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If you want to make money and pay developers a salary, you need a product. I don’t want my js tooling to be a commercial product (hi Rome). Can we go back to th

by jiofih 5y ago

If you want to make money and pay developers a salary, you need a product. I don’t want my js tooling to be a commercial product (hi Rome). Can we go back to the original spirit of OSS where everybody donates a little of their time instead?

ZephyrBlu 5y ago
I don't think it works in 99% of cases. There almost always seems to end up being a few people who do 90% of the work.
- arp242 5y ago
  In most cases it's just a few people who do >99% of the work. Project with significant contributions outside of the "core dev(s)" are much rarer than people think, and so are the number of contributions. I really need to finish my site which visualizes this ... But here's some data on ElasticSearch I did a while ago: https://lobste.rs/s/qtsjh1/elasticsearch_does_not_belong_elastic#c_hbttgr https://lobste.rs/s/qtsjh1/elasticsearch_does_not_belong_ela...
hatmatrix 5y ago
Who defined the original spirit of OSS? I thought OSS just meant that the code is open to the world.
mpeg 5y ago
Rome, which is founded by the creator of Babel, just raised $4.5m - so either the current maintainers of Babel are not doing a good job fundraising or their work is not considered as interesting as these guys who are creating a new unified toolchain.
- foldr 5y ago
  Rome is able to raise VC funding because it's a product that doesn't exist yet. Babel has the key advantage that you can actually use it now to do real work. It's not unreasonable for the developers of a real, currently-existing product to want to be paid for the work that they're doing on it, rather than for some pie-in-the-sky business proposition.
orangepanda 5y ago
> If you want to make money and pay developers a salary, you need a product. I don’t want my js tooling to be a commercial product You contradict yourself there. If no one wants to pay for said product, how would a product bring in more money? Tools is what makes us 10x more productive; its ridiculous companies cant spare 1% of their IT budgets to pay for them.
- jiofih 5y ago
  Not contradictory at all. I don’t think it should be a product and employ individual developers. They spare their budget by having employees contribute to OSS on the clock.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
The original spirit of open source software is free as in freedom, not free as in beer. People have to make a living. And who will manage that thing where everybody donates a little of their time? Babel has nearly 600 open issues and 150 outstanding pull requests; it's a full time job just to manage that.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >The original spirit of open source software is free as in freedom, not free as in beer. I'm beginning to doubt this, at least from the consumers perspective. I'm willing to bet most commercial users of these tools are thinking in terms of free as in not having to raise a purchase requisition. IE free as in beer.
- jiofih 5y ago
  Yes. Part of that freedom is being something owned by the community, not a particular commercial entity.
kasperni 5y ago
> Can we go back to the original spirit of OSS where everybody donates a little of their time instead? That's a nice goal. But you don't create non-trivial high quality software in 2021 by random people chipping in a handfull of hours a week. (Yes I'm sure that are exceptions)

by jiofih 5y ago

ZephyrBlu 5y ago

I don't think it works in 99% of cases. There almost always seems to end up being a few people who do 90% of the work.

arp242 5y ago
In most cases it's just a few people who do >99% of the work. Project with significant contributions outside of the "core dev(s)" are much rarer than people think, and so are the number of contributions. I really need to finish my site which visualizes this ... But here's some data on ElasticSearch I did a while ago: https://lobste.rs/s/qtsjh1/elasticsearch_does_not_belong_elastic#c_hbttgr https://lobste.rs/s/qtsjh1/elasticsearch_does_not_belong_ela...

hatmatrix 5y ago

Who defined the original spirit of OSS? I thought OSS just meant that the code is open to the world.

mpeg 5y ago

Rome, which is founded by the creator of Babel, just raised $4.5m - so either the current maintainers of Babel are not doing a good job fundraising or their work is not considered as interesting as these guys who are creating a new unified toolchain.

foldr 5y ago
Rome is able to raise VC funding because it's a product that doesn't exist yet. Babel has the key advantage that you can actually use it now to do real work. It's not unreasonable for the developers of a real, currently-existing product to want to be paid for the work that they're doing on it, rather than for some pie-in-the-sky business proposition.

orangepanda 5y ago

> If you want to make money and pay developers a salary, you need a product. I don’t want my js tooling to be a commercial product You contradict yourself there. If no one wants to pay for said product, how would a product bring in more money? Tools is what makes us 10x more productive; its ridiculous companies cant spare 1% of their IT budgets to pay for them.

jiofih 5y ago
Not contradictory at all. I don’t think it should be a product and employ individual developers. They spare their budget by having employees contribute to OSS on the clock.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

The original spirit of open source software is free as in freedom, not free as in beer. People have to make a living. And who will manage that thing where everybody donates a little of their time? Babel has nearly 600 open issues and 150 outstanding pull requests; it's a full time job just to manage that.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>The original spirit of open source software is free as in freedom, not free as in beer. I'm beginning to doubt this, at least from the consumers perspective. I'm willing to bet most commercial users of these tools are thinking in terms of free as in not having to raise a purchase requisition. IE free as in beer.
jiofih 5y ago
Yes. Part of that freedom is being something owned by the community, not a particular commercial entity.

kasperni 5y ago

> Can we go back to the original spirit of OSS where everybody donates a little of their time instead? That's a nice goal. But you don't create non-trivial high quality software in 2021 by random people chipping in a handfull of hours a week. (Yes I'm sure that are exceptions)