4 ms·

I must say the older I get, the more unfair I perceive this to be. It really takes a saint to pour one’s heart and soul into a piece software, for free, and the

I must say the older I get, the more unfair I perceive this to be. It really takes a saint to pour one’s heart and soul into a piece software, for free, and then have the commercial benefits go to huge public companies like Google. It also seems to annihilate most challenging and interesting software work, because the expectation is now that that will be done for free and given away on GitHub. This would all be fine if we lived in a socialist world, but we don’t. My lawyer still charges me $200 per hour for a few fake hours before giving me the template document he has on his hard drive. My accountant operates very much the same. In this context it feels like more open source just makes the world more unfair. What are the best alternatives to this model? Isn’t there something in the Source Available direction that can make sense? We live in a very different world compared to 1989 when the GPL was first published.

pjc50 6y ago
> It really takes a saint to pour one’s heart and soul into a piece software, for free I hate to make a really obvious point, but if this seems like a bad deal to you, then .. don't take it? While there's lots of room for debate over "I need this job because I need the money, even though the job is bad", in this case it's very simple: there's no money. So you don't have to take the job. The modal open source project receives no money. Then there's a long tail of projects that get just enough donations to keep going, a few ones that have secured a commercial sponsor, and then one or two big enough to have a "foundation" (Mozilla, Apache). > We live in a very different world compared to 1989 when the GPL was first published Could you articulate which differences you feel are relevant please?
- danaris 6y ago
  Without attempting to put words in bjornsing's mouth, the difference that seems most relevant to me is the degree of consolidation in the corporate sphere. Since 1989, we have seen a truly staggering wave of mergers, buyouts, and corporate consolidations of all kinds, creating so many more mega-conglomerates (like Alphabet, the big cable companies, etc) than we had before. So if you wrote a piece of (good) open source code in 1989, chances were not too bad that it would get picked up and used competitively by a wide range of small-to-medium companies. If you wrote that same piece of code today, the chances are much higher that it would either be ignored altogether, or picked up and used anticompetitively by these megacorporations.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    I'm not sure about that: in 1989, commercial use of open source was almost nonexistant. "Open Source" in the modern sense didn't exist, there was only GPL which was in practice limited to academic projects and personal use by a small hacker community. Microsoft bestrode the software world like a colossus, and was using its power anticompetitively. The internet was a long way from being mainstream and was in any case extremely slow; a lot of Free Software was being distributed on tapes and floppy disks circulating among user groups. I don't think FLOSS really started significant levels of commercial use until the "LAMP" stack of the late 90s. Early internet companies picked up on Linux as a cheap alternative to Solaris or HPUX to run Apache. (I'm not sure there were massive commercial competitors on the server side? IIS? ZWS? WebSphere?) Possibly not until 2010ish that we started to believe that Microsoft's total domination of the software world might be cracking. And of course Microsoft never touched OSS back then.
    - danaris 6y ago
      I mean, I'm not the one who set the bar at 1989! I don't at all disagree that the technology landscape was such that such activity wouldn't have been nearly as broadly viable; I was merely speaking to the corporate landscape. There, while it's true that Microsoft had a lot of power due to its Windows monopoly, there was still a lot more competition and less consolidation across the board than there is today.
- dgb23 6y ago
  (Not OP) I think you are making good points. But there are other perspectives: Open source has done a ton of good. It massively accelerated technological advancements and made software development more accessible, democratic and efficient, because people depend and build on common, collaborative technologies. A lot of programmers are not in for the business. I want a decent life and not worry about money, but I don't ask for much, especially not in the material sense. The reason I love programming is because of programming itself. It is a fascinating and rewarding craft. In a perfect world, I would be focusing purely on solving problems and make the solutions available for as many people as possible.
- zokier 6y ago
  > Could you articulate which differences you feel are relevant please? (Not OP) To me the main difference is that in 80s the main way of consuming software was by having it distributed to you, which then can trigger GPL copyleft clauses. These days it is more and more common to consume software as a service, where GPL copyleft is not triggered because the software itself is never distributed.
- dsr_ 6y ago
  "don't take it" Yup. You have to pay for what you use. For some things, that's a pricetag in dollars that you can look at on your balance sheet. For all software except that cast into the public domain, that's an obligation to use it in the ways that the license requires. If the price for a library in dollars is too high, you either grit your teeth and pay it, or you find some other way to accomplish your goal within the law. If the price for software in usage rights is too high, you make the same decision.
- bjornsing 6y ago
  >> We live in a very different world compared to 1989 when the GPL was first published > Could you articulate which differences you feel are relevant please? Mostly the sheer volume of open source that’s out there. I think FOSS makes a lot of sense for stuff that’s too much work for a small team and needed by a lot of people: operating system kernels, compilers, browsers, etc. That was the stuff to work on in 1987. Today most of that layer is “done”.
ddevault 6y ago
The key insight is that FOSS doesn't make any attempt to answer that question. It has nothing to do with how you get paid, and concerns itself only with the matter of distribution and rights. It's still up to the author to come up with a viable business model if they want to utilize FOSS to create a profit, or if they want to do anything else, really. FOSS applies constraints to how you approach the problem, and offers benefits in return, but it doesn't solve the problem of business-building for you. If software can generate profits for someone else, it could have generated those profits for you. It can feel like a slap in the face when your little side project turns into profits for someone else, but ultimately that's part of the deal with FOSS. If you want to make money from it, you need to deliberately plan for it and take advantage of the profit potential yourself. You can make money in FOSS, but usually not by accident.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
> It really takes a saint to pour one’s heart and soul into a piece software, for free, and then have the commercial benefits go to huge public companies like Google. If anything, a "saint" should be writing software to benefit end users and especially for people in need or other social good. It's hard to claim sanctity when doing unpaid labor for a FAANG (making some billionaire wealthier and therefore increasing inequality). > This would all be fine if we lived in a socialist world, but we don’t. Most of breakthrough technological R&D has been paid with tax money: semiconductors, computers, satellites, GPS, GSM, radar, laser, fiber optics, telephones, batteries, Internet, airplanes. The same goes for the bulk of scientific research in the last 100 years. Not to mention funding practical needs like building roads. > What are the best alternatives to this model? One option is to demand public code for public money. In the meantime, AGPL helps a lot to keep some FAANGs at bay.

pjc50 6y ago

> It really takes a saint to pour one’s heart and soul into a piece software, for free I hate to make a really obvious point, but if this seems like a bad deal to you, then .. don't take it? While there's lots of room for debate over "I need this job because I need the money, even though the job is bad", in this case it's very simple: there's no money. So you don't have to take the job. The modal open source project receives no money. Then there's a long tail of projects that get just enough donations to keep going, a few ones that have secured a commercial sponsor, and then one or two big enough to have a "foundation" (Mozilla, Apache). > We live in a very different world compared to 1989 when the GPL was first published Could you articulate which differences you feel are relevant please?

danaris 6y ago
Without attempting to put words in bjornsing's mouth, the difference that seems most relevant to me is the degree of consolidation in the corporate sphere. Since 1989, we have seen a truly staggering wave of mergers, buyouts, and corporate consolidations of all kinds, creating so many more mega-conglomerates (like Alphabet, the big cable companies, etc) than we had before. So if you wrote a piece of (good) open source code in 1989, chances were not too bad that it would get picked up and used competitively by a wide range of small-to-medium companies. If you wrote that same piece of code today, the chances are much higher that it would either be ignored altogether, or picked up and used anticompetitively by these megacorporations.
- pjc50 6y ago
  I'm not sure about that: in 1989, commercial use of open source was almost nonexistant. "Open Source" in the modern sense didn't exist, there was only GPL which was in practice limited to academic projects and personal use by a small hacker community. Microsoft bestrode the software world like a colossus, and was using its power anticompetitively. The internet was a long way from being mainstream and was in any case extremely slow; a lot of Free Software was being distributed on tapes and floppy disks circulating among user groups. I don't think FLOSS really started significant levels of commercial use until the "LAMP" stack of the late 90s. Early internet companies picked up on Linux as a cheap alternative to Solaris or HPUX to run Apache. (I'm not sure there were massive commercial competitors on the server side? IIS? ZWS? WebSphere?) Possibly not until 2010ish that we started to believe that Microsoft's total domination of the software world might be cracking. And of course Microsoft never touched OSS back then.
  - danaris 6y ago
    I mean, I'm not the one who set the bar at 1989! I don't at all disagree that the technology landscape was such that such activity wouldn't have been nearly as broadly viable; I was merely speaking to the corporate landscape. There, while it's true that Microsoft had a lot of power due to its Windows monopoly, there was still a lot more competition and less consolidation across the board than there is today.
dgb23 6y ago
(Not OP) I think you are making good points. But there are other perspectives: Open source has done a ton of good. It massively accelerated technological advancements and made software development more accessible, democratic and efficient, because people depend and build on common, collaborative technologies. A lot of programmers are not in for the business. I want a decent life and not worry about money, but I don't ask for much, especially not in the material sense. The reason I love programming is because of programming itself. It is a fascinating and rewarding craft. In a perfect world, I would be focusing purely on solving problems and make the solutions available for as many people as possible.
zokier 6y ago
> Could you articulate which differences you feel are relevant please? (Not OP) To me the main difference is that in 80s the main way of consuming software was by having it distributed to you, which then can trigger GPL copyleft clauses. These days it is more and more common to consume software as a service, where GPL copyleft is not triggered because the software itself is never distributed.
dsr_ 6y ago
"don't take it" Yup. You have to pay for what you use. For some things, that's a pricetag in dollars that you can look at on your balance sheet. For all software except that cast into the public domain, that's an obligation to use it in the ways that the license requires. If the price for a library in dollars is too high, you either grit your teeth and pay it, or you find some other way to accomplish your goal within the law. If the price for software in usage rights is too high, you make the same decision.
bjornsing 6y ago
>> We live in a very different world compared to 1989 when the GPL was first published > Could you articulate which differences you feel are relevant please? Mostly the sheer volume of open source that’s out there. I think FOSS makes a lot of sense for stuff that’s too much work for a small team and needed by a lot of people: operating system kernels, compilers, browsers, etc. That was the stuff to work on in 1987. Today most of that layer is “done”.

ddevault 6y ago

The key insight is that FOSS doesn't make any attempt to answer that question. It has nothing to do with how you get paid, and concerns itself only with the matter of distribution and rights. It's still up to the author to come up with a viable business model if they want to utilize FOSS to create a profit, or if they want to do anything else, really. FOSS applies constraints to how you approach the problem, and offers benefits in return, but it doesn't solve the problem of business-building for you. If software can generate profits for someone else, it could have generated those profits for you. It can feel like a slap in the face when your little side project turns into profits for someone else, but ultimately that's part of the deal with FOSS. If you want to make money from it, you need to deliberately plan for it and take advantage of the profit potential yourself. You can make money in FOSS, but usually not by accident.

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

> It really takes a saint to pour one’s heart and soul into a piece software, for free, and then have the commercial benefits go to huge public companies like Google. If anything, a "saint" should be writing software to benefit end users and especially for people in need or other social good. It's hard to claim sanctity when doing unpaid labor for a FAANG (making some billionaire wealthier and therefore increasing inequality). > This would all be fine if we lived in a socialist world, but we don’t. Most of breakthrough technological R&D has been paid with tax money: semiconductors, computers, satellites, GPS, GSM, radar, laser, fiber optics, telephones, batteries, Internet, airplanes. The same goes for the bulk of scientific research in the last 100 years. Not to mention funding practical needs like building roads. > What are the best alternatives to this model? One option is to demand public code for public money. In the meantime, AGPL helps a lot to keep some FAANGs at bay.