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It's frustrating to me, watching this culture we've built where developers feel they need to be ashamed of making money from their work. There is absolutely no
by jasonkester 6y ago
It's frustrating to me, watching this culture we've built where developers feel they need to be ashamed of making money from their work. There is absolutely no reason for you to feel the need to justify building a business off of your software product, but I can completely understand why you do.
Our "group" spends so much time and effort indoctrinating its members on this idea that profiting from your skills is a bad thing, and that the only true way to be a developer is to give your work away for free as Open Source. Even silly things like negotiating for a market rate salary from your employer are frowned upon as caring only for money.
But that's all backwards. There are good reasons to release your work product as Open Source, and those all share the quality that they give you or your business some tangible benefit. So it's simple: do the benefits of open sourcing your thing outweigh the downside? If yes, go for it. If no, don't. But don't spend even a second worrying about whether it's the "right" thing to do for silly moral reasons.
If there was one thing I could change about our industry, it would be to remove the 5 year Open Source Indoctrination brainwashing session you need to go through at University before entering it. Because we'd spend a lot less time being taken advantage of later in life.
- swat535 6y agoThe OP is isn't ashamed but more frustrated because he wanted to do good for the world and is disappointed by the fact that he may not be able to now because gree corporations like Amazon will take all the hard earned work of contributors and profit from it, thus breaking the spirit of open source. At least that's how I interpreted his comment..
- eins1234 6y agoYeah, I think the fundamental problem we're seeing here is how difficult it is for creators of open source projects to effectively capture the value they create in the world, especially at the higher end of the scale of _extremely_ popular projects that gain widespread adoption and create a mind-blowing amount of value, like Elasticsearch. I would argue that by releasing a project as open source, we create more value in society than by releasing as proprietary. An ideal society imo should distribute rewards relative value created in order to incentivize and maximize value creation. Our society does a pretty good job of rewarding and incentivizing value creation for proprietary projects, but seems to do a horrible job of incentivizing value creation through open source projects. I think it's in society's best interest for open source creators to be rewarded every bit as handsomely for creating value in the world as creators of proprietary projects, if not more, so we can incentivize the creation of more open source projects.
- shawnz 6y ago> I would argue that by releasing a project as open source, we create more value in society than by releasing as proprietary. > An ideal society imo should distribute rewards relative value created in order to incentivize and maximize value creation. Isn't that exactly the point of capitalism and the reason why proprietorship is possible?
- shawnz 6y agoHow is it contrary to the spirit of open source if greedy corporations like Amazon use their market forces to spread your work to a bigger audience? That is exactly in the spirit of open source, which is what I believe the parent poster is saying.