8 ms·

Over the course of my life the tinfoil to warranted concern has been the general trend. Mostly in areas where unchecked ambition for control, power, and influe

Over the course of my life the tinfoil to warranted concern has been the general trend. Mostly in areas where unchecked ambition for control, power, and influence have allowed greed to convince people to do evil unto others. The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying. It's the creation of new, useful information that needs to be incentivized; that's where UBI or some other hire more public works creators / maintainers would be good. The hardware still matters too, and much of why _that_ is under attack are greedy actors who want to have a cartel of control and manipulation; so that they own all things and can have them work against end users.

qz2 6y ago
That is how Amazon is growing. I fear it. They have managed to push into lots of vertical markets and even critical infrastructure now.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
samatman 6y ago
We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough. Might not be able to pay out a quarter million a year like the FAAAM crew does, but we need a bunch of jobs paying half that to write and maintain open source. If it isn't competitive with the other options, it won't attract the best people. I don't have a plan here. I found my niche but, like most of them, it isn't scalable. But we have to keep plotting if we want something sustainable.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  Two things: 1) you'd still budget 125k a man-year? Why? That's only needed for devs in SV, NYC, London and other places with mad rent, besides - all you're gonna get in these places are fresh university grads and hipsters, not seasoned people with actual experience that tells them to not use a two months old JS framework for something that is supposed to live long. 2) Why limit it to USA? Other countries have decent programmers too, with way lower cost of employment. 60k is going to fetch you quality in Germany, 30k in Eastern Europe. Besides, the best way to finance all of this, other than pressuring government to procure only/preferred open source is some rich startup exiter putting a couple billion dollars into some sort of trust fund and pay the development from the interest.
  - playing_colours 6y ago
    60k, even in EUR (about 71k USD) will not give you quality in Germany. A senior developer in Berlin is about EUR 85k, and may go up to 120k for strong tech leads.
- noworriesnate 6y ago
  This is something I've been thinking about a lot. Most of my ideas have been variations of creating a scholarship fund where interest from the initial investment goes to pay for continued development on a specific project. The big question though is how to run the investment without it being wasted on people aren't helping the project at all. Some notes (I'm planning on eventually writing a blog post on this subject): - You probably need to pay people differently depending on whether they're the maintainer or a minor contributor - There needs to be a balance of power between users and the maintainer. A simple balance could be, the maintainer is dictator for life (or until they lay down the mantle) but compensation is based on number of users. - Maybe compensation is done on a per-feature basis, e.g., users put a bounty on a feature and the interest money doubles that bounty.
- eruleman 6y ago
  Good news: Crypto created the new business model for open source software. Naval: "Ironic that the most monetizeable code in the world is now open source (running on blockchains). OSS has the best business model." https://twitter.com/naval/status/867860551522598912 https://twitter.com/naval/status/867860551522598912
  - wmf 6y ago
    That only works if you're willing to attach a scam to your software and it gives you no incentive to work on the software since it doesn't generate value.
  - geofft 6y ago
    They created a new business model for a new type of open source software. It doesn't do anything for all the existing types of open source software. Nobody is going to turn glibc into a blockchain.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      That's just a sign of glibc being stuck in the wrong millennium more than anything else. Add a couple functions to create ERC20 tokens and add the EVM as a supported architecture and I'm sure that can change. It's high time to remove those unsafe APIs like strcpy and printf that cause CVEs all the time and refocus effort on things that actually matter.
      - romanoderoma 6y ago
        Yeah like add features nobody uses for real and remove functions that will break thousands of programs used by millions of people That is thinking in the future, I'm sure of it
      - geofft 6y ago
        Hahaha I almost got so mad at this comment :)
- pabs3 6y ago
  There are a number of resources for FOSS funding listed here: https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Half a FAANG salary to write open source sounds pretty good.
  - rubidium 6y ago
    Ha. Yea of course it does, it’s still a better salary than most of people in the richest countries on earth make.
- Sargos 6y ago
  This is something that Gitcoin Grants solves fairly well. Quadratic funding of public goods allows open source developers to be funded full time by the community.
- est31 6y ago
  People take smaller salaries all the time if their work is for the public good. Quite many charity organizations find lots of people to man them. Universities are another example. Some people go into the industry, others become researchers. Instead of paying 10 people 100k annually, I'd rather pay 20 people 50k. That's enough to live a comfortable life in most places, including most places in US. Would it give you the people who are in tech only for the money? Probably not. Maybe you don't really want them in the first place, because even though they might be smart and work well, maybe they aren't the "best" people for the job, as they don't optimize by what's best for their users but by what's best for them.
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  Traditional Judaic society has a caste of people who do nothing but study sacred texts, and they've got a decent track record - I think it comes down to how much public admiration there is for the best open-source coders, if there's a lot it would attract a lot of talent.
  - samatman 6y ago
    Rabbis aren't the wealthiest members of traditional Jewish society. But they can afford large families, and good marriages for their children. Monks they are not.
    - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
      But importantly, a brilliant scholar of humble means is considered a desirable partner. If a brilliant coder of open-source were similarly desirable in our hypothetical future, I'm sure things would work out.
      - CryptoPunk 6y ago
        What generally makes men desirable to women is status, which can come from money, influence, or any other power to shape the world around them.
        SuoDuanDao 6y ago
        Agreed. So if we wanted to go that route (disclaimer: I think it's our best bet) we'd have to somehow confer high status to the best open-source code monks.
- FerretFred 6y ago
  We talk about the software a lot, but we mustn't overlook the hardware. Talking about, say, the next 10 years, we need to find a way of making Open Hardware truly affordable: I can't afford a Purism device but I could probably afford a PinePhone. However, that would probably not be powerful enough for me nor the average user. The Raspberry Pi is looking tempting again but it incorporates non-free BLOBs. What we need is a Open Philanthropist who'd be willing to recognise the problems and throw money at them. We recognise the problems and have ideas about solutions, but I get the feeling we're missing the tools to get up on the next rung of the ladder...
- 542354234235 6y ago
  > We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough. I think you underestimate what UBI would do, or you are only looking at very narrow direct effects. There probably wouldn’t be that many coders that would directly move to 100% coding while living off $1,500 a month UBI. But there would be lots of people already making decent money that would be able to rely on that extra $18k a year cushion to start their own business, or reduce their hours to work on a passion project. All the people that could go to school full time to learn skills useful to society because they didn’t have to also work full time. All the people that could afford to take a pay cut to take a more fulfilling job. All the people that could step back and take meaningful steps to get a higher skill job because they were not 2 paychecks away from homelessness. All the business that could push automation because they were no longer the only thing standing between thousands of minimum wage employees and poverty. Things like Wikipedia are just examples at the extreme end of the spectrum. UBI would free up an almost unimaginable amount of human potential to try new things and start the process of decoupling us from having to find some sort of drudgery for every single person in exchange for not starving.
Guthur 6y ago
Greed is not the problem, and trying to avoid it is going to frankly impossible and would require a degree of control that honestly none of us should want. The problem is that the individual is not being greedy enough for their own control. They are being greedy for many wrong things, not exclusively but many. This problem is solved with education not control, which is what stallman had tried to do. People should understand what they should be greedy for i.e. protect at all costs
- amirkdv 6y ago
  > The problem is that the individual is not being greedy enough for their own control This might be stretching the definition of greed as it's commonly understood.
  - Guthur 6y ago
    Well if we are making acting in your own best interests defined as greed, which is all that corporations are doing, then I think it's a fine generalised definition to say protecting your own control is greedy as well. Edit: for clarity I not implying negative connotations to either side. I think corporations are doing exactly what they should do. But I also think people need to be more responsible for their choices and the consequences thereof.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Education won't help with systemic problems. Even if individuals would be equally, ruthlessly greedy as corporation, you're still talking about uncoordinated individuals taking on a money making megamachine. Living by greed in the market economy is an exercise of exploiting a positive feedback loop. Larger entities benefit more from it, and the larger they are, they more they benefit.
  - Guthur 6y ago
    In a market economy you are free to not use their product. No one is forcing you to use Apple or Google or Microsoft or whomever. The problem is that there are political entities that can be manipulated to give unfair advantage and or effective monopoly control by making that cost of entry so prohibitively high. Education will ensure people will understand that political entities are no more inclined to have your best interest at heart than a corporation, there both made up people it would be moronic to think they'd act any differently.
jariel 6y ago
"The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying." Wow, no, this is a fundamental misunderstanding right at the core of the issue. The 'cost' is that of 'creating and developing'- and FYI it's not 'information' - in most cases it's 'creative works' not some kind of 'discovered knowledge'. MS Windows is a 'Developed and supported Product' - not 'Information'. In much the same way it only costs $2 to 'make' your pair of Nike shoes - it's definitely not the 'cost of parts and labour' (though that's obviously an input). Making anything working, of material value is usually an excessive grind involving a lot of people. 'Software' is not 'the implementation of some algorithm' it's all of the ugly complexities around that and the sausage-making realities of getting things to work well and play nicely with other platforms. And then of course it requires ongoing support, maintenance, docs, training, security updates etc.. That's real work. In then 1990's when we 'controlled' the software that went onto our Mac/PCs ... that we didn't have access to Windows or Adobe Photoshop source code wasn't really an excessive problem. Especially the fact that there was a clean delineation between 'OS and Software' (other than for say MS Office Products) - then it 'mostly worked'. IP protections are absolutely not going away, for good reason, the challenge is to make those work as the situation evolves, moreover, they are not the 'real problem' frankly, as excessive platform control (i.e. Apple, now Google) represent a more fundamental issue, and consider that happens while technically most of Android is open source anyhow. Even Linux is open and popular, and to this day it's still a mostly 'dev/interest' OS that most people don't use in their homes, partly due to distribution power controls by MS/Apple, but also because frankly managing massive real world deployments of 'Moms, Dads and frankly most people' who 'just want it to work' is an operational challenge as much as it is an R&D/Creative effort. Consider the basic economics involved: Even reasonably smart corporations with 'good IT' still don't generally deploy Linux to regular userbase. Why not? Because $50 a year to MS is very cheap, and frankly worth every penny in terms of value created. Any 'supported' Linux variation is going to cost 'something' anyhow, so what's the difference between '$20 a year' for some 'supported Linux variation' and '$50 a year' for MW Windows? Basically nothing. In a per capita basis, the true cost of a lot of software is marginal.
- mdale 6y ago
  Every home likely has five to six linux OS running locally; routers, TVs, phones, refrigerators, video doorbell etc.
PeterStuer 6y ago
You can try a different reasoning track. In the 'old days' software was more often than not driven by intrinsic motivation. I just loved making games that me and my friends could play. I loved writing software so writing useful apps for myself and good people around me did not need an extrinsic financial reward. Later I worked in academia for a long time. Again the research. gaining new insights in the company of other passionate and smart people was the intrinsic driver. It was not until much later, due leaving good environments for bad reasons, that external financial motivations became a driver, providing a temporary bad self justification for not leaving sooner. Even then, solving the puzzle, exceeding the clients expectation. We're still the most rewarding parts of the job. If you love what you do, money just becomes an issue in just 2 cases. (1) When your needs for living in comfort (and with that I mean the luxury of not having to worry about money) are not met. (2) When you feel others are exploiting you financially (you see disproportionate gains by others based of your work) Now. Against this background, let us return to the question of 'will software still get written if we allow the free distribution of it'? My believe is yes. While it is most certainly not for everyone, a certain type of people just love to create digital platforms and solutions. In fact their passion is now more often than not exploited, see for example the practices in the major gaming industry. There are more than enough specific needs that people will want to prioritise to offer financial incentives for their prioterization even if that means the result will become part of the commons. Current exclusive IP exploitation rights very seldom reward the creators, most often just those who have constructed layers on layers of financial instruments confining and leeching of the creative. Finally IP protection most certainly stifles innovation. It restricts forms of further creation. The question is Wether this reduction is compensated by a boon in extrinsic driven creation that would be missing in the absense of guaranteed monopolies on exploitation. My guess once again is no. Science, innovation in knowledge, has progressed for centuries through the free sharing of ideas. The Eastern electronics industry has thrived in a climate of fluid copying and absense of IP enforcement. Most of the 'major' industry investments carry disproportionate public investments through grants and incentives while still locking up all rights on the publicly funded results. We might see a different software world if copying and extending of all software was free, but not one whete creators go hungry, or innovation ceased to exist.
simonh 6y ago
The problem with that is it breaks the value signalling we get from paying for things. With commercial software, it only gets developed and supported if customers pay for it, proving that it has value to them. How do we know this as against that open source project is worth funding? How do we tell how many users it has, and what value it provides to them? Suppose we already have an open source project developing a snazwozzler, now somebody else develops a new kind of snazwozzler software with a better UI and more scalable architecture but missing some features the new developer doesn’t think are necessary. How do we tell whether to allocate resources to the old project or this new one? Customers can tell you this in a way that users can’t.
- nine_k 6y ago
  > only gets developed and supported if customers pay for it Not exactly. A feature gets developed if it brings in more money from customers, but not always because the customers are happy to pay. Consider putting ads to the software. Consider turning software to a subscription service. Consider preventing other software from interoperating with yours without a license, or at all, and locking users down on your platform. I agree that when a user votes with their money, it is a great incentive. But the way it currently works with commercial software is a bit far from a meritocratic ideal. Other mechanisms are possible (see sponsorship, Kickstarter, bounties), and I hope they will grow in popularity.

qz2 6y ago

That is how Amazon is growing. I fear it. They have managed to push into lots of vertical markets and even critical infrastructure now.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

samatman 6y ago

We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough. Might not be able to pay out a quarter million a year like the FAAAM crew does, but we need a bunch of jobs paying half that to write and maintain open source. If it isn't competitive with the other options, it won't attract the best people. I don't have a plan here. I found my niche but, like most of them, it isn't scalable. But we have to keep plotting if we want something sustainable.

mschuster91 6y ago
Two things: 1) you'd still budget 125k a man-year? Why? That's only needed for devs in SV, NYC, London and other places with mad rent, besides - all you're gonna get in these places are fresh university grads and hipsters, not seasoned people with actual experience that tells them to not use a two months old JS framework for something that is supposed to live long. 2) Why limit it to USA? Other countries have decent programmers too, with way lower cost of employment. 60k is going to fetch you quality in Germany, 30k in Eastern Europe. Besides, the best way to finance all of this, other than pressuring government to procure only/preferred open source is some rich startup exiter putting a couple billion dollars into some sort of trust fund and pay the development from the interest.
- playing_colours 6y ago
  60k, even in EUR (about 71k USD) will not give you quality in Germany. A senior developer in Berlin is about EUR 85k, and may go up to 120k for strong tech leads.
noworriesnate 6y ago
This is something I've been thinking about a lot. Most of my ideas have been variations of creating a scholarship fund where interest from the initial investment goes to pay for continued development on a specific project. The big question though is how to run the investment without it being wasted on people aren't helping the project at all. Some notes (I'm planning on eventually writing a blog post on this subject): - You probably need to pay people differently depending on whether they're the maintainer or a minor contributor - There needs to be a balance of power between users and the maintainer. A simple balance could be, the maintainer is dictator for life (or until they lay down the mantle) but compensation is based on number of users. - Maybe compensation is done on a per-feature basis, e.g., users put a bounty on a feature and the interest money doubles that bounty.
eruleman 6y ago
Good news: Crypto created the new business model for open source software. Naval: "Ironic that the most monetizeable code in the world is now open source (running on blockchains). OSS has the best business model." https://twitter.com/naval/status/867860551522598912 https://twitter.com/naval/status/867860551522598912
- wmf 6y ago
  That only works if you're willing to attach a scam to your software and it gives you no incentive to work on the software since it doesn't generate value.
- geofft 6y ago
  They created a new business model for a new type of open source software. It doesn't do anything for all the existing types of open source software. Nobody is going to turn glibc into a blockchain.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    That's just a sign of glibc being stuck in the wrong millennium more than anything else. Add a couple functions to create ERC20 tokens and add the EVM as a supported architecture and I'm sure that can change. It's high time to remove those unsafe APIs like strcpy and printf that cause CVEs all the time and refocus effort on things that actually matter.
    - romanoderoma 6y ago
      Yeah like add features nobody uses for real and remove functions that will break thousands of programs used by millions of people That is thinking in the future, I'm sure of it
    - geofft 6y ago
      Hahaha I almost got so mad at this comment :)
pabs3 6y ago
There are a number of resources for FOSS funding listed here: https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
Aeolun 6y ago
Half a FAANG salary to write open source sounds pretty good.
- rubidium 6y ago
  Ha. Yea of course it does, it’s still a better salary than most of people in the richest countries on earth make.
Sargos 6y ago
This is something that Gitcoin Grants solves fairly well. Quadratic funding of public goods allows open source developers to be funded full time by the community.
est31 6y ago
People take smaller salaries all the time if their work is for the public good. Quite many charity organizations find lots of people to man them. Universities are another example. Some people go into the industry, others become researchers. Instead of paying 10 people 100k annually, I'd rather pay 20 people 50k. That's enough to live a comfortable life in most places, including most places in US. Would it give you the people who are in tech only for the money? Probably not. Maybe you don't really want them in the first place, because even though they might be smart and work well, maybe they aren't the "best" people for the job, as they don't optimize by what's best for their users but by what's best for them.
SuoDuanDao 6y ago
Traditional Judaic society has a caste of people who do nothing but study sacred texts, and they've got a decent track record - I think it comes down to how much public admiration there is for the best open-source coders, if there's a lot it would attract a lot of talent.
- samatman 6y ago
  Rabbis aren't the wealthiest members of traditional Jewish society. But they can afford large families, and good marriages for their children. Monks they are not.
  - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
    But importantly, a brilliant scholar of humble means is considered a desirable partner. If a brilliant coder of open-source were similarly desirable in our hypothetical future, I'm sure things would work out.
    - CryptoPunk 6y ago
      What generally makes men desirable to women is status, which can come from money, influence, or any other power to shape the world around them.
      - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
        Agreed. So if we wanted to go that route (disclaimer: I think it's our best bet) we'd have to somehow confer high status to the best open-source code monks.
FerretFred 6y ago
We talk about the software a lot, but we mustn't overlook the hardware. Talking about, say, the next 10 years, we need to find a way of making Open Hardware truly affordable: I can't afford a Purism device but I could probably afford a PinePhone. However, that would probably not be powerful enough for me nor the average user. The Raspberry Pi is looking tempting again but it incorporates non-free BLOBs. What we need is a Open Philanthropist who'd be willing to recognise the problems and throw money at them. We recognise the problems and have ideas about solutions, but I get the feeling we're missing the tools to get up on the next rung of the ladder...
542354234235 6y ago
> We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough. I think you underestimate what UBI would do, or you are only looking at very narrow direct effects. There probably wouldn’t be that many coders that would directly move to 100% coding while living off $1,500 a month UBI. But there would be lots of people already making decent money that would be able to rely on that extra $18k a year cushion to start their own business, or reduce their hours to work on a passion project. All the people that could go to school full time to learn skills useful to society because they didn’t have to also work full time. All the people that could afford to take a pay cut to take a more fulfilling job. All the people that could step back and take meaningful steps to get a higher skill job because they were not 2 paychecks away from homelessness. All the business that could push automation because they were no longer the only thing standing between thousands of minimum wage employees and poverty. Things like Wikipedia are just examples at the extreme end of the spectrum. UBI would free up an almost unimaginable amount of human potential to try new things and start the process of decoupling us from having to find some sort of drudgery for every single person in exchange for not starving.

Guthur 6y ago

Greed is not the problem, and trying to avoid it is going to frankly impossible and would require a degree of control that honestly none of us should want. The problem is that the individual is not being greedy enough for their own control. They are being greedy for many wrong things, not exclusively but many. This problem is solved with education not control, which is what stallman had tried to do. People should understand what they should be greedy for i.e. protect at all costs

amirkdv 6y ago
> The problem is that the individual is not being greedy enough for their own control This might be stretching the definition of greed as it's commonly understood.
- Guthur 6y ago
  Well if we are making acting in your own best interests defined as greed, which is all that corporations are doing, then I think it's a fine generalised definition to say protecting your own control is greedy as well. Edit: for clarity I not implying negative connotations to either side. I think corporations are doing exactly what they should do. But I also think people need to be more responsible for their choices and the consequences thereof.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Education won't help with systemic problems. Even if individuals would be equally, ruthlessly greedy as corporation, you're still talking about uncoordinated individuals taking on a money making megamachine. Living by greed in the market economy is an exercise of exploiting a positive feedback loop. Larger entities benefit more from it, and the larger they are, they more they benefit.
- Guthur 6y ago
  In a market economy you are free to not use their product. No one is forcing you to use Apple or Google or Microsoft or whomever. The problem is that there are political entities that can be manipulated to give unfair advantage and or effective monopoly control by making that cost of entry so prohibitively high. Education will ensure people will understand that political entities are no more inclined to have your best interest at heart than a corporation, there both made up people it would be moronic to think they'd act any differently.

jariel 6y ago

"The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying." Wow, no, this is a fundamental misunderstanding right at the core of the issue. The 'cost' is that of 'creating and developing'- and FYI it's not 'information' - in most cases it's 'creative works' not some kind of 'discovered knowledge'. MS Windows is a 'Developed and supported Product' - not 'Information'. In much the same way it only costs $2 to 'make' your pair of Nike shoes - it's definitely not the 'cost of parts and labour' (though that's obviously an input). Making anything working, of material value is usually an excessive grind involving a lot of people. 'Software' is not 'the implementation of some algorithm' it's all of the ugly complexities around that and the sausage-making realities of getting things to work well and play nicely with other platforms. And then of course it requires ongoing support, maintenance, docs, training, security updates etc.. That's real work. In then 1990's when we 'controlled' the software that went onto our Mac/PCs ... that we didn't have access to Windows or Adobe Photoshop source code wasn't really an excessive problem. Especially the fact that there was a clean delineation between 'OS and Software' (other than for say MS Office Products) - then it 'mostly worked'. IP protections are absolutely not going away, for good reason, the challenge is to make those work as the situation evolves, moreover, they are not the 'real problem' frankly, as excessive platform control (i.e. Apple, now Google) represent a more fundamental issue, and consider that happens while technically most of Android is open source anyhow. Even Linux is open and popular, and to this day it's still a mostly 'dev/interest' OS that most people don't use in their homes, partly due to distribution power controls by MS/Apple, but also because frankly managing massive real world deployments of 'Moms, Dads and frankly most people' who 'just want it to work' is an operational challenge as much as it is an R&D/Creative effort. Consider the basic economics involved: Even reasonably smart corporations with 'good IT' still don't generally deploy Linux to regular userbase. Why not? Because $50 a year to MS is very cheap, and frankly worth every penny in terms of value created. Any 'supported' Linux variation is going to cost 'something' anyhow, so what's the difference between '$20 a year' for some 'supported Linux variation' and '$50 a year' for MW Windows? Basically nothing. In a per capita basis, the true cost of a lot of software is marginal.

mdale 6y ago
Every home likely has five to six linux OS running locally; routers, TVs, phones, refrigerators, video doorbell etc.

PeterStuer 6y ago

You can try a different reasoning track. In the 'old days' software was more often than not driven by intrinsic motivation. I just loved making games that me and my friends could play. I loved writing software so writing useful apps for myself and good people around me did not need an extrinsic financial reward. Later I worked in academia for a long time. Again the research. gaining new insights in the company of other passionate and smart people was the intrinsic driver. It was not until much later, due leaving good environments for bad reasons, that external financial motivations became a driver, providing a temporary bad self justification for not leaving sooner. Even then, solving the puzzle, exceeding the clients expectation. We're still the most rewarding parts of the job. If you love what you do, money just becomes an issue in just 2 cases. (1) When your needs for living in comfort (and with that I mean the luxury of not having to worry about money) are not met. (2) When you feel others are exploiting you financially (you see disproportionate gains by others based of your work) Now. Against this background, let us return to the question of 'will software still get written if we allow the free distribution of it'? My believe is yes. While it is most certainly not for everyone, a certain type of people just love to create digital platforms and solutions. In fact their passion is now more often than not exploited, see for example the practices in the major gaming industry. There are more than enough specific needs that people will want to prioritise to offer financial incentives for their prioterization even if that means the result will become part of the commons. Current exclusive IP exploitation rights very seldom reward the creators, most often just those who have constructed layers on layers of financial instruments confining and leeching of the creative. Finally IP protection most certainly stifles innovation. It restricts forms of further creation. The question is Wether this reduction is compensated by a boon in extrinsic driven creation that would be missing in the absense of guaranteed monopolies on exploitation. My guess once again is no. Science, innovation in knowledge, has progressed for centuries through the free sharing of ideas. The Eastern electronics industry has thrived in a climate of fluid copying and absense of IP enforcement. Most of the 'major' industry investments carry disproportionate public investments through grants and incentives while still locking up all rights on the publicly funded results. We might see a different software world if copying and extending of all software was free, but not one whete creators go hungry, or innovation ceased to exist.

simonh 6y ago

The problem with that is it breaks the value signalling we get from paying for things. With commercial software, it only gets developed and supported if customers pay for it, proving that it has value to them. How do we know this as against that open source project is worth funding? How do we tell how many users it has, and what value it provides to them? Suppose we already have an open source project developing a snazwozzler, now somebody else develops a new kind of snazwozzler software with a better UI and more scalable architecture but missing some features the new developer doesn’t think are necessary. How do we tell whether to allocate resources to the old project or this new one? Customers can tell you this in a way that users can’t.

nine_k 6y ago
> only gets developed and supported if customers pay for it Not exactly. A feature gets developed if it brings in more money from customers, but not always because the customers are happy to pay. Consider putting ads to the software. Consider turning software to a subscription service. Consider preventing other software from interoperating with yours without a license, or at all, and locking users down on your platform. I agree that when a user votes with their money, it is a great incentive. But the way it currently works with commercial software is a bit far from a meritocratic ideal. Other mechanisms are possible (see sponsorship, Kickstarter, bounties), and I hope they will grow in popularity.