5 ms·

How do you solve for 'work for 5 years on open source project, get it to some degree of popularity, watch AWS making a service out of your code without paying y

by pacala 6y ago

How do you solve for 'work for 5 years on open source project, get it to some degree of popularity, watch AWS making a service out of your code without paying you a dime'?

bobblywobbles 6y ago
A new licensing model where it's prohibitive to make a profit off of this work.
- pacala 6y ago
  The more restrictive the license, the more it drives potential users and collaborators away. That being said, do you have a concrete licensing model in mind?
  - wolco 6y ago
    The Unity licease works. I think any licease that takes 50% of revenue would be fair to both parties with a minimum for the small user.
    - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
      50% of revenue might make sense for Unity, where Unity provides clear value. But it absolutely would not make sense for some small library that gets used for a few operations. It also would not make sense for high profit work. Personally I’m seeking an end where everyone shares basically everything they do and no one extracts anything out of the duplication and re use of information.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - pacala 6y ago
        That end is incredibly sad. We still have to pay our mortgage and our dentists, but can't ask for a fair pay for our highly skilled work. I guess we deserve the ad-based monetization model that has taken over the world. Brave new world, let's shill for megacorps with all the clickbait we can possibly muster.
        TaylorAlexander 6y ago
        This is a misunderstanding of my goal. Even if we share everything we can there is always novel work someone needs done, and we can get paid to do it. But also if we share everything we can then most of life will become much cheaper. My end goal is to reduce the marginal cost of living to near zero and then arrange society to provide for everyone. In that case you wouldn’t need to pay the dentist or the mortgage. But IP restrictions add costs everywhere, and those costs must be eliminated. Perhaps we can’t eliminate a mortgage, but we can make your car cheaper to repair and we can make the goods you need much cheaper. Remember my goal is to make life better for all. And I know it is counter intuitive. That’s why I say we need economists to study it. But the goal isn’t sad, the goal is to thrive. The status quo, where a majority of people slave away their entire lives even in the wealthiest nation on earth... that is sad.
        kd5bjo 6y ago
        > But also if we share everything we can then most of life will become much cheaper. This is an extraordinary claim that demands actual evidence. Eliminating IP costs might make things cheaper, but physical goods (like food) will still need material, energy, and labor inputs to produce for the forseeable future. How do you plan to bring these costs down to “near zero”? If you want economists to study this, you’ll need to convince them it’s plausible. That requires at least some back-of-the-envelope reasoning from data that already exists, even if it’s not a perfect example of the policies you’re advocating. There are records from times & places where IP law was either nonexistent or unenforced; what do they say about your theories? If you expect things to be different this time, what leads you to think that (with specifics)?
      - thu2111 6y ago
        You're looking for the GPL. Richard Stallman shared your end goal. The GPL has been in decline for a long time though; most people concluded it was a bad idea.
        TaylorAlexander 6y ago
        The GPL does not solve our cultural problems. We’ve got to be doing advocacy for open collaboration and study its effects on our economic systems. If people do not understand the importance of open source the license won’t do much to help. And you’re right that GPL has its detractors. It’s highly restrictive. I use CC0/BSD licenses now. It’s perhaps overly permissive but it’s good to experiment.
- kd5bjo 6y ago
  And without any intellectual property rights, what prevents someone from simply ignoring the license?
  - andi999 6y ago
    Exactly! Only because of IP rights you can enforce a license.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
TaylorAlexander 6y ago
Thank you for your question. I want to challenge your assumptions without sounding combative, and provide what I think is a solution that prevents the conflict from existing in the first place. First of all I will point out that if one individual creates something useful and then a major service provider picks it up, this can mean very good things for society. If the service is good, hopefully AWS can provide it to many customers and help many people gain access to the utility this creative person has helped realize. There are situations where the big company disturbs the project so much it fails, but I assume you’re actually asking what happens when someone else profits off of your work. Well in the theoretical I am also imagining that all parties share. This would mean that even if AWS takes on the code and sells cloud services with it, they would only be competing against other cloud providers who could provide an identical service. That is to say there is no one way source code exchange, it should be mutual. In this case, I would argue society only stands to gain from AWS entering the fray. It is a pure positive and not a dilemma directly. Then there is the question of the individual. This one individual worked hard on something for five years and then a big company swooped in and took the profit they could have made. But if it is open source in my theoretical then anyone could have swooped in at any time, and the creator should have known that was a possibility. They never should have sunk more effort in to the project than they were comfortable with knowing an alternative provider could have taken over the market. That creative person should instead have joined groups of other engineers working on projects that people need. Perhaps they contribute to a project that eventually gets taken up by AWS, but it would not damage their livelihood as they would just shift focus to another. We play by the rules we’re given. In a society where everyone shares, creative projects do not strictly belong to one individual. We would not make choices that exposed us to risks we did not in some way accept. Some would say that without this person being willing to sink five years in to something for their own profit, they would never be creative and this would be a loss for society. But I don’t believe that. I’m two and a half years in to a project that I’ve licensed CC0 & BSD. Anyone could swoop in at any time and bring it to production, potentially earning great profit. And I would find it a great honor if someone did that. So you see, the creative drive exists outside of the need for profit. As far as how people survive - there is a great deal of work that cannot be digitally duplicated. You can pirate a musicians albums but you can’t pirate a live show. In a world where there was no IP restrictions and we all shared, people would find income doing novel work, instead of duplicating something someone had already done. One good hack to this is to automatically provide for everyone. Universal basic services. Then there’s no starving artists. Sidebar: IP laws are not strictly necessary to enforce this. You are not decent to your neighbor because the law requires it. If society values open source and collaboration and boycotts those who would use IP law selfishly, we can accomplish this all with no change in laws. Some kind of union system can help enforce these boycotts and formalize their terms. Though some laws do need to change to reduce the benefits of playing selfishly.

by pacala 6y ago

How do you solve for 'work for 5 years on open source project, get it to some degree of popularity, watch AWS making a service out of your code without paying you a dime'?

bobblywobbles 6y ago

A new licensing model where it's prohibitive to make a profit off of this work.

pacala 6y ago
The more restrictive the license, the more it drives potential users and collaborators away. That being said, do you have a concrete licensing model in mind?
- wolco 6y ago
  The Unity licease works. I think any licease that takes 50% of revenue would be fair to both parties with a minimum for the small user.
  - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
    50% of revenue might make sense for Unity, where Unity provides clear value. But it absolutely would not make sense for some small library that gets used for a few operations. It also would not make sense for high profit work. Personally I’m seeking an end where everyone shares basically everything they do and no one extracts anything out of the duplication and re use of information.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - pacala 6y ago
      That end is incredibly sad. We still have to pay our mortgage and our dentists, but can't ask for a fair pay for our highly skilled work. I guess we deserve the ad-based monetization model that has taken over the world. Brave new world, let's shill for megacorps with all the clickbait we can possibly muster.
      - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
        This is a misunderstanding of my goal. Even if we share everything we can there is always novel work someone needs done, and we can get paid to do it. But also if we share everything we can then most of life will become much cheaper. My end goal is to reduce the marginal cost of living to near zero and then arrange society to provide for everyone. In that case you wouldn’t need to pay the dentist or the mortgage. But IP restrictions add costs everywhere, and those costs must be eliminated. Perhaps we can’t eliminate a mortgage, but we can make your car cheaper to repair and we can make the goods you need much cheaper. Remember my goal is to make life better for all. And I know it is counter intuitive. That’s why I say we need economists to study it. But the goal isn’t sad, the goal is to thrive. The status quo, where a majority of people slave away their entire lives even in the wealthiest nation on earth... that is sad.
        kd5bjo 6y ago
        > But also if we share everything we can then most of life will become much cheaper. This is an extraordinary claim that demands actual evidence. Eliminating IP costs might make things cheaper, but physical goods (like food) will still need material, energy, and labor inputs to produce for the forseeable future. How do you plan to bring these costs down to “near zero”? If you want economists to study this, you’ll need to convince them it’s plausible. That requires at least some back-of-the-envelope reasoning from data that already exists, even if it’s not a perfect example of the policies you’re advocating. There are records from times & places where IP law was either nonexistent or unenforced; what do they say about your theories? If you expect things to be different this time, what leads you to think that (with specifics)?
    - thu2111 6y ago
      You're looking for the GPL. Richard Stallman shared your end goal. The GPL has been in decline for a long time though; most people concluded it was a bad idea.
      - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
        The GPL does not solve our cultural problems. We’ve got to be doing advocacy for open collaboration and study its effects on our economic systems. If people do not understand the importance of open source the license won’t do much to help. And you’re right that GPL has its detractors. It’s highly restrictive. I use CC0/BSD licenses now. It’s perhaps overly permissive but it’s good to experiment.
kd5bjo 6y ago
And without any intellectual property rights, what prevents someone from simply ignoring the license?
- andi999 6y ago
  Exactly! Only because of IP rights you can enforce a license.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

TaylorAlexander 6y ago

Thank you for your question. I want to challenge your assumptions without sounding combative, and provide what I think is a solution that prevents the conflict from existing in the first place. First of all I will point out that if one individual creates something useful and then a major service provider picks it up, this can mean very good things for society. If the service is good, hopefully AWS can provide it to many customers and help many people gain access to the utility this creative person has helped realize. There are situations where the big company disturbs the project so much it fails, but I assume you’re actually asking what happens when someone else profits off of your work. Well in the theoretical I am also imagining that all parties share. This would mean that even if AWS takes on the code and sells cloud services with it, they would only be competing against other cloud providers who could provide an identical service. That is to say there is no one way source code exchange, it should be mutual. In this case, I would argue society only stands to gain from AWS entering the fray. It is a pure positive and not a dilemma directly. Then there is the question of the individual. This one individual worked hard on something for five years and then a big company swooped in and took the profit they could have made. But if it is open source in my theoretical then anyone could have swooped in at any time, and the creator should have known that was a possibility. They never should have sunk more effort in to the project than they were comfortable with knowing an alternative provider could have taken over the market. That creative person should instead have joined groups of other engineers working on projects that people need. Perhaps they contribute to a project that eventually gets taken up by AWS, but it would not damage their livelihood as they would just shift focus to another. We play by the rules we’re given. In a society where everyone shares, creative projects do not strictly belong to one individual. We would not make choices that exposed us to risks we did not in some way accept. Some would say that without this person being willing to sink five years in to something for their own profit, they would never be creative and this would be a loss for society. But I don’t believe that. I’m two and a half years in to a project that I’ve licensed CC0 & BSD. Anyone could swoop in at any time and bring it to production, potentially earning great profit. And I would find it a great honor if someone did that. So you see, the creative drive exists outside of the need for profit. As far as how people survive - there is a great deal of work that cannot be digitally duplicated. You can pirate a musicians albums but you can’t pirate a live show. In a world where there was no IP restrictions and we all shared, people would find income doing novel work, instead of duplicating something someone had already done. One good hack to this is to automatically provide for everyone. Universal basic services. Then there’s no starving artists. Sidebar: IP laws are not strictly necessary to enforce this. You are not decent to your neighbor because the law requires it. If society values open source and collaboration and boycotts those who would use IP law selfishly, we can accomplish this all with no change in laws. Some kind of union system can help enforce these boycotts and formalize their terms. Though some laws do need to change to reduce the benefits of playing selfishly.