I've written is open source. Writers, like programmers, and artists, and other creative people, create because they love to do it, because they'd rather do it for nothing, than not do it at all.
        krschultz 16y ago
        Dont' be ridiculous. For 3 of the last 4 years my sole income was from doing free software. This is 100% spot on: "In other words, your previous answer was a cutesy lie. You do not, in fact, earn a living giving away software. You earn a living getting people to pay you to to write software." How can an author do that? There is absolutely no equivalence between the economic model around free software and the economic model around music and books. Free software makes money by giving it away to a lot of people, and getting money from the few people that need extra. Some people will pay for you to add a feature or provide support or make a change or put it under a different license or gaurentee uptime. Maybe the project matters so much to a person or group that they will pay someone to work full time on it. This is what makes FOSS go economically. A book is a book for everyone. Once you have the book, what else could you need? And to say that a side project and full time are the same thing is also ridiculous. I did a lot more coding on FOSS when I didn't have a 40-50 hour a week comittment to my FT job going on.

What do you do for a living?

by GHFigs 16y ago

What do you do for a living?

I write software and give it away for free, how about you? :P Also, there's a whole culture of free fiction on the internet. It's pretty huge, although most of it is crap, there are some real nuggets of goodness out there. Of course, most of the stuff people charge for is crap, too.

sliverstorm 16y ago
> I write software and give it away for free, how about you? For a living, eh? So do we presume you feed yourself with soup kitchens, and live in a cardboard box on the street?
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  Open source economic models have been pretty well established, no? My income is through payment for services, not software. My software may be free, but my labor is not. The same is being applied to music, artists like Unwoman regularly write songs and albums on spec and through crowd-sourcing. A friend of mine is a huge fan, and donated money for her to write a song using a Voltairine DeClayre poem. http://www.unwoman.com http://www.unwoman.com
  - danudey 16y ago
    So what you do for a living is provide (consulting? programming?) services related to open-source software, not write free software.
    - michaelchisari 16y ago
      I write free software for a living, because the result of my programming services are GPL licensed.
  - GHFigs 16y ago
    My software may be free, but my labor is not. In other words, your previous answer was a cutesy lie. You do not, in fact, earn a living giving away software. You earn a living getting people to pay you to to write software. That you don't sell the software is irrelevant: you're still creating the software because there is money in doing so. What would the effect be on your creative output if nobody would pay you for it? How much software would you be writing if you had to crank widgets for a living instead? More? Less?
    - michaelchisari 16y ago
      I stand by my original statement, and I think the tone of your response doesn't particularly invite debate on that point, but I do want to address this: How much software would you be writing if you had to crank widgets for a living instead? I've done pizza delivery, tech support, coffee barista, construction, and a bunch of jobs I barely even remember. I was writing software while I was doing all of it. My side project is Appleseed, which I've written in my spare time, which is tens of thousands of lines of code, and six years in the making, without any particular economic incentive. I've always worked whatever job I could to pay the bills, but no amount of poverty has ever stopped me from coding, at one point I had to sell my only computer to make rent, and managed to find someone who could lend me an older laptop so I could continue coding. And everything I've written is open source. Writers, like programmers, and artists, and other creative people, create because they love to do it, because they'd rather do it for nothing, than not do it at all.
      - krschultz 16y ago
        Dont' be ridiculous. For 3 of the last 4 years my sole income was from doing free software. This is 100% spot on: "In other words, your previous answer was a cutesy lie. You do not, in fact, earn a living giving away software. You earn a living getting people to pay you to to write software." How can an author do that? There is absolutely no equivalence between the economic model around free software and the economic model around music and books. Free software makes money by giving it away to a lot of people, and getting money from the few people that need extra. Some people will pay for you to add a feature or provide support or make a change or put it under a different license or gaurentee uptime. Maybe the project matters so much to a person or group that they will pay someone to work full time on it. This is what makes FOSS go economically. A book is a book for everyone. Once you have the book, what else could you need? And to say that a side project and full time are the same thing is also ridiculous. I did a lot more coding on FOSS when I didn't have a 40-50 hour a week comittment to my FT job going on.