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It’s unfortunate that you forgot to mention that these indie oss developers are highly sought after for independent contract work or direct hire positions. Open

It’s unfortunate that you forgot to mention that these indie oss developers are highly sought after for independent contract work or direct hire positions. Open Source software was never meant to pay the bills of open source developers, it was meant to open source code to the public and allow free use. To somehow read this narrative that indie developers are losing because others profit from their work is facile and not helpful.

mythz 8y ago
Right, so everyone should be happy working for the "exposure" so they can be snapped up by Cloud Companies using the wealth created from hosting their OSS efforts who will then be put to work on strengthening their cloud monopolies.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- tzakrajs 8y ago
  I never said they should work for exposure or that they should be happy with this system. Do the corporations creating products with OSS have a more positive impact on the world than when they purchased their software? If so, isn’t that beneficial to developers? Isn’t it empowering as a developer to know that your software powers businesses and markets? Why do developers contribute code in the first place? If Indie oss developers provide say 49% of the contributions to open source project ought they expect the same representation or recompense as a project with 90% indie developer contributions? More philosophically: After you create something, how long do you get to own or control that thing and how it is used? How long do indie oss developers think they should be able to dictate the future of the project? Is corporate investment in open source actually welcome?
  - mythz 8y ago
    The topic and answers are on why it's unfortunate that Cloud Monopolies are reaping most of the wealth from OSS and why they're happy to keep the status quo which grows their monopolies bigger each passing year. Never that there were no benefits - that was addressed in my initial statement. OSS does bring benefits to everyone using it where its made some products and services financially possible. But it still stands that the majority of the wealth being created from OSS is going towards building Cloud Monopolies and a fraction of that wealth being used to finance their own proprietary and OSS efforts that will outspend and out compete Indie OSS efforts - the trend of which will go towards most people switching to use commercially-backed Cloud OSS software where it exists.
- wolco 8y ago
  The author could sell a script to modify the defaults for different situations. The popularity of the oss gives the developer a build-in platform.
bsder 8y ago
> It’s unfortunate that you forgot to mention that these indie oss developers are highly sought after for independent contract work or direct hire positions. At a miniscule fraction of the value they created. These people deserve to have so much money that they can simply work on open source for free, forever. I haven't seen anybody in that position yet. This isn't even like a musician wherein some record company fronted capital, the companies benefiting from open source didn't front anything for these developers.
- cthalupa 8y ago
  >At a miniscule fraction of the value they created. Two things here: 1) In a sane business climate, you will never extract more than some fraction of the value you create. If you receive as much value as you create, then there is no purpose in anyone using whatever you've built, because they gain nothing from it. 2) If your goal is extracting as much of the created value for yourself as possible, open source software licenses are not designed in such a manner as to do so. If you want to get the same benefits of proprietary software, write proprietary software. There's nothing wrong with doing so.
pcwalton 8y ago
> It’s unfortunate that you forgot to mention that these indie oss developers are highly sought after for independent contract work or direct hire positions. For the most part, any developer who is good enough to create e.g. Redis and be hired could easily have skipped the "create Redis" part and just get hired in the first place, for far greater return on investment. That's not even getting into the fact that leading a popular open source project is no guarantee of even being hired by those big companies, due to their interview processes. For example, Google rejected the creator of Homebrew, despite getting a lot of value out of the software, because of problems with whiteboard coding.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > For example, Google rejected the creator of Homebrew, despite getting a lot of value out of the software, because of problems with whiteboard coding. Of course, it's important to note that that is his interpretation of the process. He did do a short stint at Apple at some point, too, so it's not like he didn't end up getting hired anyways.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    Regardless of whether it was fair or unfair to not hire him, the point remains that OSS doesn't guarantee getting hired.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      Sure, point taken.

mythz 8y ago

Right, so everyone should be happy working for the "exposure" so they can be snapped up by Cloud Companies using the wealth created from hosting their OSS efforts who will then be put to work on strengthening their cloud monopolies.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tzakrajs 8y ago
I never said they should work for exposure or that they should be happy with this system. Do the corporations creating products with OSS have a more positive impact on the world than when they purchased their software? If so, isn’t that beneficial to developers? Isn’t it empowering as a developer to know that your software powers businesses and markets? Why do developers contribute code in the first place? If Indie oss developers provide say 49% of the contributions to open source project ought they expect the same representation or recompense as a project with 90% indie developer contributions? More philosophically: After you create something, how long do you get to own or control that thing and how it is used? How long do indie oss developers think they should be able to dictate the future of the project? Is corporate investment in open source actually welcome?
- mythz 8y ago
  The topic and answers are on why it's unfortunate that Cloud Monopolies are reaping most of the wealth from OSS and why they're happy to keep the status quo which grows their monopolies bigger each passing year. Never that there were no benefits - that was addressed in my initial statement. OSS does bring benefits to everyone using it where its made some products and services financially possible. But it still stands that the majority of the wealth being created from OSS is going towards building Cloud Monopolies and a fraction of that wealth being used to finance their own proprietary and OSS efforts that will outspend and out compete Indie OSS efforts - the trend of which will go towards most people switching to use commercially-backed Cloud OSS software where it exists.
wolco 8y ago
The author could sell a script to modify the defaults for different situations. The popularity of the oss gives the developer a build-in platform.

bsder 8y ago

> It’s unfortunate that you forgot to mention that these indie oss developers are highly sought after for independent contract work or direct hire positions. At a miniscule fraction of the value they created. These people deserve to have so much money that they can simply work on open source for free, forever. I haven't seen anybody in that position yet. This isn't even like a musician wherein some record company fronted capital, the companies benefiting from open source didn't front anything for these developers.

cthalupa 8y ago
>At a miniscule fraction of the value they created. Two things here: 1) In a sane business climate, you will never extract more than some fraction of the value you create. If you receive as much value as you create, then there is no purpose in anyone using whatever you've built, because they gain nothing from it. 2) If your goal is extracting as much of the created value for yourself as possible, open source software licenses are not designed in such a manner as to do so. If you want to get the same benefits of proprietary software, write proprietary software. There's nothing wrong with doing so.

pcwalton 8y ago

> It’s unfortunate that you forgot to mention that these indie oss developers are highly sought after for independent contract work or direct hire positions. For the most part, any developer who is good enough to create e.g. Redis and be hired could easily have skipped the "create Redis" part and just get hired in the first place, for far greater return on investment. That's not even getting into the fact that leading a popular open source project is no guarantee of even being hired by those big companies, due to their interview processes. For example, Google rejected the creator of Homebrew, despite getting a lot of value out of the software, because of problems with whiteboard coding.

saagarjha 8y ago
> For example, Google rejected the creator of Homebrew, despite getting a lot of value out of the software, because of problems with whiteboard coding. Of course, it's important to note that that is his interpretation of the process. He did do a short stint at Apple at some point, too, so it's not like he didn't end up getting hired anyways.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  Regardless of whether it was fair or unfair to not hire him, the point remains that OSS doesn't guarantee getting hired.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    Sure, point taken.