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Quasi-ethical business idea: Sell open source software 'ghostwriting' services It makes an engineer look good to have solid commits to an open source project
by cwkoss 8y ago
Quasi-ethical business idea:
Sell open source software 'ghostwriting' services
It makes an engineer look good to have solid commits to an open source project on their github profile. The people who actually make the bulk of these commits put in tons of (at times thankless) free labor.
Create a grey market for open source software contributors to sell their diffs (that they've already written and actually entail useful contributions to their project) to some rich lazy wannabe engineers to submit to the repo, and get credit for. Bulk discounts for corporations!
It would get OSS devs more money, which is good, but is lying which is bad.
- avip 8y agoWelcome to fiverr.
- navaati 8y agoI don't know about the rest of the world but in France you cannot sell (or give, or transfer in any way) attribution rights, only copyright.
- jlokier 8y agoI thought this didn't apply to computer programs, but I looked it up and you're right... In France, authors' moral rights are quite strong. In the UK, the moral right of attribution exist, but there's a specific exception for computer programs, so that programmers don't have a right to be identified as the author, or as far as I can tell any other moral rights.
- kjullien 8y agoThis is already a reality and has been for long before "open-source" was even a thing. Can't remember exact details but recently (a couple years ago), a very high placed tech exec at some big corp was discovered to have been employing people to write his code for over 10 years.
- oever 8y agoA slightly more ethical alternative is to add sponsor messages to your commits.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kurtisc 8y agoA lot of the 'development' is discussion over emails, cue a copied-homework moment when the maintainer asks why you chose to do it this way.
- klwilson 8y agoYou can already get credit in open source projects without doing anything. Be on the mailing lists, present at conferences, claim ideas that weren't yours, treat actual code as a "solved problem".
- ghaff 8y agoYou don't need to be a developer to meaningfully contribute to open source projects.