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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 a

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.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  I expect creators of big libraries to make even more than $20K a month because of speaking gigs etc. But specifically why did you list $240K for Vue.js creator. Are they making money in some specific way?
  - jasode 7y ago
    >why did you list $240K for Vue.js creator I presume gp's calculation was $19,394 multiplied by 12 months equals $232,728. Monthly amount came from: https://www.patreon.com/evanyou https://www.patreon.com/evanyou
- andrey_utkin 7y ago
  Coming from ex-USSR country, I really don't get people who shake their fists saying that somebody is not fairly compensated, and deserves more, and somebody (rich businesses and enemies of nation obviously) should pay for it. Venezuela waits for you, evil capitalists are defeated here, and govt takes care of everyone. > Every open source contributor of any sort of popular project should be getting at least that much through various deals If they don't have such deals, who is to blame? Users who are busy with their life, take a lot of things for granted and don't think much about thousands of FOSS libraries and apps they use every day? Government which doesn't subsidize FOSS contributors? Or maybe contributors themselves who are sloppy at selling themselves and getting deals? > Ridiculous that so many billion dollar companies use these things and feel no obligation Maybe exactly because FOSS is about terms which allow such use, and enable companies to build business models on that?
  - devoply 7y ago
    I suggested a simple solution for the problem. Ask users to meet a certain fund raising goal and if they don't come up with it, either stop working on the project, or pull it entirely and let them worry about it. This is a capitalist approach to the problem of capitalists exploiting communists. Better approach is probably not license your stuff under exploitative licenses and put clauses in there for bigger companies using your work.
    - andrey_utkin 7y ago
      What is the problem you are talking about? Who exactly has that problem? What are "exploitative licenses"? If money paid by licensees is the primary driving motivation for development, then FOSS is completely wrong type of licenses for this. This is called commercial development.
    - Applejinx 7y ago
      The problem here is, nothing you can possibly do is worth more than money to a dedicated capitalist who already has tons of money. You can do stuff they exploit, or not. Doesn't change the relative size of the pool of money from your true userbase (likely much smaller), and nothing you do can force the capitalist to buy into your code at a less-exploitative license. They can and will just pass. And you can pressure your users in a wide number of ways: they are the same dark patterns used by proprietary, totally-closed software. You can become that to get paid… or, more accurately, you can become that, try to squeeze blood from a stone, and find out whether you can torture your users into providing you with the level of luxury you see fit. This is not the motivation of Free Software, and is barely the motivation of Open Source. Might as well just be proprietary and be done with it. All this works on many levels and money/compensation is only one of the levels.
- Applejinx 7y ago
  Whoa. I was going to comment, but now… I'm Chris from Airwindows. I'm patreon-backed and make upwards of fourteen HUNDRED dollars a month to serve a specialty market, audio plugins, that is heavily burdened by selfish devs and burdensome DRM strategies. Some of these companies are maybe million dollar companies but many are relatively small fry who still believe they 'should' get 240k (as if! This is still the music business! Or you could say that nothing in the music business is actually popular, therefore none of these can count as popular projects were they OSS) I license by MIT license. My pitch regarding that is that I require credit, and nothing else. From my point of view, in my business (again, the music business) since long before I was born, the only people who get to be 'popular' are those who sign off on horribly exploitative contracts and get abused just like the OSS developers people are talking about. I assume it'll be the same with me so I allow 'exploitation' on the grounds that I generate enough goodwill to slap back at anyone who's found to be ripping my stuff without credit or shout-out. It's my problem to turn that into revenue. I can easily believe the '1% to 10% of what you'd make commercially' line. I'm seeing more like 20-25% of what I would make commercially, but if you are an entrepreneur you must consider cashflow. The commercial thing is bursty: feast or famine, and it drives you in perverse directions, makes you play to your impression of what will be the most popular thing. If you market yourself as an OSS dev free to do anything creative regardless of market pressures, that's its own demographic. It's working okay for me, because I do not have to pay Silicon Valley housing costs, or employees. Like Robert Fripp, I am a 'small, independent, mobile and intelligent unit'. Why? You said freeloaders. That angers me. I have a different name. I call them 'musicians'. Often they make the musics and genres I personally like. They also have to eat. I am able to provide them with tools that become their resources. I'd do more if I could: working on it. If you aren't living on under $1500 a month you have no business calling a sum of money a 'pittance', and in no case do you get to tell me to hold my software hostage. (so I won't. No hard feelings) You appear to be talking from a 'capital maximization' position, and from that angle all you say checks out. I am talking from a 'providing freedom' position, from which the actions of companies mean diddly-squat. I am there because should they license my stuff (some is trivially simple, some is quite significant) they will take my musicians and hold them hostage and demand a 'pittance', or better yet they'll demand 'a lot' simply because they can. My musicians (or at least many of the worthy ones) are starving broke, because art does not make money. OSS is a way for me to make some money in a context people understand while giving these people not only tools, but the RIGHT to own, use, redesign these tools. What I give can't be taken away. Won't trade that for money. If that is hard to understand ask RMS. (ironically… since I'm using MIT and not GPL. But he would understand, plus people can take my stuff and extend and GPL it if they like. I could switch to GPL at ANY point, if I wanted)
TAForObvReasons 7y ago
The most interesting part (IMHO) of the post addressed Github, a multi-billion dollar acquisition on the backs of the open source contributors whose primary beneficiaries never seemed to give even a small portion of the profits back to the community. If there are other people figuring out how to exploit the tendencies of open source developers, certainly it's fair to discuss how said developers can see a bit of those resources. Especially when the big winners aren't even considering giving back in a serious manner.
- smileysteve 7y ago
  I find the Criticism of Github and Microsoft unwarranted; They contribute significantly to both the open source and startup business ecosystems; Importantly; Free Public Github repositories; these aren't free to provide, they require storage and bandwidth. And not just for major projects, but any project. @ 28 million open source repositories, if you attribute that to the equivalent of $1/year; that is 10x what the author is calling for Microsoft does a lot more too, whether it's "protecting" patents for Linux, or providing Visual Studio, Atom, sponsoring meetups and hackathons, and much more. Disclaimer; Guest of Azure Incubation Week, had Microsoft sponsor BarCamps, and hackathons; And I host open source projects on github for free.
  - xtracto 7y ago
    I completely agree with you. People should look at companies like Telmex (Mexican telecom company, owned by 3rd richest person in the world). They surely use a HUGE amount of Open Source and contribute zilch back. In contrast, Github and Microsoft are huge contributors.
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  Honestly, AGPL license your projects: That will prevent obnoxious companies from taking your work without giving back. If you deliberately pick a BSD-style license, then you don't get to complain about 'big winners' not cutting you a slice. They're doing exactly what you told them they could do.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
I find that opinion, is not so much unpopular rather it might be that it arises from approaching the the question with a different set of parameters. I am one of those people who write software for fun. I'm guessing I'm wired to get a dopamine rush from solving an interesting programming challenge the same way that someone doing the NY Times crossword puzzle is when they get all the words. Nobody claims that someone who spends hours doing crossword puzzles over the year is an underpaid crossword puzzle solver. So when people have do things for themselves, perhaps their compensation is in the doing. But when someone else decides to use some open source software, they are in a different place. They are using it as a tool that gives them value. Using our crossword solving problem; the person who gets a copy of the puzzle solver's answers and just fills in the squares is a user not a developer. This is where the open source contract breaks down, because you can get user's who file issues to be fixed but supply no money or manpower to fix them. And the people who are writing the software because they enjoy writing software, may have no interest in your particular interest, it might bring them no joy at all to work on it, so they don't. And in that gap, you get CVEs where an issue results in security problem for the tool user, but you don't have anyone able (or perhaps willing) to stop what ever they are doing and work on it. Could you imagine a person demanding someone figure out the word for 18 down "right now" because their other project needed that work to continue? I would be interested in seeing an open source license that made the software free to use for anyone who contributed at least one fix or one feature to the code each year, but cost $10,000/year to license to use if you chose not to contribute any fixes or features. I don't think you need to restrict it to features or fixes that eventually get integrated just contributed and could be integrated (pass all CI/CD requirements). The reason there is the user would end up having to pay a software developer, perhaps part time, to come up with those features/fixes and presumably that would cost more than the $10,000/year. My point is that without a way to tie the economic value of using the software back into its development cost (in order to pay people to do the grunge work that often nobody wants to do) you end up with imbalanced value equations like the ones we have today where you can't charge for the source code to people who just want to exploit it and add value in their own products that they keep.
- andrey_utkin 7y ago
  > you can get user's who file issues to be fixed but supply no money or manpower to fix them And then maintainer responds, "not on my roadmap, but patch would be welcome". > And in that gap, you get CVEs where an issue results in security problem for the tool user, but you don't have anyone able (or perhaps willing) to stop what ever they are doing and work on it. About time for idle users to step up and invest into their own security, right? > free to use for anyone who contributed at least one fix or one feature Sure, screw software freedoms, let's build unenforceable licenses with perverse incentives, driving NIH behaviour and contributions for sake of the fact of the contribution. Free software is doing fine (and this gets better as mankind gets wealthier), thank you. Please don't contemplate force-feeding it.

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.
skinnymuch 7y ago
I expect creators of big libraries to make even more than $20K a month because of speaking gigs etc. But specifically why did you list $240K for Vue.js creator. Are they making money in some specific way?
- jasode 7y ago
  >why did you list $240K for Vue.js creator I presume gp's calculation was $19,394 multiplied by 12 months equals $232,728. Monthly amount came from: https://www.patreon.com/evanyou https://www.patreon.com/evanyou
andrey_utkin 7y ago
Coming from ex-USSR country, I really don't get people who shake their fists saying that somebody is not fairly compensated, and deserves more, and somebody (rich businesses and enemies of nation obviously) should pay for it. Venezuela waits for you, evil capitalists are defeated here, and govt takes care of everyone. > Every open source contributor of any sort of popular project should be getting at least that much through various deals If they don't have such deals, who is to blame? Users who are busy with their life, take a lot of things for granted and don't think much about thousands of FOSS libraries and apps they use every day? Government which doesn't subsidize FOSS contributors? Or maybe contributors themselves who are sloppy at selling themselves and getting deals? > Ridiculous that so many billion dollar companies use these things and feel no obligation Maybe exactly because FOSS is about terms which allow such use, and enable companies to build business models on that?
- devoply 7y ago
  I suggested a simple solution for the problem. Ask users to meet a certain fund raising goal and if they don't come up with it, either stop working on the project, or pull it entirely and let them worry about it. This is a capitalist approach to the problem of capitalists exploiting communists. Better approach is probably not license your stuff under exploitative licenses and put clauses in there for bigger companies using your work.
  - andrey_utkin 7y ago
    What is the problem you are talking about? Who exactly has that problem? What are "exploitative licenses"? If money paid by licensees is the primary driving motivation for development, then FOSS is completely wrong type of licenses for this. This is called commercial development.
  - Applejinx 7y ago
    The problem here is, nothing you can possibly do is worth more than money to a dedicated capitalist who already has tons of money. You can do stuff they exploit, or not. Doesn't change the relative size of the pool of money from your true userbase (likely much smaller), and nothing you do can force the capitalist to buy into your code at a less-exploitative license. They can and will just pass. And you can pressure your users in a wide number of ways: they are the same dark patterns used by proprietary, totally-closed software. You can become that to get paid… or, more accurately, you can become that, try to squeeze blood from a stone, and find out whether you can torture your users into providing you with the level of luxury you see fit. This is not the motivation of Free Software, and is barely the motivation of Open Source. Might as well just be proprietary and be done with it. All this works on many levels and money/compensation is only one of the levels.
Applejinx 7y ago
Whoa. I was going to comment, but now… I'm Chris from Airwindows. I'm patreon-backed and make upwards of fourteen HUNDRED dollars a month to serve a specialty market, audio plugins, that is heavily burdened by selfish devs and burdensome DRM strategies. Some of these companies are maybe million dollar companies but many are relatively small fry who still believe they 'should' get 240k (as if! This is still the music business! Or you could say that nothing in the music business is actually popular, therefore none of these can count as popular projects were they OSS) I license by MIT license. My pitch regarding that is that I require credit, and nothing else. From my point of view, in my business (again, the music business) since long before I was born, the only people who get to be 'popular' are those who sign off on horribly exploitative contracts and get abused just like the OSS developers people are talking about. I assume it'll be the same with me so I allow 'exploitation' on the grounds that I generate enough goodwill to slap back at anyone who's found to be ripping my stuff without credit or shout-out. It's my problem to turn that into revenue. I can easily believe the '1% to 10% of what you'd make commercially' line. I'm seeing more like 20-25% of what I would make commercially, but if you are an entrepreneur you must consider cashflow. The commercial thing is bursty: feast or famine, and it drives you in perverse directions, makes you play to your impression of what will be the most popular thing. If you market yourself as an OSS dev free to do anything creative regardless of market pressures, that's its own demographic. It's working okay for me, because I do not have to pay Silicon Valley housing costs, or employees. Like Robert Fripp, I am a 'small, independent, mobile and intelligent unit'. Why? You said freeloaders. That angers me. I have a different name. I call them 'musicians'. Often they make the musics and genres I personally like. They also have to eat. I am able to provide them with tools that become their resources. I'd do more if I could: working on it. If you aren't living on under $1500 a month you have no business calling a sum of money a 'pittance', and in no case do you get to tell me to hold my software hostage. (so I won't. No hard feelings) You appear to be talking from a 'capital maximization' position, and from that angle all you say checks out. I am talking from a 'providing freedom' position, from which the actions of companies mean diddly-squat. I am there because should they license my stuff (some is trivially simple, some is quite significant) they will take my musicians and hold them hostage and demand a 'pittance', or better yet they'll demand 'a lot' simply because they can. My musicians (or at least many of the worthy ones) are starving broke, because art does not make money. OSS is a way for me to make some money in a context people understand while giving these people not only tools, but the RIGHT to own, use, redesign these tools. What I give can't be taken away. Won't trade that for money. If that is hard to understand ask RMS. (ironically… since I'm using MIT and not GPL. But he would understand, plus people can take my stuff and extend and GPL it if they like. I could switch to GPL at ANY point, if I wanted)

TAForObvReasons 7y ago

The most interesting part (IMHO) of the post addressed Github, a multi-billion dollar acquisition on the backs of the open source contributors whose primary beneficiaries never seemed to give even a small portion of the profits back to the community. If there are other people figuring out how to exploit the tendencies of open source developers, certainly it's fair to discuss how said developers can see a bit of those resources. Especially when the big winners aren't even considering giving back in a serious manner.

smileysteve 7y ago
I find the Criticism of Github and Microsoft unwarranted; They contribute significantly to both the open source and startup business ecosystems; Importantly; Free Public Github repositories; these aren't free to provide, they require storage and bandwidth. And not just for major projects, but any project. @ 28 million open source repositories, if you attribute that to the equivalent of $1/year; that is 10x what the author is calling for Microsoft does a lot more too, whether it's "protecting" patents for Linux, or providing Visual Studio, Atom, sponsoring meetups and hackathons, and much more. Disclaimer; Guest of Azure Incubation Week, had Microsoft sponsor BarCamps, and hackathons; And I host open source projects on github for free.
- xtracto 7y ago
  I completely agree with you. People should look at companies like Telmex (Mexican telecom company, owned by 3rd richest person in the world). They surely use a HUGE amount of Open Source and contribute zilch back. In contrast, Github and Microsoft are huge contributors.
ForHackernews 7y ago
Honestly, AGPL license your projects: That will prevent obnoxious companies from taking your work without giving back. If you deliberately pick a BSD-style license, then you don't get to complain about 'big winners' not cutting you a slice. They're doing exactly what you told them they could do.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

I find that opinion, is not so much unpopular rather it might be that it arises from approaching the the question with a different set of parameters. I am one of those people who write software for fun. I'm guessing I'm wired to get a dopamine rush from solving an interesting programming challenge the same way that someone doing the NY Times crossword puzzle is when they get all the words. Nobody claims that someone who spends hours doing crossword puzzles over the year is an underpaid crossword puzzle solver. So when people have do things for themselves, perhaps their compensation is in the doing. But when someone else decides to use some open source software, they are in a different place. They are using it as a tool that gives them value. Using our crossword solving problem; the person who gets a copy of the puzzle solver's answers and just fills in the squares is a user not a developer. This is where the open source contract breaks down, because you can get user's who file issues to be fixed but supply no money or manpower to fix them. And the people who are writing the software because they enjoy writing software, may have no interest in your particular interest, it might bring them no joy at all to work on it, so they don't. And in that gap, you get CVEs where an issue results in security problem for the tool user, but you don't have anyone able (or perhaps willing) to stop what ever they are doing and work on it. Could you imagine a person demanding someone figure out the word for 18 down "right now" because their other project needed that work to continue? I would be interested in seeing an open source license that made the software free to use for anyone who contributed at least one fix or one feature to the code each year, but cost $10,000/year to license to use if you chose not to contribute any fixes or features. I don't think you need to restrict it to features or fixes that eventually get integrated just contributed and could be integrated (pass all CI/CD requirements). The reason there is the user would end up having to pay a software developer, perhaps part time, to come up with those features/fixes and presumably that would cost more than the $10,000/year. My point is that without a way to tie the economic value of using the software back into its development cost (in order to pay people to do the grunge work that often nobody wants to do) you end up with imbalanced value equations like the ones we have today where you can't charge for the source code to people who just want to exploit it and add value in their own products that they keep.

andrey_utkin 7y ago
> you can get user's who file issues to be fixed but supply no money or manpower to fix them And then maintainer responds, "not on my roadmap, but patch would be welcome". > And in that gap, you get CVEs where an issue results in security problem for the tool user, but you don't have anyone able (or perhaps willing) to stop what ever they are doing and work on it. About time for idle users to step up and invest into their own security, right? > free to use for anyone who contributed at least one fix or one feature Sure, screw software freedoms, let's build unenforceable licenses with perverse incentives, driving NIH behaviour and contributions for sake of the fact of the contribution. Free software is doing fine (and this gets better as mankind gets wealthier), thank you. Please don't contemplate force-feeding it.