8 ms·

I 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 misunders

• helpPeople 7y ago
  I'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 ago
    It 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.
  • unsined 7y ago
    My 2 cents: keep supporting it for free for a little bit longer, and then if there's no way to keep managing it yourself, make the leap and monetize. If people don't like ads/paying and leave, then you'll at least have a large userbase that can recover.
  • xenadu02 7y ago
    There's a balance. People might _say_ they want more content but sometimes when you give it to them they get bored.
• TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  > most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for Then why does my employer pay me even for the small bugfixes I make to their code?
  • mankyd 7y ago
    Because you go on to fix more than one bug. And add features. etc.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • dashwav 7y ago
    Because their business model can't rely on the interest and free-time of others, so they are willing to pay you for your continued "interest" in their codebase. They aren't paying you for those bugfixes, rather for your ability to available to do those bugfixes immediately
• benologist 7y ago
  What corporations rely on is thousands of parallel endeavors surfacing the best ideas and educating and training programmers from which they will take, use, hire, profit, save, all for free. The stuff they don't use and the years of learning how to invent successful stuff is every bit as important as the failures. The successes can only be built by salvaging good ideas and abandoning bad ideas from the failures and obsolete successes. You pretty much have to demonstrate how you continue learning on Github just to get an interview. Vital projects are not ok financially and we're starting to find out when they get repurposed as malware, or go unsupported despite being a dependency for a double-digit percentage of the internet. Most of the world is default-excluded from creating brilliant programmers because their parents have zero hundreds of dollars, let alone thousands, to subsidize a Stallman, Gates or Torvalds for the rest of us. We are subsidizing corporations and they are racing to see who can hoard the most hundreds of billions of dollars.
• samirillian 7y ago
  > Nobody is doing anything they don't want to do. This is such a red herring. There are plenty of ways we can look at this situation that don't involve unreserved consent.
  • rhizome 7y ago
    Hey, you chose to walk outside, you didn't have to walk under that piano being lifted into the apartment building with a weak rope.
• rhizome 7y ago
  Nobody's saying it has to be, uh...what's the name of a profitable internet company that isn't Facebook? But making demands on people who are working for free is bad manners. I don't care if you think the internet changes everything, it's still possible to be an asshole. My off the cuff solution is for project owners to add a status flag to their issue trackers: PAID. Anybody can submit a bug as PAID, but it costs $50,000-100,000 to do so, per bug. And no private fixes: there is one version and everybody gets the benefit. No badgering on ETAs either. If Ford thinks it has value, then the developer should get some of that value, and $100K for a suitable patchlevel of cURL might even be a low estimate.
  • kfrzcode 7y ago
    $50k-100k seems a bit high for a bugfix.... else I'm desperately undervaluing my worth in salary negotiations
    • Kalium 7y ago
      High for salary, yes. High for buying enterprise support on mission-critical software? Perhaps the value might be different.
      • jsty 7y ago
        I was about to comment that most customers might expect more support than a bugfix for a $100k support contract, then I remembered my last few interactions with enterprise software vendors. If anything, it'd probably exceed expectations.
      • kfrzcode 7y ago
        Good point - though I'd argue anything mission-critical should never rely on external SME contractors being hired to fix one-off bugs.. :shrug:
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
• svavs 7y ago
  > Nobody is doing anything they don't want to do. Nobody is forced to build open source software. Many job postings list OSS contributions as a requirement / desirable for employment. So, I'm not sure if your statement holds up. I personally know developers that contribute to OSS because of this. And many that have burnt out because of the constant need to contribute. Most OSS contributors do it for fun - but there is a section that do it because it's becoming part of the interview / job hunting process.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • miguelmota 7y ago
    > Many job postings list OSS contributions as a requirement / desirable for employment. Well employers simply want to see your portfolio and coding abilities, and open public code is the easiest way to screen candidates. It's not the most ideal way of checking since there can be many good candidates that don't write OSS for fun but I suppose it's a trade off the employers are making. If you can demonstrate your coding abilities through blogging or other mediums other than OSS than that's a good way to show you know what you're talking about. If you write OSS on the side then of course that's a bonus but definitely not a requirement. I tend to write OSS for fun but I don't feel obligated to fix issues if I don't have the time or resources unless they offer payment. Anyone can simply fork the projects and fix it themselves.
    • Draiken 7y ago
      I've seen many job adverts that specifically cited "seeing Github contributions" as a requirement. I don't see how that is not enforcing free work. You could say that you can choose to not apply to that company, but not everyone lives on SF and has tons of offers to choose from. It becomes this unspoken rule that to work on many companies you have to contribute to OSS (preferably on Github). If you really need a job, you can't really pick and choose.
      • boring_twenties 7y ago
• agumonkey 7y ago
  There's an issue though. You spend time as you please and its fine, but ultimately current society revolves on exchanging services in a semi quantifiable manner (transactions at price). You cannot live on free contributions. I find this hybrid situation too paradoxical.
  • PeterStuer 7y ago
    What makes you think a society relying on margin maximizing businesses is the better choice?
    • agumonkey 7y ago
      I'm not putting one above the other, I'm saying the right now you cannot live out of contribution. It's not a standalone option. I wish we could all contribute improvements, as you say, there are high chances that it would lead to a better society overall.
  • dumbfoundded 7y ago
    How is it different than any other sort of hobby or volunteering?
    • dkersten 7y ago
      Most hobbies don’t provide potentially large financial upside to some corporation who is unwilling to give you something in return. If my hobby is to bake cakes, there isn’t typically some corporation making money off my cakes.
      • wvenable 7y ago
        If your hobby was making cake designs and you share them on the Internet to whomever wants them with a license that allows even businesses to use your designs then we are right back where we started. That's still a perfectly valid hobby. P.S. You give away your designs because everyone else does and you get this big collection of free cake designs to bake. That's worth more to you in your cake baking hobby than selling your designs and making it a business. Invariably someone comes along and sees all this huge body of cake designs and says "This collection is worth money, you should be rich" and completely misunderstands the whole situation.
• davnicwil 7y ago
  > most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for I agree with your general thrust but on a tangent, this isn't true and isn't the right way to think about software contributions, even 'trivial' ones. A trivial change seems low value to you because you wouldn't have to spend much time at all doing the same thing yourself. To see its market value, you have to view it from the perspective of the average person - how long would it take them to make that change? Answer: a very, very long time. They'd have to learn the fundamentals of programming first. The value of something isn't how long it takes to do it in isolation. It also factors in how long it took to get to the position where you could do it at all.
  • wvenable 7y ago
    I actually completely agree with you; the value isn't how long it takes or how much effort goes into it -- it's how much it's worth to the user. The problem is that most contributions, individually, just aren't worth that much to a users individually. For example, how much would I personally for a fix to a graphical glitch fixed in the Dolphin emulator? Think how hard that is to quantify! Is it worth $20? It it worth $0.00001 over thousands of users? Is it not worth anything because nobody even noticed it? If there was a dollar amount attached to it, would it ever get fixed at all? Maybe it's value is too low to bother now that we've quantified it that way; new features are worth so much more. Even if you sell something for what's it worth to the end user, it might not be worth doing. Most of my open source projects fall in that category: It's worth maybe $20 to an end user, and there might be handful of users, and that's definitely less than my hours are worth to make it. But that's why it's not a business.
    • davnicwil 7y ago
      A very good point and an angle I'd not considered to what you were saying. What I said of course assumes that the result of the change is worth the effort in and of itself. Usually true for a product managed by a business, potentially less true when the implementer simply chooses whatever they want to change in an open source project.
    • dwild 7y ago
• turk73 7y ago
  I think without the Euro social safety net system that open source would totally collapse.
• Nasrudith 7y ago
  It seems to me to be major permission culture speaking that shows they just don't get a culture other than monetizing every little snippet by prior agreement and getting lawyers involved. It is a very media culture with their excesses and it shows. When really the open source software is about making it easier to work with across jobs so that everyone doesn't need to tediously reinvent the wheel ad nausuem or jump through hoops.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• commandlinefan 7y ago
  > aren't worth enough individually to charge for. The downside I see is that leads to a lot of “just good enough” solutions out there. There are things like the Spring “framework” that kind of sort of almost do something useful but add conceptual overhead and leaning time and subtract troubleshoot-ability in exchange for not much, but enough that the people in charge push you to use it since it’s free anyway. On the one hand, if not for open source, Unix, vi, grep, awk, sed, lex, yacc and bash would all be long dead and buried now - there was a time before I came across Linux that I was starting to try to implement all of these myself in DOS because they were so useful and there was no available equivalent. On the other hand, if not for open source, I wonder if we ever would have gotten PHP or Java or a lot of the monstrosities that hang off of them like Zend and Hibernate.
• banannaise 7y ago
  > Nobody is doing anything they don't want to do. And yet, one party is making all the profit, and a different party is putting in all of the work. That seems like a non-ideal situation?