4 ms·

> The law that mandates that companies can't donate to someone on Patreon or help triage bugs or dedicate QA/security time to identifying issues is the requirem

> The law that mandates that companies can't donate to someone on Patreon or help triage bugs or dedicate QA/security time to identifying issues is the requirement for CEO's to demonstrate good judgment in managing the company by maximizing profit for shareholders. People place an over-emphasis on this. Minecraft broke, the situation they ran into is no different than if their engineering team had introduced an XSS error in their own codebase. If this isn't something that's affecting company profits, then why are they complaining? And if it is affecting company profits, then it's in the shareholder interest to figure out how to support the work so their stuff doesn't break. Nobody says that the law mandates that companies can't have a QA team, companies are allowed to care about reliability. So if donating to someone's Patreon or kicking resources their way improves the stability of a product, then that's in a company's interest, it's not violating shareholder rights to take tangible steps to make your product more secure/reliable. In general, companies are not quite as constrained as you are suggesting by requirements to pursue profit in the first place, but even from that perspective if we assume they are completely bound in that way, this is still either: A) not a problem they should be complaining about since apparently it doesn't affect their profits, or B) their problem to solve, since it affects their profits. ---- > If you design your house with no doors or windows and then proudly announce the fact it has no doors and windows and everyone is welcome to take a look around you don't get to blame people who wander in from time to time and take a look around. I don't think anyone here is blaming people for using Open Source projects for free, that's by design. I'm blaming them for then turning around and saying, "hey, this thing we're using for free without contributing at all broke, something is clearly wrong with your process, why didn't you stop us from using your thing for free?" It is directly by design that people can use Open Source projects without contributing back. That's not really the issue here. ---- > If you are making FOSS you are perpetuating a broken system and are accountable for that. See, this kind of gets at the core of my criticism. The log4j devs didn't wake up in the morning with their house on fire. Minecraft did. Log4j devs didn't have a contract with Minecraft, they weren't losing money because Minecraft's house was on fire, none of this had to be an emergency for them. But somehow, not only is this suddenly log4j's problem to solve, but also it's their fault that Minecraft used their code and they're somehow responsible for perpetuating a 'broken' system? It just doesn't make any sense; if you don't think that Open Source is maintainable or safe, then don't use it in your company. If you think it's valuable, then think more than 3 months down the road and commit to helping it thrive so you can continue to rely on it (and explain to your shareholders that sometimes share price is affected by zero-day vulnerabilities in products). Or don't, but then don't expect us to do a bunch of soul searching over how we can serve you better or change our culture to suite you. Feels very weird to be relying on a commons as critical infrastructure by your own choice, and then complaining that the people building the commons are the problem because they're somehow enabling the system. > AGPL/Copyleft/Ethical Source/Noncommercial licening and Social Domain licenses all seem to be pointing to a new economic future that I don't understand why it's the job of people working for free to not only give people their code for free, but also to figure out the entire social/economic structure for how to get companies to contribute to the ecosystem.

localhost1729 5y ago
> it's in the shareholder interest to figure out how to support the work so their stuff doesn't break. 100% incorrect. The motivation is to make as much money as possible which could mean anything... mothballing an investment, firing workers, outsourcing, making code proprietary, buying out competitors... whatever it takes to make money. You really have a very naive view of the profit at any cost rule that makes a corporate run. Donating to someone's Patreon does NOT improve the stability of a product, so it is not in a company's interest. What they are more likely to do is hire the lead developer. The corporates motivation is not to make a product more secure/reliable, it's to make their profits more secure and reliable, and very often this comes at a cost to product reliability and stability. The entire Big Tech model is about creating artificial scarcity in tech and premature product obsolescence. More money is made from financialization of the company than from products at the highest level. You need to look at that. My understanding is your position is that Open Source isn't broken, it's all the free riding that's the problem. The trouble with that is it is an argument from proximate cause. It seeks to eliminate the negligence on behalf of FOSS developers, the negligence of NOT fixing their work to a licensing regime that deters free riders. > The log4j devs didn't wake up in the morning with their house on fire. No, but they woke up everyday with a house they made from tinder, and built it in a dry and overheated climate, so how responsible is that? > I don't understand why it's the job of people working for free to not only give people their code for free, but also to figure out the entire social/economic structure for how to get companies to contribute to the ecosystem. You need to understand. That's what you need to do.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > Donating to someone's Patreon does NOT improve the stability of a product Saying this more forcibly doesn't make it true. Demonstrably, a bunch of people's stuff broke because log4j was underfunded. You can't claim with such certainty that funding Open Source doesn't make products more stable after a bunch of companies just had a bunch of critical severity bugs because the project wasn't funded and didn't have enough eyes on it. That's a wild thing to say. "Locking doors doesn't deter criminals, so our investors aren't going to pay for locks at my business", as you actively watch masked thieves walk out of your office building holding a flat-screen TV. Come on. :) On the other hand, if it doesn't impact corporate profits, if Open Source stability isn't affecting businesses, then corporations can stop complaining about Open Source bugs, and we can all stop having these hot takes. But I think the reason we have these hot takes coming out corporate mouths is because they recognize that bugs do impact stability and they're interested in trying to make that into someone else's problem. > You need to understand. That's what you need to do. See, this is the thing though, I and the Open Source community don't need to understand this. The point I'm making here is that the log4j developers were not affected by this bug, it wasn't their stuff that was on fire, and nobody had a contract with them forcing them to care. Donating something to a company is not an obligation to service that thing. Nor would it be "irresponsible" for the log4j maintainers to leave companies in that state. The Open Source community could just ignore all of this. The Open Source community doesn't benefit from Minecraft using their stuff for free, the Open Source community could turn over and go back to bed when people start panicking about Minecraft bugs. The Open Source community does not need to worry about anything other than the Open Source community, it is an act of both social and personal charity that people release code under permissive licenses, and doing so does not open them up to any additional obligation for support or any additional responsibility to guarantee stability. If you want that support, then pay for it. And if you're not willing to pay for it, then fine, but then don't complain or expect sympathy from the Open Source community if your stuff breaks. ---- > My understanding is your position is that Open Source isn't broken, it's all the free riding that's the problem. My position is not that free riding is the problem, free riding is a big part of Open Source, free riding is fine. My position is twofold: - First, when you give someone something for free, and they come back with additional demands or complaints that it doesn't work as well as they want it to because they're not engaged in support -- it's not your problem or your job to devote additional work to making it easier for them free ride. - Second, that at a systemic level people giving stuff away for free does not give them some kind of additional obligation to individually overthrow Capitalism or rework our entire economic system, and I think it's wild to look at arguably one of the most successful Anarchist spaces in the entire modern world and say, "it's not the businesses that are the problem, it's these people, because they haven't done enough to overthrow the entire tech industry." ---- You seem to be dipping your toes into a very cynical take on the tech industry that I'm not going to argue for or against. What I am going to say is that if I take your position, if I assume that the tech industry doesn't care about stability at all, that it only cares about rapid growth, that security vulnerabilities are acceptable to investors, that this all and elaborate shell game to monopolize and undercut competitors and choke down on the market and its workers -- from that perspective, it makes even less sense for us to have an earnest conversation about how Open Source can become more "professional" or how it can encourage companies to give back. If I start from your view of the tech industry, then I am even more convinced that Open Source bears no obligation to these companies and that it's fine for the Open Source community to go off and do its own things and leave them to figure out their own problems. It doesn't make sense to have such a cynical view of how companies work, and then to say that Open Source developers are now somehow responsible for cleaning up this mess that companies caused. You seem very cynical about the potential stability of corporate products in general; but if they're so fundamentally broken then why not let them break? It is a very strange philosophy for you to have where you're pointing at corporations and investor mentality as a fundamentally broken system, and then saying that Open Source devs are being irresponsible because they're somehow "enabling" these people. If someone sets out a bowl of Halloween candy and some kid comes up and takes the entire bowl, who is the primary person that you blame in that situation? But sure, whatever. If I understand you, the central problem is that free riding is baked into our industry, and yet somehow it's individual unpaid developers building software outside of that profit-maximizing system that are to blame for all of it. So instead of holding companies to task, or trying to support the people building commons that aren't designed to monopolize or grow at all costs, or reworking economic systems to improve incentives, or even just acknowledging that Open Source devs don't have an obligation to support the industry, what we should actually do instead is criticize the Open Source community for not being itself Capitalistic enough. That will definitely help, and definitely won't just result in cementing the very systems you criticize. /s

localhost1729 5y ago

> it's in the shareholder interest to figure out how to support the work so their stuff doesn't break. 100% incorrect. The motivation is to make as much money as possible which could mean anything... mothballing an investment, firing workers, outsourcing, making code proprietary, buying out competitors... whatever it takes to make money. You really have a very naive view of the profit at any cost rule that makes a corporate run. Donating to someone's Patreon does NOT improve the stability of a product, so it is not in a company's interest. What they are more likely to do is hire the lead developer. The corporates motivation is not to make a product more secure/reliable, it's to make their profits more secure and reliable, and very often this comes at a cost to product reliability and stability. The entire Big Tech model is about creating artificial scarcity in tech and premature product obsolescence. More money is made from financialization of the company than from products at the highest level. You need to look at that. My understanding is your position is that Open Source isn't broken, it's all the free riding that's the problem. The trouble with that is it is an argument from proximate cause. It seeks to eliminate the negligence on behalf of FOSS developers, the negligence of NOT fixing their work to a licensing regime that deters free riders. > The log4j devs didn't wake up in the morning with their house on fire. No, but they woke up everyday with a house they made from tinder, and built it in a dry and overheated climate, so how responsible is that? > I don't understand why it's the job of people working for free to not only give people their code for free, but also to figure out the entire social/economic structure for how to get companies to contribute to the ecosystem. You need to understand. That's what you need to do.

danShumway 5y ago
> Donating to someone's Patreon does NOT improve the stability of a product Saying this more forcibly doesn't make it true. Demonstrably, a bunch of people's stuff broke because log4j was underfunded. You can't claim with such certainty that funding Open Source doesn't make products more stable after a bunch of companies just had a bunch of critical severity bugs because the project wasn't funded and didn't have enough eyes on it. That's a wild thing to say. "Locking doors doesn't deter criminals, so our investors aren't going to pay for locks at my business", as you actively watch masked thieves walk out of your office building holding a flat-screen TV. Come on. :) On the other hand, if it doesn't impact corporate profits, if Open Source stability isn't affecting businesses, then corporations can stop complaining about Open Source bugs, and we can all stop having these hot takes. But I think the reason we have these hot takes coming out corporate mouths is because they recognize that bugs do impact stability and they're interested in trying to make that into someone else's problem. > You need to understand. That's what you need to do. See, this is the thing though, I and the Open Source community don't need to understand this. The point I'm making here is that the log4j developers were not affected by this bug, it wasn't their stuff that was on fire, and nobody had a contract with them forcing them to care. Donating something to a company is not an obligation to service that thing. Nor would it be "irresponsible" for the log4j maintainers to leave companies in that state. The Open Source community could just ignore all of this. The Open Source community doesn't benefit from Minecraft using their stuff for free, the Open Source community could turn over and go back to bed when people start panicking about Minecraft bugs. The Open Source community does not need to worry about anything other than the Open Source community, it is an act of both social and personal charity that people release code under permissive licenses, and doing so does not open them up to any additional obligation for support or any additional responsibility to guarantee stability. If you want that support, then pay for it. And if you're not willing to pay for it, then fine, but then don't complain or expect sympathy from the Open Source community if your stuff breaks. ---- > My understanding is your position is that Open Source isn't broken, it's all the free riding that's the problem. My position is not that free riding is the problem, free riding is a big part of Open Source, free riding is fine. My position is twofold: - First, when you give someone something for free, and they come back with additional demands or complaints that it doesn't work as well as they want it to because they're not engaged in support -- it's not your problem or your job to devote additional work to making it easier for them free ride. - Second, that at a systemic level people giving stuff away for free does not give them some kind of additional obligation to individually overthrow Capitalism or rework our entire economic system, and I think it's wild to look at arguably one of the most successful Anarchist spaces in the entire modern world and say, "it's not the businesses that are the problem, it's these people, because they haven't done enough to overthrow the entire tech industry." ---- You seem to be dipping your toes into a very cynical take on the tech industry that I'm not going to argue for or against. What I am going to say is that if I take your position, if I assume that the tech industry doesn't care about stability at all, that it only cares about rapid growth, that security vulnerabilities are acceptable to investors, that this all and elaborate shell game to monopolize and undercut competitors and choke down on the market and its workers -- from that perspective, it makes even less sense for us to have an earnest conversation about how Open Source can become more "professional" or how it can encourage companies to give back. If I start from your view of the tech industry, then I am even more convinced that Open Source bears no obligation to these companies and that it's fine for the Open Source community to go off and do its own things and leave them to figure out their own problems. It doesn't make sense to have such a cynical view of how companies work, and then to say that Open Source developers are now somehow responsible for cleaning up this mess that companies caused. You seem very cynical about the potential stability of corporate products in general; but if they're so fundamentally broken then why not let them break? It is a very strange philosophy for you to have where you're pointing at corporations and investor mentality as a fundamentally broken system, and then saying that Open Source devs are being irresponsible because they're somehow "enabling" these people. If someone sets out a bowl of Halloween candy and some kid comes up and takes the entire bowl, who is the primary person that you blame in that situation? But sure, whatever. If I understand you, the central problem is that free riding is baked into our industry, and yet somehow it's individual unpaid developers building software outside of that profit-maximizing system that are to blame for all of it. So instead of holding companies to task, or trying to support the people building commons that aren't designed to monopolize or grow at all costs, or reworking economic systems to improve incentives, or even just acknowledging that Open Source devs don't have an obligation to support the industry, what we should actually do instead is criticize the Open Source community for not being itself Capitalistic enough. That will definitely help, and definitely won't just result in cementing the very systems you criticize. /s