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The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
- alephnan 7y agoAs Elon Musk described in the Joe Rogan interview: cybernetic collectives
- navigatesol 7y agoElon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, who doesn't comply with GPL but spends $50k trying to dig up dirt on a person he accused of being a pedophile to avoid lawsuits? That guy? Who cares what he says.
- orisho 7y agoIs that really so widespread though? All of my open source contributions were done on the job, fixing a bug or adding a feature to an open source project I use at work. There is a strong incentive to improve the project rather than fork it to fix, as you don't have to keep maintaining it yourself. It also appears that many maintainers are doing so as part of their duties at work. Just as Google maintains their search engine for "free" to show you ads, they maintain Kubernetes so that you use it on their cloud platform. You fix bugs in Kubernetes so you can have the fix you need, at work, when you need it.
- qudat 7y ago"[...] people working for free." OSS is "free" in the sense that anyone can consume the content. It's not free labor though. Most of the time, the people building OSS are gaining clout and career progression as a result of their "free work." Companies end up paying for it.
- eropple 7y agoI can assure you that the overwhelming majority of people building open source software, even very popular software, are not being paid for it and it offers little value for their careers. Like most things, the top couple of percent are being used to project an upside that does not apply to everyone else.
- NoodleIncident 7y agoBut on the other hand, much of the long tail of contributions probably come from companies using open source software, finding some deficiency, and contributing their change so they don't have to maintain their own fork forever.
- tathougies 7y ago> I can assure you that the overwhelming majority of people building open source software, even very popular software, are not being paid for it and it offers little value for their careers. Can you give an example of a very popular project whose maintainer is not employed in a related field?
- sixstringtheory 7y agoFamously, the creator of Homebrew wasn't able to get hired at Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15981338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15981338 Not exactly fitting your question, but an interesting point.
- tathougies 7y agoI mean, homebrew is completely inapplicable to what Google makes its money off of, so it's not particularly surprising. I would not be surprised if I wasn't able to be hired in anything but a junior role at a very niche medical technology company for example. Or a java desktop app shop (I have no java experience). For some reason people are under the impression that Google makes its money from 'doing computer science', and mistakenly think that anyone good at something that qualifies as computer science ought to be able to work there. Aside from the obvious (and oft-repeated) critique of rampant Google fetishism, it's important to note that Google does actually operate several businesses, and its goal when hiring engineering talent is to find talent that will help its business. Homebrew, a package manager for OS X (I don't think Google uses OS X for anything but consumer apps), is completely orthogonal to most of their business.
- eropple 7y agoBeing "employed" in a related field isn't the same thing, though. A moderately animate clothes rack can get a job as a software developer; it's just not that difficult. My assertion is that having those open source software projects is not materially impacting the careers most writers of open source software because of that software's existence (i.e., excluding potential improvements in skill and craftsmanship from writing it; you can get those through not writing open source software just the same). Even in hiring processes it's really rare to have an interviewer bother to so much as glance at your GitHub account or, like, your NPM account. I'm personally in an interesting spot, as part of why I got my current job is that I have demonstrated proficiency with various sets of tools through writing open-source software (even there it's not my open source work itself, just my understanding of the stuff I'm writing it against). But I'm also aware that I'm very much the exception on that one.
- chiefalchemist 7y ago> "It’s still not clear that companies would be interested in such a contract. When Stenberg asked the company that needed him to fly to a different country to troubleshoot their problem to pay for one, they refused." The irony is, in not paying directly for suppirt they are paying indirectly with risk. Risk to product. Risk to brand. And perhaps in sone cases risk to life. It seems to me a new licence is in order. One that distinguishs from small fries and big fish. And big fish that refuse to be good citizens of a given (product) community should be outed and shamed for their lack of cooperation. Extreme? Sure. But sometimes fairness and justice require such guidance.
- rabidrat 7y ago"shame" is not a reasonable means of enforcing such a thing with big companies. People may feel shame, companies don't.
- chiefalchemist 7y agoTrue. But perhaps it'll "help" someone think twice about taking a new job and a shamed company? Without that information that decision can't be made.
- lysium 7y agoIt’s a well written article. I did not get the point where the internet relies on people working for free. Yes, free software such as curl is in use, but where does the internet rely on it? If there were no curl, there would be something else, wouldn’t it?
- judge2020 7y agolibcurl is widely used and, along with the curl cli, is bundled with most linux/unix installations; it's installed on nearly every consumer device in the wild, including things like cars on the road. https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/09/17/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/09/17/ The article's point is that the reason curl is so widely used by almost everything is because it's free and has a open source license. If it requires some small amount of money per commercial install, or even if it had some license terms that weren't appealing to legal teams at these companies, it would likely not have the widespread adoption is currently has. If every piece of curl-like software in the space were pay-per-install, these companies probably would go and use one of them, but if just one of the offerings is free for all use it's going to top the paid offerings most of the time.
- Gpetrium 7y agoWhat would the world look like if all volunteering stopped? Would society have reached the point it is today? Volunteer encompasses all kinds of areas, including software and research. It can be argued that some segments would be covered by for-profit organizations, but decisions in this area is often driven by the return on investment (ROI). This means that some solutions would likely be paid or not pass the potential ROI test. If it became paid, it would likely be a barriers of entries to a lot of people, leading to slower integration and growth of the platform, software, etc.
- lysium 7y agoI was not arguing against volunteering. From the article, I just did not understand what was described in the title. I’m glad there is so much volunteering, I think the current climate crisis shows that capitalism cannot work for everything.
- user_50123890 7y agoNot just open-source maintainers but also moderators. A bad thing about moderators is that nowadays they tend to be immature teens, it's one of the reasons Reddit content quality has been going down in the past few years. It also creates some moral questions, as companies with giant revenues are outsourcing their internet janitor duties to naive unpaid child labourers
- drei109 7y agoIn my experience with moderators on Reddit, is that they are power driven adults who still act like teens.
- falcolas 7y agoThe sad thing about aging - the body and mind (metaphysical mind, not the brain itself) don't necessarily age at the same rate.
- rhizome 7y agoIt's the Stanford problem, but not everybody succumbs to the allure of power. We see it pretty much everywhere, like on IRC, where power-madness is an expected consequence of giving someone ops in a channel. You win some and you lose some, moderation isn't "set it and forget it," you have to remove some and acquire others from time to time.
- mrmuagi 7y ago> moderation isn't "set it and forget it," you have to remove some and acquire others from time to time. A great point. Succinctly, the moderators need moderators.
- volkk 7y agoi see your point, but it also brings about something like where certain people see quality degrading, and go off to make their own subreddit/community like /r/truereddit or /r/truetruereddit, etc. it's an interesting phenomenon and am curious as to whether its better this way, or actually making things worse.
- Y_Y 7y agoA rational actor never works for "free", they derive some perceived benefit (not necessarily money) from their action, like reputation or self-satisfaction or warm fuzzies. I think it's brilliant that we can use these carrots to get good work out of people that can be shared on the internet. All the same that's no excuse to abuse people who are acting far from rationally.
- ptah 7y agohumans are not "rational actors"
- cesarb 7y ago> they derive some perceived benefit (not necessarily money) from their action, like reputation or self-satisfaction or warm fuzzies You forgot what is perhaps the most important one: using the resulting software. For instance, when Linus wrote git, it was because he wanted a source control system with certain characteristics for himself to use.
- reaperducer 7y agoThat appears to be how we got rsync. From the rsync man page: EXAMPLES Here are some examples of how I use rsync. To backup my wife's home directory, which consists of large MS Word files and mail folders, I use a cron job that runs rsync -Cavz . arvidsjaur:backup each night over a PPP connection to a duplicate directory on my machine "arvidsjaur".
- saagarjha 7y ago> Because the code is available to use for free, without any commercial licensing, there’s no reason that companies need to tell him that they’re using it. Well, that depends on the license.
- jxramos 7y agoI was actually wondering if there's licensing that has a notification clause or what an attribution clause would look like.
- muglug 7y agoThe overarching problem with expecting companies to pay for open-source is that they don’t have to. It’s often as vital to them as the publicly-provided infrastructure used by their employees to get to work, but because they never see the costs, they assume there isn’t any. In an ideal world business-critical FOSS projects would be funded by the government the same way that other public infrastructure is. Until that happens I think lone developers of those popular projects should start to adopt licenses that allow them to charge businesses. It’s the only way to avoid creating martyrs of them.
- pdonis 7y ago> The overarching problem with expecting companies to pay for open-source is that they don’t have to. It might also be because, even when they have to, they refuse to. As in this case described in the article, for example: "Last year, a company overseas contacted him in a panic after they paused a firmware upgrade rollout to several million devices due to a cURL problem. "When Stenberg asked the company that needed him to fly to a different country to troubleshoot their problem to pay for [a support contract], they refused."
- kube-system 7y agoSounds like that company either found an alternative or decided it wasn't important enough of a problem. This isn't a situation inherent to FLOSS. I've worked many sales cycles with commercial software where potential customers act exactly the same way. I wouldn't be surprised if this effect is even stronger for commercial software, because of the sunk cost effect.
- jackcosgrove 7y agoI understand the sentiment. However 1. Money corrupts everything. Be careful what you wish for. 2. Lone developers will probably do a better job than any sort of bureaucracy, public or private. Small-scale FOSS projects are the perfect platform for a lone developer. They can of course demand payment for their efforts, with all that it might entail regarding point 1.
- wvenable 7y agoI feel like there is an article a week about how open source developers are being used by corporations for free labor. I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding that these journalists aren't grasping. Nobody is doing anything they don't want to do. Nobody is forced to build open source software. And, most importantly, most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for. It's only collectively that these contributions have value and we all collectively benefit from it. And for-profit companies are part of that collective benefit but that doesn't mean money needs to be involved. I'm working on an open source project right now -- I've put a lot of hours into it -- and it's cool but there is no way to build a profitable business from it. It's an end-user product, the small number of users will like it, and I just enjoyed building it. But I also don't want to make it business. I already have a job.
- helpPeople 7y agoI'm in a similar situation. Started a website for fun, maybe I'll sell books. Then my website got popular and people want more content faster. I have a day job, so I can't work full time unless I'm paid similar. I'm unsure what to do next. My free website can be monatized with the goal of quitting my job. Or users can get my hobby for free. It seems no one is happy except me. The only benefit, my popularity will likely have me employed forever.
- edoloughlin 7y agoIt seems no one is happy except me That sounds ok to me. You're only responsible for your own happiness.
- marcosdumay 7y ago> It seems no one is happy except me. Well, keep what makes you happy, and rest assured that happy people usually do not voice their happiness, so the entirely one-sided voices you are hearing carry almost no real information.
- wccrawford 7y ago>It seems no one is happy except me. I disagree. Plenty of people are enjoying your content so much they want more. That doesn't mean they are unhappy, only that they think they could be happier than they already are. They are happy.
- ViViDboarder 7y ago“The catastrophic Heartbleed bug of 2014, which compromised the security of hundreds of millions of sites, was caused by a problem in an open-source library called OpenSSL, which relied on a single full-time developer not making a mistake as they updated and changed that code, used by millions.” And the catastrophic Specter and Meltdown bugs show that private code doesn’t prevent this sort of thing either...
- EGreg 7y agoThe best situation is many independent people vetting code and new versions before it is used somewhere. I wrote this 7 years ago: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114
- LomaxJunior 7y agoGlobal Standards can be included in that list, here is one example called Signalling System 7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7#Protocol_security_vulnerabilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7#Protoc... Caller ID uses a protocol used by dial up modems, which means the telecoms hardware supporting it, is in effect, a dialup modem which makes life easier for security services to remotely access systems once they have updated the firmware on telecoms hardware, for a persistent backdoor.
- rhizome 7y agoI would never rely on Caller ID, particularly for something like that. Modems have had callback for decades: call up, identify yourself, the connection is dropped and the system dials a stored number for that ID and the connection is set up for the session. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callback_(telecommunications)#Modem_security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callback_(telecommunications)#...
- BrandonMarc 7y agoYes, the OpenSSL dustup led to this amusing article: The Internet Is Being Protected By Two Guys Named Steve [1] ... the more serious point being, at the time, massive pieces of the internet owed their security to two unpaid/underpaid developers on two different continents. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657571
- benj111 7y agoIsn't this one of Microsoft's arguments in its FUD phase? Open source being less secure.
- petepete 7y agoIt definitely used to be. I think it tailed off when it turned out they were attempting to throw stones from inside a glass house.
- erik_seaberg 7y agoSee also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194376.
- jjohansson 7y agoPerhaps most egregious are companies who profiteer from open source, without contributing back. Amazon comes to mind.
- soperj 7y agoSo does Apple.
- human20190310 7y agoThere is basically no reason for them to contribute back. Using all available tools while restricting their own efforts for their own use creates a competitive edge. The only time it makes sense to release something to the public is as a complement to one of their paid services.
- partialrecall 7y agoCopyleft licenses were created for a reason. If you want companies to either contribute back or fuck off, use copyleft licenses.
- claudiawerner 7y agoThis is, unfortunately, less and less true, when companies like Amazon will take some GPL'd software and make modifications internally and never distribute it. Copyleft licenses only apply if Amazon is going to distribute the software outside the company (such as by selling the software, or giving away binaries).
- andymockli 7y agoOSS is digital volunteerism. It seems a stretch to imply it's exploitation.
- RustyBucket 7y agoIn my opinion, free software stops being free when you need people behind it do something you need. Once "as is" is not enough for you, you either fork or fix it, or pay creates to help you. And it's not that people want to make money of this, rather than cover their costs while solving your problem.
- viburnum 7y agoIt's completely normal and human to want to be productive and contribute. About half of the work that gets done is paid work. The rest, parenting, diy, housework, cooking, volunteering, creative work, is not. This work is done out of a spirit of generosity and/or reciprocity. To exploit that work without reciprocity undermines society. To be generous to billionaires is insanity. Markets are great and all (competition can be fun, after all) but they aren't in accord with every aspect of human nature. Life is better for people when they feel like they express their creative and generous aspect without being a sucker.
- djsumdog 7y agoThere aren't a lot of totally free, open-source, end user products. In the 90s FOSS devs though one day GiMP would surpass Photoshop, we'd see Linux on at least 8% ~ 10% of laptops at coffee shops, Inkscape would be better than Illustrator, etc. Today, a lot of FOSS is corporate sponsored. But it's not end-product. It's all middleware. Hophop/Hack, Lightbend libraries like Slick, React, etc. It's all to help you build things to interact with the big commercial players. Yes there is still a lot of FOSS that's small, 1 ~ 5 people maintainers that's volunteer. But there is a considerable about that's corporate backed. We're a far cry from the FOSS hope of the 90s. I wrote about this a few years back: https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source...
- ip26 7y agoMy perception was always that the FOSS hopes of GiMP, Inkscape, etc flopped mainly because nobody in FOSS put work into UI/UX. So, it kind of makes sense that FOSS found a niche somewhere that UI/UX didn't matter.
- valiant55 7y agoGiMP UI/UX has actually improved a lot over where it was just a few years ago.
- gitgud 7y agoBlender has also made huge strides in UI/UX in the past year, it actually feels like a proprietary product now, which will give it a much bigger chance in industry. > So, it kind of makes sense that FOSS found a niche somewhere that UI/UX didn't matter. I wonder if there can be a push for UI/UX designers to contribute to open source Projects, I'm sure there's people out there who want to contribute...
- Tinfoilhat666 7y agoIt's great that corporates pay developers for writing open source software! I'm much happier today about open source than in 90ies, when no one was getting paid for writing it.
- TurboHaskal 7y agoI always liked this post by Erik Naggum: The whole idea that anything can be so "shared" as to have no value in itself is not a problem if the rest of the world ensures that nobody _is_ starving or needing money. For young people who have parents who pay for them or student grants or loans and basically have yet to figure out that it costs a hell of a lot of money to live in a highly advanced society, this is not such a bad idea. Grow up, graduate, marry, start a family, buy a house, have an accident, get seriously ill for a while, or a number of other very expensive things people actually do all the time, and the value of your work starts to get very real and concrete to you, at which point giving away things to be "nice" to some "community" which turns out not to be "nice" _enough_ in return that you will actually stay alive, is no longer an option. (continues) https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3217750625724755@naggum.net.html https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3217750625724755@naggum...
- dleslie 7y agoThis is incredibly insightful; particularly the final dig regarding an unwillingness to compensate others for their efforts. It strikes me that the open source bounty model never really took off, and neither did the open source crowd funding model. It's hard to convince users to contribute funding when many of them were drawn to your software _because_ it is free as in beer. Free2Play video games have struggled with this for years, and look at the state of monetization in that market: predatory gambling mechanics, digital storefronts tuned to maximize anxiety in purchasers, and so many hats. Perhaps the future of open source funding is in selling personalization customizations, somehow.
- bsmitty5000 7y agoI'd never heard of Erik Naggum before but his wikipedia entry makes him sound interesting as hell- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum
- lucb1e 7y agoThis whole argument is built on the premise that when you fall ill for a while or have an accident, nobody will help you and you'll die instead (I guess they didn't mean it so literally, but that's what the text says). As far as I know, this is actually false in every part of the world that can afford it except for the USA. You may not earn a lot while ill, government support isn't everything, but roughly a thousand bucks a month plus medical expenses paid isn't peanuts.
- joshlemer 7y agoSome other commenters in this thread have pointed out that nobody is forcing open source developers to work on the contributions that they make, and that is strictly speaking true. But in the culture of software development, there does seem to be an ambient message often repeated or hinted at, that it is good to "give back" to open source by contributing and that it is virtuous to do so. I now am starting to rethink this sentiment because the vast majority of the benefit of open source contributions on github, be they to languages, runtimes, application frameworks, databases, etc, go towards increasing the bottom line of for-profit companies, not to developers. And the vast majority of the beneficiaries of open source will never support the project even when they are fortune 50 companies saving millions of dollars by using the work of one volunteer. There is also the idea that contributing will be great for your career development. I have found that not to be the case at all, I think that no potential or current employer has ever given a rat's ass about open source contributions, and do not consider that work as valuable when making hiring decisions. The work you are paid to do is the only thing anyone cares about. I'm not saying that that shouldn't be the case, but just that that is the case. Given then, that there's very little upside to doing open source, and most/all the benefits go to profit-making corporations, it is puzzling why do we even push for greater involvement in open source at all? It seems we shouldn't be, we should be warning people who want to contribute to Open Source that they should probably spend their time doing their own studying and personal/skill development which will allow them to succeed in the roles that they have with their current role or a role they'd like to obtain one day, for money.
- _ZeD_ 7y agothis is the core reason for free software
- groestl 7y agoThis. I use permissive licenses mostly, but if you're disgruntled about companies ripping off your work without ever giving back, it could be that you've used the wrong license.
- volkk 7y agoall good points. i also think what really pushes a lot of developers to do open source, and bear with me for the unpopular opinion--is ego. they love having followers, and a voice on twitter with some open source badge on their profile page. it's in a way a status symbol of "i did this important thing that a lot of people rely on, im pretty important." i highly doubt that even 5% of contributors are doing it out of the kindness of their hearts or the community. you can sort of see evidence of this within repositories filled with smug comments within the issues or pull requests
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ddingus 7y agoOf course it does. There is a thing about open source and I would submit, many uses of the Internet, that ESR (and others) talked about early on, and that's use value. Because the entire work product is available to anyone, the use value is high. There is a skill / understanding investment to make, and while that is expected, it can get ignored, or overemphasized in these discussions. Once someone has made the skill investment, they need only entertain incremental change type investments. Overall, great return on investment. Anyone learning *nix systems can get a ton of work done, and or have set themselves up to explore and benefit from a large number of technologies. The point ESR made is simple: Nobody is really working for free. They are getting the use value, and it's non-trivial. In the case of some important developers, use value is not enough. Can't eat it, or live in it. Fair enough. In this way, OSS is a whole that really is greater than it's parts, and high use value is why. Contributions, and their cost, are multiplied across users and that is often enough to warrant making said contributions. Anyone doing that can improve their use value, and anyone may see the benefit of other contributions. None of that has really changed, but for large corporations deriving significant financial returns, all of which further demonstrate the huge use value in play. I submit this high degree of use also comes with more demands for contributions than an average user / developer too. Funding this should be a no brainer given the extremely low costs needed to see awesome use value and potential to profit. Seriously, the larger players are making plenty. It's my opinion more financial contributions can and should be made, and made in a way that leaves plenty of agency for those who receive them too. Without that, it could be a sort of tragedy of the commons scenario. OSS is awesome, but could be a lot less awesome if this is not improved. Surely an ecosystem like this can be maintained from the billions that it has helped others earn. We say greed is good. Well, so is a degree of fairness, and some respect for that which has delivered so much too. If not, the question, "why should I bother?" is totally fair, and will present itself more and more over time. And this: >It’s still not clear that companies would be interested in such a contract. When Stenberg asked the company that needed him to fly to a different country to troubleshoot their problem to pay for one, they refused. They totally got their use value. If they can't be bothered to help with the code, paying for said help is totally reasonable. What drives that? Perhaps some important people can start posing the question: Either help with code, or dollars, which is it because everyone needs to help?
- jimhefferon 7y agoLots of interesting comments here. I have not seen anyone mention a model that means something to me. I am an academic. Simplistically stated, students come to study with folks who have an academic reputation (yes, I know it is much more complicated than that). A person could imagine that one place to get an academic reputation is through the development of great Free software, or other Free works such as texts.
- buboard 7y agoIt s the equivalent or researchers doing free peer review for elsevier. Nobody’s forcing them, but they kinda have to.
- scarejunba 7y agoHonestly, with bountysource and all that, I'm not too upset with the state of things. The way I see it is that you're just free agents acting in a universe with other agents. It is valuable to make open-source software because other agents will also share those with you. If someone wants a support contract or wants a one-off fix it's going to cost some amount but I'm not going to sweat my balls over trying to make it for them without money. I'm not going to hide any software I write from big companies. They can take if they so desire so long as they adhere by the licence. The magic of software is that this community has realized the incredible value humanity can realize by open collaboration, value we realize personally. So I don't really care that the Internet relies on people working for free. It's like the government kinda relies on my reporting a pothole to fix it. But I get a fixed pothole out of it, so we gucci. It doesn't matter if someone gets more value out of it if I get sufficient value out of it. I'm all for chasing Pareto improvements to my life. When I really really want something I take a risk to get it with money, like when I had to go fund a tiny piece of `neovim` in the beginning or when I fund a Kickstarter thing.
- carapace 7y agoKnow your stack. Intimately. There's a very interesting book called "Hollywood Secrets of Project Management Success"†. Actually, IMO only about half of it is interesting, the parts about how Hollywood makes movies is fascinating, the rest of the book seems to me to be a mildly enterprisey pitch for Agile Methods, (of which YMMV.) THe fascinating thing about Hollywood is that it's old (over a century) and they have developed a system that works: it's rare for a film to go over-budget or over-schedule. I can't do a proper summary here, but the fundamental gist is that they have detailed plans, that experience says are realistic, and they track those plans closely and deal with divergence systematically. †https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hollywood-secrets-of/9780735625693/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hollywood-secrets-of/97... Anyway, one of the tools they use, if transposed to the IT industry, would be something like an Inventory of Dependencies. It would list every piece of software that your system depends on along with costs, risk assessments, and alternate dependencies for each. I don't have the book with me or I'd give more details. My point is, we should do this and usually don't. It's kind of on the company management if you're using, e.g. cURL, and your stack blows up and only then do you discover there's not a great "support story" there, eh? Taking infrastructure for granted is not how you get reliability. FWIW. - - - - BTW, readline and bash are maintained by one volunteer. > GNU Readline is today maintained by Chet Ramey, a Senior Technology Architect at Case Western Reserve University. Ramey also maintains the Bash shell. Both projects were first authored by a Free Software Foundation employee named Brian Fox beginning in 1988. But Ramey has been the sole maintainer since around 1994. > Ramey has now worked on Bash and Readline for well over a decade. He has never once been compensated for his work—he is and has always been a volunteer. > I asked Ramey what it was like being the sole maintainer of software that so many people use. He said that millions of people probably use Bash without realizing it (because every Apple device runs Bash), which makes him worry about how much disruption a breaking change might cause. But he’s slowly gotten used to the idea of all those people out there. He said that he continues to work on Bash and Readline because at this point he is deeply invested and because he simply likes to make useful software available to the world. https://twobithistory.org/2019/08/22/readline.html https://twobithistory.org/2019/08/22/readline.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20772053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20772053
- cwyers 7y agoI don't really think it depends on people working for free. The salary of a single person working on curl could be absorbed by any of a dozen companies (or foundations, like the Linux Foundation or Apache) without blinking. And I don't think there's enough pieces of software like this to really change the math. Yes, right now, there are places where work isn't getting funded, but if that lack of funding ever actually causes critical work to go undone and then get noticed, the money comes out. OpenSSL and Heartbleed showed us that. People have noticed that the ways that this money gets disbursed tends to concentrate power away from the community and towards commercial interests (which is where I think a lot of the systemd hate really comes from, the fact that Red Hat is making those decisions and not the community), but the money seems to be there for infrastructure projects in the long run.
- peterwwillis 7y agoIt's not like we don't like money. We just don't want to be told how to write the software and what we can do with it. Nobody's willing to pay us to do whatever we want. The only way for us to do whatever we want is to own the software, by making it independently, and releasing it as free/open source software. Every free software project you can think of was already created by a company as a proprietary product, but was not released as free software/open source. We had to write them on our own time for no money, because companies have never wanted to pay to publish them [and also relinquish control of them]. I still work on projects all the time that would be fantastic to open source, but the company doesn't want to spend the time or money to put it through lawyers, clean up the code, release it, and maintain it for the community. (they are invariably unwilling to release control of their own project to the community at large) Occasionally a technology group will get buy-in from an SVP that this is a competitive advantage, and a project actually becomes open source, but there's still tons of red tape, and it's still owned by the company. You have to fork it to be able to do anything of your own with it, and then nobody will use your fork.
- gerbilly 7y agoIt's not just through open source contributions that internet users work for free, either. One example is google translate, which encourages you to correct the suggested translation.
- verisimilitudes 7y agoIt's very telling that the word copyleft hasn't appeared in this thread nor in the submitted article. I use the AGPLv3 for most of my software and it's a feature that large corporations horrified of contributing back fear it. I'm not exploited, because I use a license that doesn't allow me to be exploited. No one using a permissive license, which are pushed primarily by corporations that slander the GPL I think, has any right to complain about being exploited, in my opinion. Copyleft is good and copyleft software still gets paid support and other things; as many companies have found, it's also a good means to release Free Software that people will still pay for, in the form of license exceptions, even.
- carapace 7y agoI'm a Bucky Fuller fanboy. He calculated that we would have enough technology to make our current economic system obsolete by sometime in the 1970's. That has already happened, but we have, in general, failed to notice. The advancement of automation should lead to a post-historical quasi-utopia, and our biggest problem will be sorting out our personal baggage. (Like Star Trek but without FTL and teleporters.) From my POV, charging money for copies of software is regressive and foolish.
- navigatesol 7y ago>From my POV, charging money for copies of software is regressive and foolish. Curious if you have any literature expounding on this idea; it's hard for me to wrap my head around. Is the idea to use software as a tool to provide the product, not as the product itself?
- carapace 7y agoI have a few moldy old blog posts but nothing worth linking to, sorry. I should probably take the time to write up a proper screed. Meanwhile, I'll try to explain where I'm coming from. Briefly, it makes sense to me to get paid to write software to solve some new problem; but once it has been written, I feel it would be venal (at this time in history) to refuse other people the use of it unless they give me a set amount of money. It costs me nothing and adds value to their lives, presumably, so why wouldn't I let them copy and use it for free? (It also makes sense to me to pay for support if I need it, and not to use software I can't repair myself if support is unavailable.) In more detail, I see automation as having its highest goal in the transformation of civilization to a better mode. Technology doesn't solve the human condition, but it does alter the set of daily problems with which we must cope. Bucky calculated that we would be able to work for two years and then retire having paid for our living expenses for the rest of our lives in those two years, and this by sometime in the 1970's. The catch is that we have to align our technology with our needs efficiently. He said: > Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before - that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. In this scenario your problem is what to do with your free time, not how to get paid for writing/maintaining software, eh? Restrictions on copying bit-patterns create an artificial scarcity and delay the arrival of this techno-secular Golden Age. That's why I call it regressive. It is foolish to predicate your business-model on prevention of copying of data (software or media) because then you set up an open-ended source of additional overhead (cost of DRM) and bullshit (DRM).
- marknadal 7y agoIf you don't want companies using your tech, just use (A)GPL or anything from Richard Stallman. But there are some of us who believe in Open Source[1] and giving value to the world, including companies. So please stop bullying us into being a victim culture, we're not. Besides, scientific research over the decades has shown that Open Source produces valuable work specifically because it is unpaid creative work, and when pay is introduced, quality drops. Here's a good summary video of the studies: https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc [1] Disclosure: I work on Open Source full time now because 8M people use my tech ( https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun ), but I do not charge for it and previously had to do it in my spare time (it is only its success that has lead to me being able to work on it full time - not the other way around).
- tome 7y agoThat's amazing. How do you fund it without charging for it?
- marknadal 7y agoSweat & tears with side gigs until the OSS became popular enough that I then tried raising VC money. Raising money was extremely hard, but it worked after years of trying. I then moved out of state to somewhere insanely cheap, so I could survive & build for years more. Now we're finally doing well enough that I've moved to SF to hopefully make enough connections for the next stage! Do you have any OSS projects yourself? :)
- tracker1 7y agoI'd suggest that most people writing open-source code are doing it while working for a company and it's part of their regular work days. There are also a lot of projects that should be better supported and funded. It's a mix of both.
- ken 7y agoIsn’t that true of most industries? The shirt on your back cost only $10 because it was made by a kid in Bangladesh for pennies. The tunnel under the city cost millions more than planned, and somebody will have to eat that cost. Your theatre program has a page of 6-digit donors because ticket prices don’t cover half the cost of producing a show. Nobody likes to admit the true cost of anything.
- gitgud 7y agoIn my opinion, software is slightly different, it's much easier to waste time on because the end product can be duplicated infinitely for free. I guess this makes software, on average, much more costly...
- alexellisuk 7y agoI wrote a post on The Five Pressures of Leadership in Open Source and can relate to what the author is talking about having done this for several years and now without any pay. https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/ https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/
- Vibor131 7y agoyes
- ineedasername 7y agoWell, it's not quite free, it has benefits like reputation that in theory could lead to better employment opportunities, though I'm not sure how well that holds up in practice. It would be interesting to do a study on it. Of course the results could show a negative as well: those dedicated to open source projects focus less of their time and energy on their career responsibilities.
- 3xblah 7y agoContrast this with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20987628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20987628
- traverseda 7y agoHow about duel-licensing your work AGPL and commercial? You can give back to the open-source community, but profit-motivated entities can pay for a license. There is one significant barrier stopping me from doing that on my own (meager) projects, and it's that a scheme like that would require contributors to sign a CLA, a whole kettle of fish I'm not really prepared to deal with on my own.
- yellowarchangel 7y agoFOSS has always been a give and take. You use FOSS every day in your daily life from software on your phone, your computer, maybe even your microwave is using FOSS! No one has to do FOSS! It's a give and take, you take, so there's no harm in wanting to contribute back. It's about freedom, passion, getting your work out there for the benefit of humanity. Can you be sponsored / paid? Sure! Are you obligated to work for anyone or do what they want? No! It's is just impossible for big companies to pay every FOSS developer everywhere. When I install create-react-app, it downloads thousands upon thousands of libraries, from thousands of developers. Do each of them get a fraction of a cent from the profits of my company? No. Does a developer at a job cloning a repo mean they have a moral obligation to pay the developer? No. Right now, the top companies do primarily mobile / web development, and use code probably written by thousands if not millions of developers. Splitting payment to all of them is impossible. The big projects like Blender, Krita, GNU projects... are all sponsored, and receive donations. The devs work on them for the passion, recognition, and "fun". FOSS has always been a give and take. If money is a driving force for you, getting a traditional developer job (as they're very in demand) is the best choice for that goal.
- elihu 7y agoI think the article is based on a misconception. Just because software (including source code) can be obtained by anyone at no cost does not mean the developer was not paid to create it. The important question here is "why was this software written in the first place?" If you think that the purpose of software is to make money through licensing fees, open source doesn't make any sense at all. However, if you take a contrary view that the primary purpose of software is to solve problems (with revenue generation as an optional secondary goal), then it does make sense that a developer could get paid quite well to create something they give away for free.
- Sargos 7y agoI think the open source space will benefit tremendously from DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) that direct funding for projects or new ideas of note. The most famous example is Moloch DAO which funds things ranging from entire software teams building Ethereum clients to individual positions like a test plan runner for coordination across multiple organizations. These are the types of things that are traditionally hard or impossible to get funding for as the smallest unit of funding typically falls to VCs who fund an entire company for many years. Anyone can submit a funding proposal which is akin to a business plan that doesn't aim to make money and it is voted on by members of the DAO. A lot of interesting ideas are debated and refined with the best ideas making it to the front and being funded by democratic vote. We are still within the first few years of the existence of DAOS and there are already a dozen DAOs focused on funding various aspects of tech and design with likely many more coming in the future. Open source has always had a hard time competing with corporations but with DAOs like Moloch and others the future is starting to look bright.
- YesThatTom2 7y agoWhat? People don’t know this?? (Just kidding. We take this kind of thing for granted. In reality it should keep us up at night!)
- guelo 7y agoThis problem is solved by the GPL/AGPL. Id corporations want the code then they need to contribute back, simple. But then the Silicon Valley startup culture started whining about not being able to use all that tasty free code and have produced a culture shift towards corporate friendly licenses.
- bernierocks 7y agoIf you expect money or compensation for your hard work, charge money and have a commercial license. Plenty of open source developers do this and make a living. It just seems disingenuous to me to give out your work for free, with little to no strings attached, and then expect companies to either give back or pay you money. This isn't really what the open source movement is all about. I've contributed to and release many libraries as open source. There are many companies using it, for free, and not giving me anything in return. I really don't care, because I just wanted to release something that anybody could use. I feel like the movement is starting to turn from giving code away for free to all..to giving code away to only be used in the way I see fit.
- CodexArcanum 7y agoIf only there was some way for people to live decently while working on anything they wanted to. Like, if there was some Universal way they could meet their Basic needs without having to devote all their energy towards extracting an Income out of for-profit companies or contract-for-hire schemes. Wow, then maybe there would be millions of people interested in computers who could work on all kinds of projects!
- Havoc 7y agoWhat of it? The linux literally exists because lots of people believe in something greater than "I need to be paid per line of code". If you want to reduce it to a simple transactional level like that then year...they are not getting paid. Even the article's example mentions a FOSS writer that got hired (and thus paid) literally because he is a famous FOSS writer...yet somehow he's not getting paid? Yes FOSS crew deserves more credit and perhaps money but the logic is all over the place there.
- amelius 7y agoCompared to Jeff Bezos, everybody else on the internet is working practically for free ...
- carry_bit 7y agoesr's solution to this problem is https://gitlab.com/esr/loadsharers https://gitlab.com/esr/loadsharers
- polynomial 7y agoIt's not just that it relies on some people working for free. It's that others have figured out how to profit from this free donated labour.* (*No judgements necessarily implied here, merely an observation.)
- earthboundkid 7y agoThere should be an NEA for OSS.
- xz0r 7y agoWe need to understand that open source contributors "working for free" is not in the context of market norms. There are experiments[0] indicating that people who work for free adhere to social norms and they do a far more fantastic job from what they would have when they get paid to do the same work. I myself am an open source contributor working for free and I do it to the best of my abilities even though its "free". [0] Predictably Irrational - Chapter on The cost of Social Norms.
- Pmop 7y agoAn interesting note that I often like to bring is that one might not catch the entire idea of "There's no free lunch". Follow with me. People need to eat in order to stay alive; therefore people will often spend a part of their precious time working on acquiring food. So, there's no such a thing as "people working for free". What is effectively happening is that the costs are being outsourced, either to who's working or to someone else who buys the worker his lunch.
- convefefe 7y agoIf a project starts having large companies relying on it, traditionally there have been 2 mechanisms to address this: - start a company around providing enterprise support services; ask for the large companies to provide some resources such as a part (or all) of an employee's time to work on the project, for the parts that are more dear to that company. If a company is unwilling to pay, either in the form of a support contract or employee's time, it should look at another solution. Not just because they are being disrespectful/annoying/distracting to the maintainers of the OSS project but also because it means they don't have a good contingency plan for when things go wrong. For a larger business, the value of using OSS is not to save money, it's to get the right level of customization for specific needs.
- dbuder 7y agoThis would never fly but my suggestion is to change to a new form of the GPL that says mostly the same things except there is a list of organisations (FAANG, Oracle, MS, various governments) and they cannot use it unless they pay a fairly significant fee and list some large fines for avoiding this. I'm aware that these companies make contributions to OSS, it's just not nearly enough and they are the cause of many of our needs for OSS.