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>> Given this situation, why will they pay for what they can get for free? > If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last? That doesn

>> Given this situation, why will they pay for what they can get for free? > If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last? That doesn't answer the GP question, which is all about incentives. The answer is, at least some parties won't pay for what they can get for free. So the options are: a) deal with it b) require payment c) come up with some way to incentivize more donations

meheleventyone 5y ago
d) stop It’s not like there is a parable about killing the goose that laid the golden egg to teach you how to appreciate these things.
wpietri 5y ago
Those aren't the only answers. The notion that people only respond to direct incentives is incorrect and ahistorical. It's a convenient dogma for the selfish to promote, but I don't have to take it seriously at all. Another perfectly good option is for tech people to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy. Which is what's happening right here in this discussion, so you could be part of that solution if you wanted.
- cxr 5y ago
  > tech people [need] to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy Agreed on this, but the "and companies" thing is a total red herring. Two things to note: even though you mention "people and companies", it's incredibly clear from popular sentiment that the conception held by most people of the problem/solution comes down to the latter (companies) and not the former (people). Focusing on companies at all—let alone allowing it to occupy a majority share of one's focus—is a huge mistake. Depersonalized abstract entities like companies are almost entirely immune to whatever methods of persuasion people have in mind here. Gay rights only just became kosher to "take a stand" on, and even then it's invariably limited to being trotted out as a vehicle for the most empty and self-serving marketing horseshit and other corporate speak that anyone should expect to come out of these institutions. Cultural pressure for open source by way of shaming companies doesn't stand a chance; it has to come down to people. I've brought up the subject before: why do we rake companies over the coals for their inaction, but ignore the individuals? It's worth reflecting on the relationship between a company and its employees. A company, no matter how many layers of management are involved, delegates some problem to an employee. That employee surveys the lay of the land and then elects to use some tech that is available from the commons towards solving the problem. In turn, they are rewarded by their employer in both tangibles and intangibles that are considered proportionate to the achievement and budgeted accordingly. Thus, that person is, in a very real way, converting the labor of others into personal gain—in the form of wealth, career prospects/advancement, and personal stature in wider society. Why is it easy to frame a company as the perpetrator and hard to say anything about any given developer who benefited from this (and did not share)? Because it's uncomfortable, since it's too personal? That might make sense if we were talking about, say, a custodian with limited career prospects just doing their best to keep their head above water and provide for their family already, but that tends not to be the case where software development is involved. The implication here is clear. (Forget, for now, the prior argument I just made about effectiveness for a moment and feel free to focus just on the fairness aspect here, if it uncomplicates things.) If there's any appropriate allocation of social pressure to be meted out—resulting in social expectations to be met—then it needs to come in the form of beliefs like, "hey, if as part of your employment you are singlehandedly making something like twice the US national average of an entire household, and you're not giving away at _least_ 10% of your salary to the people who made that possible, then you're kind of a piece of shit." Is that a stand that people are willing to make, though? It's acceptable to disagree with this, but to understand why you feel it's justified to defend the individuals involved means that you have everything you need to understand why there is no movement on the problem. Perennially and impotently opining that companies need to quit screwing around and do something already is a ridiculous strategy.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  Good luck with that. I for one am not holding my breath. Meanwhile, perhaps accept the world for what it is and act accordingly? Just make the companies pay for it by licensing the code correctly. It isn’t rocket science.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Oh? Shame nobody's ever tried that. But since you've had a brand new idea that you're sure will solve the problem, how about you take a swing at it? Show us how easy it is.
    - mbrodersen 5y ago
      Where did I say it was a brand new idea? Where did I say it would be easy? Starting a business is hard. I founded and ran my own succesful business so I know how hard it is. I am not sure what your point is?
      - wpietri 5y ago
        My point is that you're trivializing the problems and insulting all of the people who have been trying to make it work for decades. I too have started successful businesses. What I learned from that was to respect the people doing the actual work, rather than to run around arrogantly blustering, "It isn't rocket science."
        mbrodersen 5y ago
        You are attacking a point I am not making. My point is that some OSS maintainers don't understand that they have to think about their work as a business if they want to see any $ thrown their way. That's the part that isn't rocket science. I agree with you that actually doing it is hard. My message is to stop whining that companies/people don't give them $ out of the kindness of their hearts and instead accept it and either treat their work as a business or accept that they will get very little gratitude or $ in return. The idea that OSS maintainers are special snowflakes that can work on whatever they feel like and the world automatically owns them something in return is childish.
- throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
  How has the strategy of "companies should just be nicer" worked for things like minimum wage, health insurance, workers rights, ect... It's getting to the point of insanity (in my opinion) that people keep thinking this is going to magically appear if they ask for it. It arguably flies in the faces of thousands of years (or millions if you count pre-humans) of evolution. At the least people suggesting this should acknowledge that this kind of society has possibly never existing in this entire universe on the scale they want it to exist (larger then dunbar(ish) number tribes). The onus is on them to build a path towards this new kind of society instead of just throwing the ideal out into the ether and expecting it to just magically appear.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    I'm not suggesting it's magic. Indeed, what I specifically said was that we should work to build strong cultural expectations. Which are very much necessary in all the cases you name. As an example, note that the Fortune 500 spend $20bn annually on corporate social responsibility: https://econreview.berkeley.edu/stocks-sustainability-how-they-relate/ https://econreview.berkeley.edu/stocks-sustainability-how-th... That's not because they just had some good feelings. It's because people expect them to be at least slightly non-awful. We can accomplish something similar here. If programmers start insisting that companies take open-source funding seriously, it will happen. Not quickly and not easily. But if people start taking action (e.g., turning down jobs when companies are parasites on the open-source ecosystem), things will change.
    - hellotomyrars 5y ago
      Yes and no. A lot of that spending is done with a monetary incentive in mind. Companies aren’t completely devoid of understanding that there is a certain breaking point where being shitty can have financial consequences. They aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, not predominantly anyways. They can use charitable contributions to project a public persona (earned or not) of being good, for the purposes of increasing/maintaining business. They can do it as a smokescreen/cover for other scandals for the same reason. Is that a good thing? Yes. Is it enough? Not even close. The culture needs to change sure, but the change of culture that needs to happen seems effectively impossible unless companies are dragged into it kicking and screaming through organized labor efforts or government oversight/regulation. Those are both of course highly polarized political issues and that aspect of culture sure isn’t getting better either. I think the quicker, sadder, and easier change is that a lot of Open Source projects just aren’t going to get started like they used to, and are going to have increasingly restricted licenses with stratified feature sets. We’re definitely seeing more of the “Taking my ball and going home” approach by small developers with tiny open source packages these days and it’s sad but also hard to blame them for. Even worse there are an increasing number of groups who attempt to buy projects for sometimes stupid money for the explicit purpose of using them as a Trojan horse to ship malware. They’re preying on the same people who have become incredibly cynical about the whole thing and that’s dangerous for everybody.

meheleventyone 5y ago

d) stop It’s not like there is a parable about killing the goose that laid the golden egg to teach you how to appreciate these things.

wpietri 5y ago

Those aren't the only answers. The notion that people only respond to direct incentives is incorrect and ahistorical. It's a convenient dogma for the selfish to promote, but I don't have to take it seriously at all. Another perfectly good option is for tech people to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy. Which is what's happening right here in this discussion, so you could be part of that solution if you wanted.

cxr 5y ago
> tech people [need] to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy Agreed on this, but the "and companies" thing is a total red herring. Two things to note: even though you mention "people and companies", it's incredibly clear from popular sentiment that the conception held by most people of the problem/solution comes down to the latter (companies) and not the former (people). Focusing on companies at all—let alone allowing it to occupy a majority share of one's focus—is a huge mistake. Depersonalized abstract entities like companies are almost entirely immune to whatever methods of persuasion people have in mind here. Gay rights only just became kosher to "take a stand" on, and even then it's invariably limited to being trotted out as a vehicle for the most empty and self-serving marketing horseshit and other corporate speak that anyone should expect to come out of these institutions. Cultural pressure for open source by way of shaming companies doesn't stand a chance; it has to come down to people. I've brought up the subject before: why do we rake companies over the coals for their inaction, but ignore the individuals? It's worth reflecting on the relationship between a company and its employees. A company, no matter how many layers of management are involved, delegates some problem to an employee. That employee surveys the lay of the land and then elects to use some tech that is available from the commons towards solving the problem. In turn, they are rewarded by their employer in both tangibles and intangibles that are considered proportionate to the achievement and budgeted accordingly. Thus, that person is, in a very real way, converting the labor of others into personal gain—in the form of wealth, career prospects/advancement, and personal stature in wider society. Why is it easy to frame a company as the perpetrator and hard to say anything about any given developer who benefited from this (and did not share)? Because it's uncomfortable, since it's too personal? That might make sense if we were talking about, say, a custodian with limited career prospects just doing their best to keep their head above water and provide for their family already, but that tends not to be the case where software development is involved. The implication here is clear. (Forget, for now, the prior argument I just made about effectiveness for a moment and feel free to focus just on the fairness aspect here, if it uncomplicates things.) If there's any appropriate allocation of social pressure to be meted out—resulting in social expectations to be met—then it needs to come in the form of beliefs like, "hey, if as part of your employment you are singlehandedly making something like twice the US national average of an entire household, and you're not giving away at _least_ 10% of your salary to the people who made that possible, then you're kind of a piece of shit." Is that a stand that people are willing to make, though? It's acceptable to disagree with this, but to understand why you feel it's justified to defend the individuals involved means that you have everything you need to understand why there is no movement on the problem. Perennially and impotently opining that companies need to quit screwing around and do something already is a ridiculous strategy.
mbrodersen 5y ago
Good luck with that. I for one am not holding my breath. Meanwhile, perhaps accept the world for what it is and act accordingly? Just make the companies pay for it by licensing the code correctly. It isn’t rocket science.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Oh? Shame nobody's ever tried that. But since you've had a brand new idea that you're sure will solve the problem, how about you take a swing at it? Show us how easy it is.
  - mbrodersen 5y ago
    Where did I say it was a brand new idea? Where did I say it would be easy? Starting a business is hard. I founded and ran my own succesful business so I know how hard it is. I am not sure what your point is?
    - wpietri 5y ago
      My point is that you're trivializing the problems and insulting all of the people who have been trying to make it work for decades. I too have started successful businesses. What I learned from that was to respect the people doing the actual work, rather than to run around arrogantly blustering, "It isn't rocket science."
      - mbrodersen 5y ago
        You are attacking a point I am not making. My point is that some OSS maintainers don't understand that they have to think about their work as a business if they want to see any $ thrown their way. That's the part that isn't rocket science. I agree with you that actually doing it is hard. My message is to stop whining that companies/people don't give them $ out of the kindness of their hearts and instead accept it and either treat their work as a business or accept that they will get very little gratitude or $ in return. The idea that OSS maintainers are special snowflakes that can work on whatever they feel like and the world automatically owns them something in return is childish.
throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
How has the strategy of "companies should just be nicer" worked for things like minimum wage, health insurance, workers rights, ect... It's getting to the point of insanity (in my opinion) that people keep thinking this is going to magically appear if they ask for it. It arguably flies in the faces of thousands of years (or millions if you count pre-humans) of evolution. At the least people suggesting this should acknowledge that this kind of society has possibly never existing in this entire universe on the scale they want it to exist (larger then dunbar(ish) number tribes). The onus is on them to build a path towards this new kind of society instead of just throwing the ideal out into the ether and expecting it to just magically appear.
- wpietri 5y ago
  I'm not suggesting it's magic. Indeed, what I specifically said was that we should work to build strong cultural expectations. Which are very much necessary in all the cases you name. As an example, note that the Fortune 500 spend $20bn annually on corporate social responsibility: https://econreview.berkeley.edu/stocks-sustainability-how-they-relate/ https://econreview.berkeley.edu/stocks-sustainability-how-th... That's not because they just had some good feelings. It's because people expect them to be at least slightly non-awful. We can accomplish something similar here. If programmers start insisting that companies take open-source funding seriously, it will happen. Not quickly and not easily. But if people start taking action (e.g., turning down jobs when companies are parasites on the open-source ecosystem), things will change.
  - hellotomyrars 5y ago
    Yes and no. A lot of that spending is done with a monetary incentive in mind. Companies aren’t completely devoid of understanding that there is a certain breaking point where being shitty can have financial consequences. They aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, not predominantly anyways. They can use charitable contributions to project a public persona (earned or not) of being good, for the purposes of increasing/maintaining business. They can do it as a smokescreen/cover for other scandals for the same reason. Is that a good thing? Yes. Is it enough? Not even close. The culture needs to change sure, but the change of culture that needs to happen seems effectively impossible unless companies are dragged into it kicking and screaming through organized labor efforts or government oversight/regulation. Those are both of course highly polarized political issues and that aspect of culture sure isn’t getting better either. I think the quicker, sadder, and easier change is that a lot of Open Source projects just aren’t going to get started like they used to, and are going to have increasingly restricted licenses with stratified feature sets. We’re definitely seeing more of the “Taking my ball and going home” approach by small developers with tiny open source packages these days and it’s sad but also hard to blame them for. Even worse there are an increasing number of groups who attempt to buy projects for sometimes stupid money for the explicit purpose of using them as a Trojan horse to ship malware. They’re preying on the same people who have become incredibly cynical about the whole thing and that’s dangerous for everybody.