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Software Below the Poverty Line

• SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  "The results I found were shocking: there were two clearly sustainable open source projects, but the majority (more than 80%) of projects that we usually consider sustainable are actually receiving income below industry standards or even below the poverty threshold." I fear that open source is actually just the tech industry's group of underfunded-but-vital-infrastructures that are constantly either forced to work for poverty pay or go corporate/private(and externalize the costs to society as a whole). Similar to single-payer healthcare systems, domestic violence sheltering, child protection, pet shelters, and education systems. Specifically that I fear once these entities try demand to be paid what they're worth, there will be criticism and controversy.
  • lostmymind66 7y ago
    "I fear that open source is actually just the tech industry's group of underfunded-but-vital-infrastructures that are constantly either forced to work for poverty pay or go corporate/private(and externalize the costs to society" The whole idea of open source is to share your code with the world without expecting payment. These developers can just as easily release a commercial app with appropriate licensing. "Specifically that I fear once these entities try demand to be paid what they're worth, there will be criticism and controversy." Once someone gets used to free, they will be shocked when you decode to give them a bill one day. In some sense, the open source community has devalued their own worth by giving software away for free for decades. It's a bit like the copyright infringement discussions I see so often on HN: Most of these companies would have never paid for open source in the first place, so we shouldn't really consider it a loss of money/revenue.
• jrochkind1 7y ago
  I think historically (like over the last 30 years) most successful open source projects have been maintained by people who have jobs for companies which do other things as their primary function and revenue producing business (whether non-software 'enterprise' or other software products; or academic/non-profit), who work on the open source on company time. While I think there may be structural reasons that this is harder to do now (including increased complexity of software, and companies more ruthlessly chasing 'efficiency'), it seems important to at least include in the discussion. For instance, OP says: > Only accept jobs at companies that donate a significant portion of their profit (at least 0,5%) to open source, or companies which don’t fundamentally depend on open source for their products OK, but how about "or companies that have employees, ideally including you, spending a significant amount of on-the-clock time originating, maintaining, or contributing to open source." Is this not mentioned because it somehow seems even less 'realistic' than companies donating 0.5% of profit to open source?
  • staltz 7y ago
    Author here. Actually I did mention in the article that company time was a good option: > This doesn’t mean the people working on those projects are poor, because in several cases the maintainers have jobs at companies that allow open source contributions. What it does mean, however, is that unless companies take an active role in supporting open source with significant funding, what’s left is a situation where most open source maintainers are severely underfunded.
    • jrochkind1 7y ago
      I don't think that logic holds. It may be that most open source maintainers are severely underfunded, but your numbers alone don't show that, because they don't account for how much support there is from on-payroll work. See the current top comment from Electron maintainers for instance. "supporting open source with significant funding" (in the specific sense of transfering funds to an outside entity responsible for development) is not the only way of "supporting open source" financially. Paying your employees to develop, maintain, and contribute to it is another. I suspect it is the primary way historically for historically succesful open source (although research in this area would be helpful). It might (or might not) be the primary way even now; we don't know from these figures alone. Employees paid to do on-the-clock work might (or might not) be sufficient to sustainably provide resources/"funding" to open source. Or there might be reasons it's unlikely to work, or unlikely to work as well going forward as it is historically. I'm not sure straight-out donations to entities developing open source have ever historically been responsible for successful open source resourcing -- and yet we've built software empires on open source. There may be reasons this is not (or no longer) sustainable, but that doesn't necessarily mean this kind of fundraising will ever be more successful than it has been historically (not very, I think). Understanding what has worked in the past and making a case for why it no longer will would be one way to make the case. Just talking about current levels of direct donation without talking about how open source has actually been resourced/funded historically, to me is not a very persuasive case. (Then there's talking about the idea of monetizing open source with 'open core' or 'PaaS' or some combination, which I think some people think is what will save open source, rather than direct contribution. I have my doubts, but it's another possibility). I think these are all important questions.
• gregdoesit 7y ago
  I find the author’s view puzzling. For open source projects that have the goal to become profitable and have full-time staff working on them, there are plenty that make this happen. For example, Ghost (the blog engine) via providing sourcing. RedHat similarly provided services and consulting on top of their open source contributions. Databricks, founded by the creators of Spark, is a unicorn. The author is looking at the wrong type of metric. Expecting that every open source project on Github will get donations to pay each contributor a full-time salary is nonsense. Also, on top of the value add services profitability route, the article does not take into account how many companies have full time employees contribute to open source as part of their working hours - a very tangible open source investment. While the author asks for companies to donate 0.5% or more of their profits to open source projects, I work at an unprofitable unicorn (Uber) which is a heavy contributor to open source itself and my team contributes to open source as part of our work: both to other projects, as well as open sourcing tools and improvements we built. The same can be said for some of the most popular open source projects. Angular? Originally by Google engineers, on Google company time. Tensorflow? Also Google. React? Built by Facebook. Atom? By Github. And the list continues with many-many projects.
  • cryptica 7y ago
    >> The same can be said for some of the most popular open source projects. Angular? Originally by Google engineers, on Google company time. Tensorflow? Also Google. React? Built by Facebook. Atom? By Github. And the list continues with many-many projects. It's not a coincidence that most popular open source projects come from big corporations. Their popularity has more to do with capital and social networks than actual merit. Also, I'm highly skeptical of open source projects which come out of corporations; their primary goal is not to help people, it's to gain mind-share and control. There is not an ounce of altruism in corporations.
    • abdullahkhalids 7y ago
      To follow up on your point, this is the real reason FAANG write open source software https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement
• steve1977 7y ago
  This only seems to take donations into account, which obviously doesn't make sense.
  • nonwifehaver3 7y ago
    Agreed. The thrust of this article is correct, in that people should support open source projects as much as they can (I usually donate around $100 a month, which is really not that much). But, other sources of income are being missed here. Sometimes companies will pay maintainers as consultants for integration or new features. Sometimes people have companies that provide their project as a service as well.
• module0000 7y ago
  I've worked for 2(out of many) employers that allowed me to spend significant time committing our improvements and modifications upstream to open source projects we used in-house. This was very enjoyable, and I wish more employers behaved that way. One of the enjoyable aspects of this practice, was during the selection process for "what software do we want to use?". I didn't have to select only open source projects which were "almost a perfect fit, with XYZ problems we can live with". Instead, I got to select software with (to me) better criteria: * what are the upstream devs like to work with? * what is the future of this project? * is this project something we would be proud of our association with? * working on this project, will myself or my team be exposed to new skills and technology?
  • nerdponx 7y ago
    I think part of the problem is that a lot of big, "old school" companies seem to think their code is special. Every shell script, every ugly library, every half-functional API is some precious gem of intellectual property to be hoarded and protected at all costs. We, of course, know that's completely ridiculous. But try convincing your manager that.
    • M2Ys4U 7y ago
      there's the opposite problem as well: "We don't want our brand to be damaged by showing our bad code to the public"
    • phkahler 7y ago
      So true. And these crappy wheels keep getting reinvented over and over at different companies. Sharing the effort and making a better wheel for everyone sounds like a good idea so long as it's not your core business. There must be a downside right?
    • p0nce 7y ago
      Hits close to home. Many closed sources libraries are nowhere near the level of _documentation_, quality, and collaboration that is routinely expected of open-source software.
    • 7y ago
• xwdv 7y ago
  Having met with many open source contributors and maintainers, the one pattern I see from those who do it consistently is that they are usually pretty wealthy or gainfully employed. It's almost like a status symbol to be able to have many open source projects that you can afford to work on for free. And a lot of open source projects are really just part of commercialized software that has been extracted and made available to the public for free, so there has already been some revenue from it. It is pointless to feel outraged about open source projects being "below the poverty line". Virtually no one is actually being forced into poverty by working on open source projects, and if they are, they're doing it wrong. Open source ventures are primarily a rich man's (or woman's) game.
  • kazinator 7y ago
    Also, some open source projects are of the category "gosh darn it, this just wants to exist, regardless of whether large numbers of people are willing to use it and popularize it". The developer is gainfully employed with another source of income, but believes in that project.
  • kaikai 7y ago
    Sounds like survivorship bias. The people who are able to start and keep working on open source projects have other income sources, because the current donation model affords them below-poverty wages. I would like open source to be a viable model for projects run without maintainers needing to be independently wealthy or full time employed elsewhere. This article is pouting out that we’re a long ways off.
    • xwdv 7y ago
      > I would like open source to be a viable model for projects run without maintainers needing to be independently wealthy or full time employed elsewhere. This article is pouting out that we’re a long ways off. Why? There's no guarantee that's going to result in better software anyway. Sounds like a desire to just be able to work on absolutely whatever you want and get paid (very well) for it.
    • shados 7y ago
• kazinator 7y ago
  Free software projects not earning significant donations is exactly the same phenomenon, or an aspect of it, as selling software (regardless of license) being difficult. Most software doesn't sell. Not only is it hard to sell software, it's hard to get people to just download it and try it for free. Most software will not find any users, let alone paying or donating users.
• xvilka 7y ago
  It is a good thing Electron below that line. Hopefully, it will stop developers from creating software with it, wasting our memory and performance, effectively making planet warming faster.
• vortico 7y ago
  I tell every entrepreneur that asks me for advice that the donation model for any business gets no more than 1-10% (depending on the industry) compared to a business model of selling commercial software. This is the difference between poverty and 6-figures. The open-source model is good for launching your own career, but you should avoid trying to make the career the open-source project itself. The open-core model is a good alternative if you wish to be around open-source software. Or make your project de-facto standard and charge for consulting. Or, you can make an entirely commercial project that uses and contributes to open-source projects. That way, you are surrounded by open-source and can help them financially to add features you need.
  • throwayEngineer 7y ago
    I could convert my website to a paid model, but as you mentioned I use it for growing my career. But really, I just wanted to help people. Here is my great question, can I help more, if I charge money?
    • giancarlostoro 7y ago
      You would be able to afford helping more if you charge money, now you're your boss, you charge based on what you believe and know you need to survive and based on periods where you aren't consulting.
    • luxstyle 7y ago
      Absolutely. Imagine how much more you can help if you had a team helping to build and grow your website. If you want, don't take a dime for yourself and instead invest it all into growing your business and helping others. If you're delivering something that gives real value to someone's life, and it's priced correctly, they will pay for it.
      • anigbrowl 7y ago
        But what about the people you won't be helping any more if it becomes commercial? That could vary wildly depending on the context.
• ktpsns 7y ago
  Vue.js is outstanding here. I spent the last weeks getting my hands dirty with Vue.js and I am quite disillusioned about the state of the ecosystem and the performance when it comes to large datasets --- compared with its competitors, notably React.js. Which is not even part of this small sample set of projects analyzed by Staltz. I wonder how it compares.
  • awkward 7y ago
    React is funded and staffed with full time engineers from Facebook. React is a standout when handling large datasets, but tends to mildly underperform on small ones. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
• base698 7y ago
  "The results I found were shocking: there were two clearly sustainable open source projects, but the majority (more than 80%) of projects that we usually consider sustainable are actually receiving income below industry standards or even below the poverty threshold." This is a general principal of the world. Almost everything, including customers, getting dates, and wealth follow the same pattern: Pareto. There's even a Bible verse: Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. Matthew 13:12 May be more interesting to compare the jobs allowing open source contributions at the top of the scale. Or put another way: comments closer to the top attract more karma than those at the bottom.
  • gagege 7y ago
    That Bible verse is Jesus talking about people having no knowledge of the kingdom of heaven. What little knowledge they have will be taken away, and that's why he's speaking in parables, and not saying things more plainly. I don't see how that applies to this article.
    • base698 7y ago
      That's the thing about stories and literature, they can be different things to different people. A story about loss can be a love song to one person, a dead loved one or a missed opportunity to another...
    • karlmcguire 7y ago
      You're right about that specific verse but that line is repeated throughout the Bible - some within the specific context of compounding money (Luke 19:26). It applies to the article because the Pareto principle (also known as the Matthew effect [1]) explains why there's so many open source projects with low revenue and only a few with six figure revenues. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
  • sdegutis 7y ago
    In other words, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer." Although, technically that Bible verse has significantly richer and more useful meaning than your interpretation, I don't think it doesn't mean what you said either. St. Augustine affirms the common opinion of the Church Fathers that each Bible verse may have multiple true meanings as long as they aren't incompatible with one another. But I've seen this principle very truly at work: you have to spend money to make money. Those who have very little money to start with, usually can make very little money in return. Especially in software, if you don't spend a decent amount of money on advertising, you will almost never get anywhere. Fortunately for those of us who don't have that money to make more money with, there are other things in life than money, and Jesus also says "blessed are the poor, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."
• JackFr 7y ago
  I find the author's attitude maddening. People writing open-source software are not being exploited. People writing open-source software have alternatives. They can simply stop writing open-source software. It does a disservice to the millions of people on the planet who do not have alternatives, and who are truly being exploited.
  • ozim 7y ago
    Author also comes from perspective that somehow "project" in itself is good and should be sustained. Open source projects are not endengered species to keep it alive. If no one is interested in paying for project, then people don't need it. Simple as that, when project breaks like open ssh companies will chip in...
    • ghaff 7y ago
      >when project breaks like open ssh companies will chip in... Although, in that case, they really didn't. At least not enough. That's why you ended up with a Core Infrastructure Initiative. (Which, to be sure, is indirectly companies chipping in because that's mostly how the Linux Foundation gets funded but it's not individual companies bankrolling critical infrastructure software.)
      • eeZah7Ux 7y ago
        Good example. People expect FLOSS developers to contribute work on their weekends and never complain about not being paid. Meanwhile Linux runs the power plants that keep the lights on.
        • ozim 7y ago
          That is the problem that devs are nice people who are doing it for free on weekends. This should end, and pointy haired bosses should deal with fallout at best from their own pockets.
    • eeZah7Ux 7y ago
• caniszczyk 7y ago
  I wrote about this in the past how all these open source donation systems like OpenCollective and GitHub Sponsors are exploiting maintainers via gig economy dynamics: https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-source-gig-economy-and-sustainability-tip-jar/ https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-... The solution is simple, having companies hire open source maintainers to work on their projects in some fashion or we need to make it easier for maintainers to start companies and build an actual business.
  • RussianCow 7y ago
    That doesn't sound simple at all. How do you incentivize companies to do this? And what does it mean to "make it easier for maintainers to start companies"?
    • caniszczyk 7y ago
      For companies, I've been encouraging companies for the last several years to start formal open source programs to build a proper open source strategy: https://todogroup.org/guides/create-program/ https://todogroup.org/guides/create-program/ From that, comes hiring maintainers and contributing to open source projects, fiscally or hiring maintainers. Second, there are plenty of accelerators like YC itself that can help maintainers start a company around their project.
• vijaybritto 7y ago
  Will a licensing model that mandates companies who have a certain amount of revenue to pay up for using the OSS, work? Are there any licenses like this?
  • kemitchell 7y ago
    Polyform Project (https://polyformproject.org/ https://polyformproject.org/) just announced draft terms for a suite of standardized, noncommercial, source-available licenses, like Creative Commons' CC-BY-NC-*, but for software. The draft includes a "Small Business" exception that gives companies below certain headcount and revenue figures a free pass.
    • vijaybritto 7y ago
      This is nice!
  • eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    Unfortunately a license cannot do that without turning into closed source. AGPL is still the best option to mitigate the SaaS issue without fully solving it. We need new models that don't depend on limiting access to software (or books, music...)
  • davemp 7y ago
    Unity3D has this sort of license, though it's not OSS last time I checked.
• afpx 7y ago
  Naive question - why isn’t more open source dual licensed commercial and GPL? If it’s licensed commercial, you would still be give it away for free.
  • tzs 7y ago
    That works fine if you are the only significant contributor to the project. If you start getting significant contributions from people using the GPL version, dealing with the dual license can become problematic. Best for you is if you can convince the contributors to assign they copyright to you. That lets you then fold their contributions, and continue dual licensing the result. You'll first have to make sure that the contributors own the copyright on all the code they contribute, because they cannot assign copyright of something that isn't theirs. Remember, your contributors are working on the GPL version, so they might copy/paste useful things from other GPL projects into their contribution without thinking about it, because that is fine under GPL. They might not stop and think, "wait a minute...this is going to a dual licensed project that requires copyright assignment, so I can't bring in outside GPL code!". That's in the best case, where your contributors are OK with copyright assignment. You might also start getting contributions from people who are not willing to have their code go into the commercial version. There are two ways you can deal with that. 1. Maintain two branches in your project, one for a GPL-only version, and one for a dual license version. If you want some feature in the dual license version that is in the GPL-only version via a contributor who won't assign copyright, you'll have to implement it yourself. You can use the implementation on the GPL-only side for guidance for things such as algorithm selection, as long as you are careful to not do anything that would infringe the copyright on the GPL code. 2. Reject those contributions. The risk with that approach is that if those contributions are useful enough, your GPL version might get forked, and people who don't need the commercial version will choose the forked GPL version over yours, because it has better features. Probably best to go with the branch approach. That way you are more likely to remain the primary source (no pun intended) for the GPL version. There will be some contributors who are OK with dual licensing, and with the branch approach you get their contributions and can ask make your pitch to them for dual licensing. If some fork becomes the primary source, you are out of the loop, and will likely never find out what contributions to that are from people who would dual license to you.
• ricardobeat 7y ago
  Unpopular opinion: this is absolute non-sense. If you want to create a commercial organization to maintain a project, by all means go ahead, but the idea that all open-source work should be paid for in equal terms is not healthy in the long term. The community aspect used to be the most enjoyable part of open-source, and I gladly donated (a lot of) my own time. It’s about people coming together around a common need - if there’s enough demand more people will join in. I loathe the current state of marketing/funding/clout based OSS where projects become institutions of their own and break the natural attention balance.
  • devoply 7y ago
    > is not healthy in the long term. Healthy for whom? Creator of Vue.js pulls in like 240k. Every open source contributor of any sort of popular project should be getting at least that much through various deals or pull the plug. Hold your software hostage, get freeloaders to pay a pittance for it. Ridiculous that so many billion dollar companies use these things and feel no obligation to sustain their development and have a mechanism set in place to do that automatically or as a part of due course of using that software.
    • jasonlotito 7y ago
      Projects can do this already. It's the reason we have licenses. The problem are people want to license under MIT, but want more than just recognition. If you want to get paid, use the GPL, and offer dual licensing. It's that easy. Oh, it's not "that" easy? So you are really just using MIT as a marketing tool until you get large enough where you can pull the rug out from under everyone and start demanding things? The problem isn't open source. The problem is the expectation that the MIT license means more than it does. You got what you asked for.
    • stcredzero 7y ago
      ...should be getting at least that much through various deals or pull the plug. Hold your software hostage, get freeloaders to pay a pittance for it. Funny, but this was almost exactly the unspoken (and actual) ethos of the Sales department dominated old school software company founded in the late 60's I used to work for.
• carapace 7y ago
  Remember, the Free Software movement all started when RMS wanted to fix his printer. Xerox told him to go screw, so he did. Should anyone expect to make a living writing software? First: we don't need endless piles of software. Most of the software we actually need could be written by less than 0.001 of the programmers and "software engineers" working today. (And I could put more zeros in there and still be right-ish.) Second: if you're not one of the truly good programmers[1] you should not be writing software for others to use. It is not needed (see point #1), and it's irresponsible. Most of us should be pulling off-the-shelf components and configuring and connecting them. Excel proves that most people's real software needs are mostly handled by Excel. We don't write all this software because we need it, we write it because we like to write software. (And because we have tricked normal people into thinking they need us and should pay us tons of money. It's a huge scam.) It's understood that the really good folks pretty much write their own tickets (meaning they can generally pick and choose what they work on, whether they are in industry or academia or just private individuals. I.e. Jim Simons does what he likes.) So my question is: Should mediocre programmers get paid to produce inadequate software? At all? Regardless of the FLOSSiness of their licenses? [1] People like DJB, Fabrice Bellard, Mark Miller, RMS, and their ilk. They're like professional athletes compared to you and I.
  • nickpsecurity 7y ago
    That's going too far. The public and businesses have benefited a ton from software written by non-experts and low-quality software. I think Excel spreadsheets still drive more value creation than most professional apps. The people you refer to don't usually write it. They mostly go to best paying companies in tech or finance. You could say our baseline is dependent on people with less skill stepping up to do what better developers weren't willing to do. That assumes they know what we need. Biggest part of making the world's software is getting the requirements right. The intellectual elite have been consistently worse at that than folks with strong people skills to get the info out of the market or just folks in it that see the need(s). A recurring example is how they all think brick and mortar is obsolete due to Prime or whatever but a ton of people just want out of house or break from family. They don't know cuz they're coding amongst their peers instead of interacting with such people. So, folks with less brains who do listen wrote software and made plans to make shopping better with Best Buy, local grocers, and others slated for death thriving last I checked. I learned long ago that intellectual superiority or best code aren't all that has value. Most people want software to get shit done or for entertainment with relatively-low standards of quality. So, anyone that can do that should jump in. Then, a small percentage of buyers and suppliers are about design or quality excellence. That's our thing. We'll keep doing that. Judging them won't help, though. Sell them on benefits after assessing if it would even have benefits from their perspective.
• winter_blue 7y ago
  > Only accept jobs at companies that donate a significant portion of their profit One such company might be Bloomberg. I've heard that effectively 85% to 90% of all the profits go to charity. I don't know how much of that goes toward open source; but it's still great overall, if you work there, to know that most of your work is helping make the world a better place.
  • nickpsecurity 7y ago
    I had no idea. Thanks for the info! Might subscribe just for that. https://www.bloomberg.com/philanthropy/ https://www.bloomberg.com/philanthropy/
    • gorbachev 7y ago
      As it happens the annual report for Bloomberg Philanthropy just came out today: https://annualreport.bloomberg.org/ https://annualreport.bloomberg.org/
• Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  Ah, an issue close to my heart. I work full-time on open source, making my money from three places: 1. Donations directly via Patreon, Liberapay, and fosspay[0] 2. Paid subscriptions on Sourcehut [1] 3. Part-time consulting gigs [2] [0] https://drewdevault.com/donate https://drewdevault.com/donate [1] https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3C20190426160729.GC1351%40homura.localdomain%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3C2019042616072... [2] https://drewdevault.com/consulting https://drewdevault.com/consulting (numbers undisclosed) With 1 & 2 alone, I'd be making about $34,000. Not poverse, but I am preparing to move into a 200 sq ft apartment in a couple of months. Consulting gigs help a lot - working on these anywhere from 0-24 hours a week brings me up to a comfortable standard of living. I think what helps is that I'm a person, not a project. By working on lots of different projects, I get a lot of different people interested in paying for my work. The income from any of my ventures alone would not pay me a livable wage. I've put a lot of thought into how to make money from FOSS, if anyone has questions or wants to send me their thoughts, I'm listening.
  • jupp0r 7y ago
    > If anyone has questions or wants to send me their thoughts, I'm listening. Ask a company that's using your libraries heavily to hire you full-time and have you do internal consulting for them while still working on the project, mostly. That path comes with its own pitfalls, though.
    • Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
      That is the nature of most of my consulting work (it's generally related to wlroots or Wayland in general). But it doesn't work for any of my end-user software, makes it hard to work on several unrelated projects like I do, and sets up an unhealthy power dynamic that makes you subsurvient to authorities who care more about a bottom line than the project (see Redis for an example of this gone wrong). Those pitfalls you mentioned are numerous and difficult pills to swallow, too.
      • decasia 7y ago
        Care to say more about the Redis case? I haven't followed it carefully enough to make sense of their organizational trajectory.
• ThinkBeat 7y ago
  The "open source model" is good for far more than launching your career. You can contribue, create, participate, enjoy open source your entire life. Contrary to American beliefs (being an American myself) not evertying is about making the most money.
  • 1penny42cents 7y ago
    As this article clearly states, it's _not_ good for making even a bit of money, let alone the most.
  • lostmymind66 7y ago
    The parent was mentioning telling entrepreneurs this advice, who are interested in starting a business and making money. "Contrary to American beliefs (being an American myself) not evertying is about making the most money." It's not. But you will only really ever get to work on what you want when you are making enough money to quit your day job. Contributing to open source can be a great experience. It can also be very taxing, especially when you have a family/other obligations outside of work.
    • orhmeh09 7y ago
      This is where strong welfare systems have value in that it gives one the freedom to pursue this kind of thing without having to worry about health insurance and so forth.
      • briandear 7y ago
        However, those welfare systems then force other people to subsidize someone else working on something that, by definition, doesn’t contribute economic value that exceeds the cost of producing it. It’s an inefficient allocation of resources. Meaning money going to support someone building a “thing” nobody values instead of going to support a thing people do value. And by “value,” I mean willingness to pay for it. Free money in the form of welfare so someone could work on a hobby that may have no value is paid for by people who are creating value. Should I get free healthcare and free food and free rent if I have a passion for making a widget that nobody is willing to pay for? Should I be able to spend my days walking in the woods while a barber spends his days cutting hair for money — money that is taxed to pay for someone to spend their day walking in the woods? To be clear, welfare is valuable as a safety net, but it shouldn’t be a safety harness. If you are disabled or lost your job, definitely welfare is important. But welfare to support some guy writing a new JavaScript library nobody is willing to pay for? That’s ridiculous. Society needs people to build roads, cook food, and cut hair. If society rewarded people for sitting around doing nothing, then who would do those jobs? If people weren’t doing those jobs, who would pay the taxes for all the people that would decide to simply walk in the woods all day? We would all like the freedom to pursue “this sort of thing,” however, what happens when everyone pursues “this sort of thing?” Who is going to pay for it? The guy hauling freight isn’t going to take too kindly to be paying for people to do nothing. People should be able to do whatever they want, but it crosses the line of reason when other people are literally forced to pay for it. Of course this will be an unpopular opinion here because there is an entitlement mentality that would suggest that someone’s latest JavaScript library should be tax subsidized. However, try making that case to a freight hauler who pays the taxes. Make that case to the restaurant owner that she should pay higher taxes so someone else can sit at home writing browser plugins or painting cute rocks with animal faces that nobody wants to buy.
• samirillian 7y ago
  2 Important points: 1) In terms of financial remuneration, it's even worse than this. Consider Mastodon, which looks like it's doing pretty well. Well, according to his Changelog interview, Eugen also pays 5 moderators to help maintain mastodon.social. 2) Sindre Sorhus, statistically living in poverty, tweeted saying open source was the best decision of his life! Quality of life is increasingly diverging from income. And I hope it continues to, since mean income keeps diverging from median.
  • Applejinx 7y ago
    Absolutely. I am constantly seeing posters on HN who are clearly far unhappier than me, even though they are pursuing wealth with some success (or even a lot of success). I too am living in relative poverty (sub $1500 a month) and open source was the best risk I ever took. There are some really interesting angles to consider such as the more predictable income of being supported as a working developer, rather than being paid for your 'hit products' and having to generate more hits or starve. Quality of life is also whether you're subject to ruthless pressures. You can trade off income for creative freedom, in a very natural way. Do weird noncommercial stuff if that is more important than maximizing revenue at any given point. There'll be a natural balance between how hard you're trying to please a customer base, and how much that base will reward you for pleasing it.
• lacker 7y ago
  Some of this data doesn't seem right. For example, the author lists Gatsby as "below poverty threshold". However, Gatsby raised $3.8M recently. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gatsby-e828 https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gatsby-e828 I'm pretty sure they are able to pay people better than poverty wages. Another important omission is that many developers contribute to open source as part of their work for a larger company. The core React team, for example, is primarily working for Facebook. They spend a lot of their time working on Facebook-internal things, but a lot of their effort is going towards the open source community as well. The real lesson here is that the OpenCollective model (where these numbers come from) is not where most of the funding for open source engineering is coming from. Most of the money paid to open source software engineers comes from companies that produce open source code as a byproduct of their main mission, like Microsoft building TypeScript or Google building Go.
• sb1752 7y ago
  Minor point, which always frustrates me when people say it. "proven through scientifical consensus". Nothing in the history of science has ever been "proven" by consensus. We get proof when observation matches theoretical prediction.
• cryptica 7y ago
  As the open source author of a popular project (5 years old and over 5K stars on GitHub), I can relate the problem but at the same time, I think that some solutions could make the problem even worse. There are actually two 'fairness' issues in open source and from my experience each one is as bad as the other: 1. Fairness in terms of projects getting the amount of attention that they deserve. 2. Fairness in financial terms. If corporations start donating and drawing attention to some projects more than others, it will cause both problems to worsen. This is because open source projects which are backed by a lot of funding and have strong connections with corporations tend to naturally draw more attention and thus funding because developers and bloggers are more likely to talk, write and tweet about them (regardless of actual merit). It reinforces the importance of social connections and turns an otherwise honorable and altruistic pursuit into a social-climbing financial scheme. TBH, I'd prefer it if corporations did not get involved at all. If they did, I could only pray that my project would get its fair share of funding. The unfortunate reality of capitalism is that some people will get very lucky but it's just not going to be you. Luck is often paid for at the expense of others; if your competitor gets lucky and walks into a pile of a few million dollars, that's very bad luck for you. Corporations already took the meritocracy out of tech startups, it would be a shame if they also took the meritocracy out of open source (more than they already have). Open source is very far from a meritocracy but it's probably the closest thing possible to it in the tech industry and we should keep it that way. The best way to do this is to keep the big money out.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  Easiest way to make money from open source: 1. Use open source as a way to develop your skills and increase your developer profile (for example presenting at conferences) 2. Use your acquired skills and prominence to land a job at one of the FAANG companies. 3. Bonus if you your employer allows you to work at least part-time on your open source project. In general, open source is a lousy way to make money by building a business. However, it can be very useful in building your personal brand by both increasing your skills and demonstrating your expertise.
• UglyToad 7y ago
  I just don't get this discussion. And part of it worries me. Open source isn't what you do to get vc funding, it's not what you do to build a unicorn (it shouldn't be). It's in the name, open source, it's a charitable act. I worry this attempt to commercialise open source is corrupting it. For sure a lot of companies derive a lot of value from open source software but the user is irrelevant to the act of open sourcing something. The problem, if you believe there is one, is that work that genuinely delivers benefit for society, is not rewarded economically. While the rich have more money than they can feasibly spend. The problem then is actually how we structure the economy and society, instead of applying a sticking plaster of commercialisation around open source and getting upset when big companies use the software under the licence available to all users, or relying on generous patronage, why not envision a society in which delivering valuable software for free is treated as more valuable than building Uber for dogwalking. I haven't fully structured my thoughts around this so they're still half baked but it seems we're discussing the problem from the wrong angle?
  • Applejinx 7y ago
    Yeah they are, but it's a marketing problem. I'm working on it directly as I am a fairly influential (in my small pond) OSS developer working for less than the poverty line (thank goodness I live in the boonies, plus I've been fortunate) You have to SHOW the benefit and continually make that case that you are doing something beneficial, and that you are doing it open, that you are in fact giving it away as speech that can be taken and restated and rephrased and reused, becoming a broadening language. The marketing angle is to continue to do this publically, in contrast to the 'rich and big companies' who absolutely try to exploit everyone and everything, and are horrible to work with or for. You can't stop them being rich, or exploitative, or even from having a lot of power. But you can make people ask 'why are we using those things again?' because to exploit at that level, competitively, involves pressuring people really hard and taking their stuff away. It feels bad and looks bad. You can do open source and be truly kind. You must start out wealthy enough that you can survive it, because so far people still align themselves with the power, they still will tend to side with the big company or whoever wields more money. That's basic human nature: animal, even. But we can get 'em asking questions and being open to sharing and cooperative behavior… because that is ALSO human nature.
• linuxhansl 7y ago
  My company pays me handsomely for working - in part - on Open Source projects. It's kind of the reverse of what's described here, I do not live off donations to the project, instead I "donate" some of my paid time to the Open Source project... That way my company, the Open Source projects, and myself benefit. What I do benefits other users of those projects and we benefit from other contributions. Open Source is about sharing ideas and code, not about living off a project. IMHO at least.
• andrelaszlo 7y ago
  Last week I attended a talk by one of the nuxt.js core devs, Sébastien Chopin. Nuxt, in case you haven't heard of it, is a framework built on Vue.js, with almost 100k weekly downloads on npm and 20k+ stars on Github. He said they have multiple sources of income, but donations and sponsors is just enough to cover hosting and offices. The team seem to get by on chômage (France's unemployment program, which is relatively generous... for a limited amount of time) and on some consulting work. Maybe that's normal, but I hope that we can find more sustainable ways to develop great projects like this.
• timwaagh 7y ago
  I did not get to contribute much to open source. I do think it is a privilege if you are able to make something you want to make and give it away to people who use it a lot. You get to put your name out there etc. And if you can really afford it and that is where your heart is, why not. Maintaining commercial software is not a choice. It's done out of pure necessity. My company wants to get rid of me for what I think are bad reasons. Meaning I need to pay for a lawyer to fight them. Its just misery for people to treat each other like that. This is common in IT. It does not take much and it really does not make as much as portrayed (globally speaking, as open source is global). I used to like the company but clearly they don't give much of a damn about the law (not US law) or just being good employers. Literally all It managers are like this. All I've met anyways and I've been around. IT is a brutal world. But you will get a new job? Yes I will get a new job. Of course I will. I can't afford not to. As far as I'm concerned open source maintainers are the lucky ones. They do not need to deal with management. Ps: not that I begrudge them extra wages. I'm all for it.
• maxbendick 7y ago
  André Staltz's writing is always a pleasure to read. I still show people his intro to reactive programming https://gist.github.com/staltz/868e7e9bc2a7b8c1f754 https://gist.github.com/staltz/868e7e9bc2a7b8c1f754
• oweqruiowe 7y ago
  I'd think a Universal Basic Income could help value work like this, work that the market traditionally does not reward, much like caregivers. Doesn't solve the problem of course, but could go a long way.
• _bxg1 7y ago
  Key quote here: > Open source infrastructure is a commons, much like our ecological systems. Because our societies did not have rules to prevent the ecological systems from being exploited, companies have engaged in industrialized resource extraction. Over many decades this is depleting the environment, and now we are facing a climate crisis, proven through scientific consensus to be a substantial threat to humanity and all life on the planet. Open source misappropriation is simply a small version of that, with less dramatic consequences.
• Buetol 7y ago
  It doesn’t take into account that countries like France gives you some good benefits while you’re unemployed (like paying you the same salary you had before for a year) while you use this time to make FOSS that’s easy to maintain. There is a good study to be done on how people in countries with good social benefits make more and better FOSS !
• andrewstuart 7y ago
  A "KeepAlive" system might work for funding software projects. If your company has a dependency on some open source software project, then it is very much in their interests to pay a "KeepAlive" amount per month to that project, ensuring that project remains alive and well and healthy, and thus your systems - which depend literally on that software - remain healthy. "KeepAlive" is not sponsorship. Sponsorship has the perception/reality of being optional/nonessential and indeed there is an expectation that something further will be given to the sponsor after the money is handed over. Sponsorship isn't a great model for funding software projects. Even worse is donations. Nor is a KeepAlive payment a support payment. in fact you might have a support system on top of your KeepAlive system. A KeepAlive payment system is simply a payment to ensure that software that a company depends on stays alive. The super critical thing that no one seems to understand - (and Patreon is the prime culprit here) is that you simply cannot allow the money amounts to drop to the floor - it must not be possible to contribute $1 a month. This is just digital street begging. Patreon - and any other sponsorship/donation/support/KeepAlive system that permits the payer to "choose their own price" is setting the whole system up for failure. Have you ever seen a "choose what you want to pay" system that does anything except drop straight to the pricing floor? Any sponsorship/donation/support/KeepAlive system must assert value, must anchor the price, and must set a practical minimum that is required and not optional. For example $10/month for individual person KeepAlive payments, $200/month for small companies and $500/month for larger company KeepAlive payments. What's the value in 300 people throwing a $1 coin per month into your digital suitcase - that's what Patreon is. Part of the problem is that software developers are typically afraid to set a realistic price point/value on their work, thus the KeepAlive system needs to do it for them - ensuring it doesn't turn into a Patreon like digital street begging system.
• JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  In Islam's golden age, they came up with a trust structure known as a waqf [1]. A waqf is "an inalienable charitable endowment under Islamic law, which typically involves donating a building, plot of land or other assets for Muslim religious or charitable purposes with no intention of reclaiming the assets." Working to endow charitable trusts might be a smart move for open-source projects. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waqf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waqf
• neilv 7y ago
  For an expensive US city with a "tech" concentration, only the article's "BLUE" category (6 figures) is usually viable, AFAICT. If you look at their chart as everything except blue being red, almost nothing is viable. You can scrape by on some 5-figures in such a place (assuming no trust fund, and that parents didn't buy you a condo), especially if you have roommates and a hope in growth of circumstances (e.g., startup founder or equity-heavy employee, or the academic postdoc situation), but that's not a good plan for open source work.
• felixrieseberg 7y ago
  Electron maintainer here. Most of the maintainers are being paid to maintain Electron full-time. I've worked in jobs before where you got to do "some open source during work hours", but in the case of Electron, most of our people are specifically paid to work on Electron. Yes, absolutely, find and use more ways to fund Open Source, but describing Electron as a project below the poverty line is plain incorrect. Yes, we too need funding, but that description strikes me as inaccurate and thus problematic. "Below the poverty line" means something, doesn't apply to Electron, and saying it because it sounds good trivializes a problem in a world where 1/7 children in the US live _actually_ below the poverty line.
  • ghawk1ns 7y ago
    Does Electron have another revenue stream that isn't accounted for here? Are the full-time employees paid a wage above the poverty line? If so then yeah, this doesn't make sense. But I think the sentiment isn't trivializing, that 1 child out of 7 might have a parent who works on one of these projects.
    • felixrieseberg 7y ago
      > Are the full-time employees paid a wage above the poverty line? Yes, very much so. It's tech. We're all really, really lucky.
      • thatoneuser 7y ago
        I really respect people who work in impressive tech jobs who can admit this.
  • staltz 7y ago
    As I shared with you on Twitter (1), I think the definitions of the terms might have been misleading. For instance, although the charts use the word "salary", in my blog post I defined what those terms meant: > ...how much yearly revenue for a project goes to each “full-time equivalent” contributor. This is essentially their salary. Or, said better, this is how much their salary via donations would be if they were working exclusively on the open source project, without any complementary income. It is likely that a sizable amount of creators and maintainers work only part-time on their projects. Those that work full-time sometimes complement their income with savings or by living in a country with lower costs of living... Later, when I specifically mention Electron, I say: > This doesn’t mean the people working on those projects are poor, because in several cases the maintainers have jobs at companies that allow open source contributions. What it does mean, however, is that unless companies take an active role in supporting open source with significant funding, what’s left is a situation where most open source maintainers are severely underfunded. In summary, this means that projects categorized in red or orange can be one of these cases: - Maintainer is an employee earning fair salary, and nearly nothing (<10%) from donations: Electron et al - Maintainer is independent, earns significantly (>50%) from donations: Sindre Sorhus (AVA), myself (Manyverse and Cycle.js), Paul Frazee (Beaker Browser) and others - Maintainer is independent, earns entirely from donations: Titus (Unified) and others The core message of the blog post still stands true, unless companies take a central role in sustaining open source (which is your case!), what's left is a situation of unfair compensation to open source maintainers. [1]: https://twitter.com/andrestaltz/status/1139533257077338112 https://twitter.com/andrestaltz/status/1139533257077338112
• OmarIsmail 7y ago
  This is why I went with dual license for my react animation library. Full reasoning here https://omar.dev/articles/why-im-charging-for-react-spho.html https://omar.dev/articles/why-im-charging-for-react-spho.htm...
• cavneb 7y ago
  disclaimer - I'm the founder of https://codefund.io https://codefund.io This is a very interesting view of the current issues surrounding the funding of open source. I think there are also some assumptions surrounding the motivations of being a maintainer that may not be accurate. As the founder of a company that's sole purpose is to bring funding to open source developers, bloggers and app builders, I do understand the issues with the "trickle economics" of generating funds for open source. Let me first say thank you for your contributions. I do not believe that most people become open source contributors/maintainers for the money. They do it b/c they are good people trying to give back to their community. The way I see it, maintainers need to be open to many different paths of generating funds. Open Collective and Patreon are incredible, however they often require an active effort in fund-raising to generate any significant amount of money. Tidelift is doing great stuff in this field as well by selling SLA contracts on open source projects, although it's difficult to qualify and the developers might not want to sign a contract. There is the promise of crypto-economics and how they might impact funding OSS (see https://oscoin.io https://oscoin.io). Finally, advertising (yuck?) has been a proven and more widely accepted form of funding as long as the user's privacy is protected. That's what we do. Fund open source maintainers through ethical advertising. It takes a village to solve sustainable funding for open source.
• mperham 7y ago
  Open source developer here making 7 figures per year on my own. I don't take donations, I use an open core model and charge companies for access to my commercial products. AMA! https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-charging-money-for-pro-features-allowed-me-quit-my-job-6e71309457 https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-charging-money-fo...
• lliamander 7y ago
  I find the mindset of this article to be mind-boggling. The fact that open source developers aren't getting paid does not mean there is exploitation. Those developers don't have to work on FOSS. They could also work on proprietary software. The problem is that it is hard to develop a business model around developing open source software (it's also hard to develop a business around proprietary software, too). If the current maintainer of a open-source project does not have the financial support to continue working on the project, they should put their open-source work on hold until they get their finances in order. If that software is part of a critical chain for a business, then that business should provide financial support. It is not a necessity that all current open-source projects continue to be actively maintained.
  • flukus 7y ago
    Wait until they find out how little the person dispensing soup in a homeless shelter is getting paid. OSS is usually like charity, you do it because you can afford to and want to and don't expect anything back from it. Some people end up full time employees in the charity sector, which is also a big industry reliant on free labor.
    • lliamander 7y ago
      > OSS is usually like charity, you do it because you can afford to and want to and don't expect anything back from it. There are reputational rewards associated with open source[1]. However, if you're solely contributing to open source for those rewards, you're going to have a bad time. I would agree that there needs to be a high degree of intrinsic motivation. [1]http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading
• tehjoker 7y ago
  Another situation where public good meets an economic system that only rewards tightfistedness. Why not have a system of public funding of valuable projects that everyone uses? Charity is weak. Democracy is strong.
• DocTomoe 7y ago
  The methodology is highly flawed - with the amount of "educated guesses" the author takes, anything that comes out of that exercise is highly questionable.
• rkara224 7y ago
  Hi guys, I wanted to respond to this forum, to hopefully, demystify some misconceptions or help folks, understand, what real self-sustainability is, or what it could mean to us as people, or as a collection of individuals. Many people believe, that, just because you are being paid, or have money, that you or your service is part of a self-sustainable system, or sociopolitical or economic circumstance. And, by using money to purchase products or services that you or your business is being sustained. Fortunately, that's not true. Society, or real self-sustainability, doesn't work like that. This was proven in 1930, by the Austrian mathematician, Kurt Godel, in his incompleteness theorem, paper. Basically, Godel concluded, that there is no such thing, as a set-of-all-sets, or superset, in mathematics, or that such a statement, or set, can never be proven, or exist in nature. Fast forward to 1936, and Alan Turing, uses Godel’s statement, as the “process” or self-sustainable mechanism, for his Turing machine. Input > Process > Output Basically, Turing is saying to Godel, you’re right, there is no such thing as a set-of-all-sets or superset in nature. But, what if there was? What would that look like? And then, Turing goes ahead, based on that supposition, to demonstrate that such a set exists in his 1936, computable numbers paper. So every time people turn their computers on, they are basically proving Turing right, and Godel wrong, about their being a set-of-all-sets or a superset in nature. What does this have to do with self-sustainability or human sociopolitical or economic circumstance? Everything. All sociopolitical or economic responses or circumstances are built on their being a “process”, or set-of-all-sets, present in every human or non-human transaction or request. In other words, we as people shouldn’t be seeking to “create” self-sustainable services or mechanisms in the world, Godel proved that, that would be a waste of time. We, should be looking at, is ways to “serve” the self-sustainable mechanism, that Turing has proven exists. What, if we alter, what Alan Turing is saying about their being a set-of-all-sets, that can be aggregated, to a set-of-all-sets that can’t be aggregated, but could only be served. In other words a forum, or circumstance in which ‘process’ or the set-of-all-sets is the only constant in the system, and that, the forums or requests, themselves, are the things or mechanisms, that scale or aggregate in the system. One of the biggest bottlenecks we face as humankind or a society is the ability to scale our requests, so that they can be managed by multi-individuals or organisations simultaneously. By inverting a Turing machine, we just might be able to serve one another globally, or as a new human circumstance that can scale to serve any human or non-human request. !DA