6 ms·

I wish FSF also started caring about the developers. Free software was and is a great idea, but unintended consequence is that it also facilitates exploitation

I wish FSF also started caring about the developers. Free software was and is a great idea, but unintended consequence is that it also facilitates exploitation of software developers by big corporations who from the perspective of FSF are just users as regular people. This means they make billions off of a software who someone built in their rented flat, living a modest life, sometimes struggling with bills, meanwhile the execs spend their time choosing a new jet and on which Caribbean island this time will be a general meeting of the board. FSF should start lobbying for royalty system for developers, so that big corporations using free software should have to pay % of revenue to all contributors of open source software they are using. Individuals and small companies would be exempt.

winter_blue 6y ago
Exactly this. I love and support open source[1], but I don’t support all software being “free of cost”. [1] Not the OSI definition of it.
- winter_blue 6y ago
  Do people actually support all software being free? Note that I said above: > but I don’t support all software being “free of cost” Does anyone really support all software being free? That means developers would have to live like saints / monks, with donations to support themselves (and forgo the the 250k income that's become the standard/median in Silicon Valley today...).
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    Well, there are other ways to get income while producing software than selling the software. You can be a university professor. You can be funded by grants. You can have a job working for a non-software company that lets you produce free software for that company's use that you can also give away, while they keep paying your salary. Things like that were how open source software has been historically produced mostly, right? Heck, there could be a Universal Basic Income, and someone could choose to write the software they want while getting it. Yeah, none of these would be sufficient to produce all the software that is "needed" or wanted. So, as long as there are people willing to pay for software they can't get for free, all software won't be free. I support the idea of all software being free, including social changes that would be necessary for that to be realistic, such as serious alterations to capitalism.
    - winter_blue 6y ago
      > You can be a university professor. You can be funded by grants. I actually have a bunch of friends that I went to college with, who all have PhDs now. Getting a tenure track position is nearly impossible. Also, grants are extremely hard to get. They’re all working either: (1) as postdocs (where there is a grant funding it), or worse (2) looking for a postdoctoral or tenure-track position (or have lost a postdoc position because the grant ran out). These things are incredibly hard to do. > You can have a job working for a non-software company that lets you produce free software for that company's use that you can also give away, while they keep paying your salary. If the plan is abolish proprietary software, there’s not gonna be a lot of companies making money selling software, ie making software. So do you mean some hardware company that needs to write some specific software for its needs? I suppose there could be a world where most/all software is free (in GNU terms), but you’d end up with almost everything becoming web-based SaaS, and that would be the commercial model. (I mean, we’re already pretty close to that.) Universal basic income requires a tax base of highly productive, and high earning taxpayers. Just look at the economic contribution of software and technology companies. If the government were to take a wrecking ball to that literal economic powerhouse, how significantly would the tax base shrink by?
- teddyh 6y ago
  > I don’t support all software being “free of cost”. Stallman and the FSF agree with you; selling software is perfectly OK: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling
  - winter_blue 6y ago
    From your link: > With free software, users don't have to pay the distribution fee in order to use the software. They can copy the program from a friend who has a copy, or with the help of a friend who has network access. Or several users can join together, split the price of one CD-ROM, then each in turn can install the software. The type of “selling” that GNU is proposing here is exactly the same as asking for donations (and is a misuse of the word “sell”). Since people can resdistribute the software without limit (and someone is sure to put it up on internet), you “charging” for it is the same as asking for donations.
    - teddyh 6y ago
      If you don’t like that kind of selling, maybe this is more to your liking? https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
Exactly this. Free software has helped shift the economic power from programming experts to business people. Who cares if you are a top-class compiler expert. Compilers are a commodity anyway. You are better off if you are young, and photogenic and can start a social media app that monetizes people privacy. In addition, things have shifted to cloud, which favors bin corporations even more, and data and code is not even accessible, even theoretically, for the user. Of course big business is a fan of free software, it enables them to get for basically free, a lot of infrastructure code. Lawyers and Doctors must absolutely hold programmers in derision for undermining their own economic power.
mrob 6y ago
The goal of the FSF is "to promote computer user freedom". By "freedom" they mean the four freedoms of the Free Software definition: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Your proposal contradicts freedom 0, so the FSF cannot support it without abandoning their mission. To do so is both undesirable and unnecessary, because the alleged "exploitation of software developers" is in most cases just people doing what those developers permitted when they chose to use a permissive license. The correct solution is encouraging developers to choose more suitable Free Software licenses, and the FSF already does this by advocating copyleft licenses in most circumstances. The AGPL especially has strong protections for the four freedoms, which makes it very difficult to "exploit" developers who use it.
- varispeed 6y ago
  Big corporations sponsor FSF then this is an understandable stance as what I am proposing would hurt their bottom line. Current situation saves them huge amounts of money from spending on R&D because developers all over the world will develop something for free (believing the PR around open source) and then if something catches on, big corporation can use it of appropriate it if you will. Sometimes developers from within those companies feel bad and then ask the corporation if they could contribute something. This is then again is turned into PR piece saying that you see we give back! Best outcome for the original authors is getting hired on mediocre salary at one of those corporations or having a cool entry in CV. I think you are missing the point and my idea does not contradict user freedom as users will continue to use it for free.
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    The philosophy of freedom of open source that RMS and others have been developing pre-dates any significant big corporation sponsorship. (Many of the particular big corporations using open source now didn't even exist then). I guess you can argue they would have changed it by now but for the subsequent sponsorship. There's no real way to resolve that claim one way or the other. But it is a coherent philosophy on it's own, it's not some incoherent thing that makes sense only as self-interest of big corporations. Open source from the start as envisioned by rms and others was about creating software that users could use as they choose, including altering it as they choose and deploying it where and how they want. While they may not have envisioned the economic system that has resolved from that, all the proposals I see on HN for "not letting big corporations take advantage of developers writing open source" are about removing this freedom, making it no longer open source. So, sure, if some developers don't want to produce work that can be taken advantage of by others without payment, including big corporations -- they can stop producing open source. You shouldn't produce open source unless you want to produce open source. But that doesn't mean the definition of open source is wrong.
indymike 6y ago
A royalty system is almost in direct opposition to what the FSF has accomplished. In fact, the entire body of work that the FSF has done has been to ensure that users of software have the same rights as developers of that software. As far as execs with jets, starving developers, etc... well, the music industry and book industry have royalties and last I looked, the execs did better than most practicing musicians and authors.
gruez 6y ago
>FSF should start lobbying for royalty system for developers, so that big corporations using free software should have to pay % of revenue to all contributors of open source software they are using. Nobody's forcing them to license out their software for free. The reason why they do so is simple: they know they won't be able to make a buck off of it if it was commercial (even with the individuals/small company exemption you mentioned), and that stringent terms will only harm adoption of their project. See for instance companies unwilling to touch GPL licensed software, for instance. From the corporation/executive's view, why would they bother adopting a piece of software that has a royalty system, especially when there are alternatives? For instance, other projects that are permissively licensed, writing it themselves, or paying for a proprietary/commercial version.
- the_af 6y ago
  > The reason why they do so is simple: they know they won't be able to make a buck off of it if it was commercial That's not the reason why someone would choose a copyleft license of the kind the FSF advocates, like the GPL or one of its variants. You choose a copyleft license because you primarily care about freedom.
xyzzy123 6y ago
It's not at all clear to me that someone deriving benefit from freely given work constitutes exploitation. The creator is free to create what they want, the user is free to support them, or not. What you are not free to do is appropriate the "creation" itself.
dkjaudyeqooe 6y ago
You make the developers sound like helpless individuals unable to adopt a software licence that gives them what they want, and that need people to save them from ruin. They obviously want everyone and anyone to use their software and don't care who makes money from it, if its licenced that way. They can licence it so it excludes large corporations, or even demand recompense under certain situations, such as company size. Your attitude just sounds like you object to large corporations (and their executives) making money from free software. If it's not your software it's really none of your business.
- varispeed 6y ago
  In many countries it is illegal to work for free - companies have to pay you minimum wage regardless if you agree to not be paid. In a way this open source model provides a loophole through which companies can exploit developers or it puts developers who would love to contribute to open source into disadvantage. I think we need changes in law to ensure even if people want their work to be used for free to be reimbursed. This way if you want to work on open source you won't have to worry how you are going to pay your bills. I need to think how to argue this better and make politicians aware of this issue. Take a look how big corporations were able to amass such wealth - they don't pay taxes like small businesses do and they don't pay salaries for R&D as much as they should, because there is always that open source project to appropriate, so why pay?
door100 6y ago
> unintended consequence is that it also facilitates exploitation of software developers by big corporations who from the perspective of FSF are just users as regular people. Sure, but rms has nothing but pure comtempt for every big corporation and their approach to software. The only difference is the FSF doesn't have influence over big tech the way it does over hobbyists. This isn't a condemnation of the FSF, but of its marginal position. An alternative perspective is that the principles of the FSF are good, and should be enshrined in law and regulation, much like other freedoms are. We shouldn't make FOSS software less free, we should make big tech software more free.
thinkingemote 6y ago
Different political conceptual views, I guess? You may be looking to some kind of workers cooperative, where the workers are the developers. A cooperative's primary benefit is to the members of the organisation. A coop can have viewpoints outside of course. The FSF views all global people are the "worker" - so rights and freedoms are for people outside the organisation. So you'd like a workers coop but with a (variable) lesser set of rights that the FSF currently has to everyone else? I could imagine a closed license that #1 only members of the coop can develop software with that license and #2 only the coop can sell the software. You could optionally allow non members to develop with copy left-like term but not sell their work or the software. How would you do it?

winter_blue 6y ago

Exactly this. I love and support open source[1], but I don’t support all software being “free of cost”. [1] Not the OSI definition of it.

winter_blue 6y ago
Do people actually support all software being free? Note that I said above: > but I don’t support all software being “free of cost” Does anyone really support all software being free? That means developers would have to live like saints / monks, with donations to support themselves (and forgo the the 250k income that's become the standard/median in Silicon Valley today...).
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  Well, there are other ways to get income while producing software than selling the software. You can be a university professor. You can be funded by grants. You can have a job working for a non-software company that lets you produce free software for that company's use that you can also give away, while they keep paying your salary. Things like that were how open source software has been historically produced mostly, right? Heck, there could be a Universal Basic Income, and someone could choose to write the software they want while getting it. Yeah, none of these would be sufficient to produce all the software that is "needed" or wanted. So, as long as there are people willing to pay for software they can't get for free, all software won't be free. I support the idea of all software being free, including social changes that would be necessary for that to be realistic, such as serious alterations to capitalism.
  - winter_blue 6y ago
    > You can be a university professor. You can be funded by grants. I actually have a bunch of friends that I went to college with, who all have PhDs now. Getting a tenure track position is nearly impossible. Also, grants are extremely hard to get. They’re all working either: (1) as postdocs (where there is a grant funding it), or worse (2) looking for a postdoctoral or tenure-track position (or have lost a postdoc position because the grant ran out). These things are incredibly hard to do. > You can have a job working for a non-software company that lets you produce free software for that company's use that you can also give away, while they keep paying your salary. If the plan is abolish proprietary software, there’s not gonna be a lot of companies making money selling software, ie making software. So do you mean some hardware company that needs to write some specific software for its needs? I suppose there could be a world where most/all software is free (in GNU terms), but you’d end up with almost everything becoming web-based SaaS, and that would be the commercial model. (I mean, we’re already pretty close to that.) Universal basic income requires a tax base of highly productive, and high earning taxpayers. Just look at the economic contribution of software and technology companies. If the government were to take a wrecking ball to that literal economic powerhouse, how significantly would the tax base shrink by?
teddyh 6y ago
> I don’t support all software being “free of cost”. Stallman and the FSF agree with you; selling software is perfectly OK: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling
- winter_blue 6y ago
  From your link: > With free software, users don't have to pay the distribution fee in order to use the software. They can copy the program from a friend who has a copy, or with the help of a friend who has network access. Or several users can join together, split the price of one CD-ROM, then each in turn can install the software. The type of “selling” that GNU is proposing here is exactly the same as asking for donations (and is a misuse of the word “sell”). Since people can resdistribute the software without limit (and someone is sure to put it up on internet), you “charging” for it is the same as asking for donations.
  - teddyh 6y ago
    If you don’t like that kind of selling, maybe this is more to your liking? https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

Exactly this. Free software has helped shift the economic power from programming experts to business people. Who cares if you are a top-class compiler expert. Compilers are a commodity anyway. You are better off if you are young, and photogenic and can start a social media app that monetizes people privacy. In addition, things have shifted to cloud, which favors bin corporations even more, and data and code is not even accessible, even theoretically, for the user. Of course big business is a fan of free software, it enables them to get for basically free, a lot of infrastructure code. Lawyers and Doctors must absolutely hold programmers in derision for undermining their own economic power.

mrob 6y ago

The goal of the FSF is "to promote computer user freedom". By "freedom" they mean the four freedoms of the Free Software definition: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Your proposal contradicts freedom 0, so the FSF cannot support it without abandoning their mission. To do so is both undesirable and unnecessary, because the alleged "exploitation of software developers" is in most cases just people doing what those developers permitted when they chose to use a permissive license. The correct solution is encouraging developers to choose more suitable Free Software licenses, and the FSF already does this by advocating copyleft licenses in most circumstances. The AGPL especially has strong protections for the four freedoms, which makes it very difficult to "exploit" developers who use it.

varispeed 6y ago
Big corporations sponsor FSF then this is an understandable stance as what I am proposing would hurt their bottom line. Current situation saves them huge amounts of money from spending on R&D because developers all over the world will develop something for free (believing the PR around open source) and then if something catches on, big corporation can use it of appropriate it if you will. Sometimes developers from within those companies feel bad and then ask the corporation if they could contribute something. This is then again is turned into PR piece saying that you see we give back! Best outcome for the original authors is getting hired on mediocre salary at one of those corporations or having a cool entry in CV. I think you are missing the point and my idea does not contradict user freedom as users will continue to use it for free.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  The philosophy of freedom of open source that RMS and others have been developing pre-dates any significant big corporation sponsorship. (Many of the particular big corporations using open source now didn't even exist then). I guess you can argue they would have changed it by now but for the subsequent sponsorship. There's no real way to resolve that claim one way or the other. But it is a coherent philosophy on it's own, it's not some incoherent thing that makes sense only as self-interest of big corporations. Open source from the start as envisioned by rms and others was about creating software that users could use as they choose, including altering it as they choose and deploying it where and how they want. While they may not have envisioned the economic system that has resolved from that, all the proposals I see on HN for "not letting big corporations take advantage of developers writing open source" are about removing this freedom, making it no longer open source. So, sure, if some developers don't want to produce work that can be taken advantage of by others without payment, including big corporations -- they can stop producing open source. You shouldn't produce open source unless you want to produce open source. But that doesn't mean the definition of open source is wrong.

indymike 6y ago

A royalty system is almost in direct opposition to what the FSF has accomplished. In fact, the entire body of work that the FSF has done has been to ensure that users of software have the same rights as developers of that software. As far as execs with jets, starving developers, etc... well, the music industry and book industry have royalties and last I looked, the execs did better than most practicing musicians and authors.

gruez 6y ago

>FSF should start lobbying for royalty system for developers, so that big corporations using free software should have to pay % of revenue to all contributors of open source software they are using. Nobody's forcing them to license out their software for free. The reason why they do so is simple: they know they won't be able to make a buck off of it if it was commercial (even with the individuals/small company exemption you mentioned), and that stringent terms will only harm adoption of their project. See for instance companies unwilling to touch GPL licensed software, for instance. From the corporation/executive's view, why would they bother adopting a piece of software that has a royalty system, especially when there are alternatives? For instance, other projects that are permissively licensed, writing it themselves, or paying for a proprietary/commercial version.

the_af 6y ago
> The reason why they do so is simple: they know they won't be able to make a buck off of it if it was commercial That's not the reason why someone would choose a copyleft license of the kind the FSF advocates, like the GPL or one of its variants. You choose a copyleft license because you primarily care about freedom.

xyzzy123 6y ago

It's not at all clear to me that someone deriving benefit from freely given work constitutes exploitation. The creator is free to create what they want, the user is free to support them, or not. What you are not free to do is appropriate the "creation" itself.

dkjaudyeqooe 6y ago

You make the developers sound like helpless individuals unable to adopt a software licence that gives them what they want, and that need people to save them from ruin. They obviously want everyone and anyone to use their software and don't care who makes money from it, if its licenced that way. They can licence it so it excludes large corporations, or even demand recompense under certain situations, such as company size. Your attitude just sounds like you object to large corporations (and their executives) making money from free software. If it's not your software it's really none of your business.

varispeed 6y ago
In many countries it is illegal to work for free - companies have to pay you minimum wage regardless if you agree to not be paid. In a way this open source model provides a loophole through which companies can exploit developers or it puts developers who would love to contribute to open source into disadvantage. I think we need changes in law to ensure even if people want their work to be used for free to be reimbursed. This way if you want to work on open source you won't have to worry how you are going to pay your bills. I need to think how to argue this better and make politicians aware of this issue. Take a look how big corporations were able to amass such wealth - they don't pay taxes like small businesses do and they don't pay salaries for R&D as much as they should, because there is always that open source project to appropriate, so why pay?

door100 6y ago

> unintended consequence is that it also facilitates exploitation of software developers by big corporations who from the perspective of FSF are just users as regular people. Sure, but rms has nothing but pure comtempt for every big corporation and their approach to software. The only difference is the FSF doesn't have influence over big tech the way it does over hobbyists. This isn't a condemnation of the FSF, but of its marginal position. An alternative perspective is that the principles of the FSF are good, and should be enshrined in law and regulation, much like other freedoms are. We shouldn't make FOSS software less free, we should make big tech software more free.

thinkingemote 6y ago

Different political conceptual views, I guess? You may be looking to some kind of workers cooperative, where the workers are the developers. A cooperative's primary benefit is to the members of the organisation. A coop can have viewpoints outside of course. The FSF views all global people are the "worker" - so rights and freedoms are for people outside the organisation. So you'd like a workers coop but with a (variable) lesser set of rights that the FSF currently has to everyone else? I could imagine a closed license that #1 only members of the coop can develop software with that license and #2 only the coop can sell the software. You could optionally allow non members to develop with copy left-like term but not sell their work or the software. How would you do it?