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This was a long, thoughtful read. I really enjoyed it and mostly see things as the author does. > So it is with free software. You literally cannot pay for it.

This was a long, thoughtful read. I really enjoyed it and mostly see things as the author does. > So it is with free software. You literally cannot pay for it. If you do, it becomes something else. This is really the crux. Everyone is mad there’s no money in writing free/os software, but if there was money it wouldn’t be free/os software. It would just be like what we do at our day jobs. You can write the code someone else wants and get paid for it (aka a day job). You also have the option to write the code YOU want to write, but in this case you’ll need to figure out a plan for making money on your own.

pronlover723 5y ago
> You literally cannot pay for it Sure you can. You can hire someone to fix it to your liking. As an example, I'm pretty sure that's RedHat's M.O. Pay them to fix whatever you want them to fix.
r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
One of the problems is that if your target market is other devs, there is a knee jerk demand that your software should be foss and free (as in beer). I hope that we'll see a move away from foss licensing to source available licenses over the next few years and an increased acceptance of this model in more areas. Dropping the non discrimination clauses in open source licenses while giving licensees the right to view and modify the source and integrate it with their own software, but not the right to redistribute, is to me a good middle ground for a lot of projects. This would allow developers to charge different rates (or not charge) depending on the licensee and ensure that they can capture more of the value from their work if they need to do so in the future, or if their project becomes popular. It works for Epic with Unreal Engine and more generally in the game industry where it is common to have source available licenses. While free software has its place in certain areas (academia, government, hobby projects), and I agree you should be able to audit and fix the software that runs on your own devices, it also has downsides and I don't think foss licensing should always, or even usually, be the default outside of these cases.
- mcguire 5y ago
  "...giving licensees the right to view and modify the source and integrate it with their own software, but not the right to redistribute, is to me a good middle ground for a lot of projects." Licensees have that right with (most) free software licenses. The downside of this is that, if the owner, Epic say, is not interested in changes you need, then you cannot distribute those changes no matter how valuable they are to you or anyone else. Further, you will have to maintain those changes in the face of whatever architectural differences the owner decides to introduce.[1] You are in the same position as the good old days of proprietary software (Believe me, you could absolutely pay IBM to make changes its OS's. If you were, say, Ford.) except that you get to see the source. Yay. [1] Yes, you should be expected to maintain your own changes if the original maintainers don't want to. However, that's significantly more difficult if the owner is uninterested in your features or is actively trying to break you. (Microsoft waves in the distance.)
- ignoramous 5y ago
  > One of the problems is that if your target market is other devs, there is a knee jerk demand that your software should be foss and free (as in beer). The problem with source-available COSS licenses like SSPLv1, BSLv1, Perimeter etc is that, it almost to the point of insulting developers who care about FOSS, wants to have its cake and eat it too: That is, the benefits of both, open and proprietary software. That's a hard sell, and it remains to be seen if they'd be as successful as FOSS for developer tools: http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts-its-midlife-crisis/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts... and https://steveklabnik.com/writing/the-culture-war-at-the-heart-of-open-source https://steveklabnik.com/writing/the-culture-war-at-the-hear... Another popular strategy is to open source just enough bits, but not all of it: Previously named "open-core", pioneered by Elastic (who have since moved to SSPLv1) and GitLab, but is now accepted as open-source, anyway. Tailscale falls in this category. https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-source-business-strategies/ https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-sourc... > I hope that we'll see a move away from foss licensing to source available licenses over the next few years and an increased acceptance of this model in more areas. Nouveau open source strategy is to have a strangle hold on the software itself (think Chrome / Android) by keeping the development tightly guarded along with the business interests of the original sponsor. Typically, these projects are open sourced to commodotise competitor's advantages (Symbian/Blackberry in the case of Android, IE in the case of Chrome): https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ The traditional way of being in a F/OSS business was through associate services like deployments and consulting ala RedHat for Linux / Acquia for Drupal: http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-software/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft... Open source, in particular FOSS (free-as-in-beer), in itself is a business strategy (but not a business model) if one knows how to use it to their advantage (as the author points out, many startups doing so these days): https://a16z.com/2019/01/22/what-comes-after-open-source/ https://a16z.com/2019/01/22/what-comes-after-open-source/
RicoElectrico 5y ago
I think of platonic ideal FOSS as liberal art in the ancient definition: you do it because you can afford it. Having said that, this does not imply FOSS developers shouldn't have the "product mindset". Quite the opposite, in fact.
- kelnos 5y ago
  > Having said that, this does not imply FOSS developers shouldn't have the "product mindset". Quite the opposite, in fact. Disagree. FOSS developers should have whatever mindset they feel like having. Motivations run the entire gamut. Some FOSS developers really do want to build a polished "product" that others will want to buy (or whatever the non-paying equivalent might be). Others just want to scratch their itch and share what they've made. Telling either of those people (or any of the people in between) that they're "doing it wrong" is incorrect by definition.
joe_the_user 5y ago
JM Keynes said: “A ‘sound’ banker, alas, is not one who sees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.” and same applies to software managers. We're had lots of nasty security breaches lately. These breaches overall have nothing directly to do with free software but it's pretty easy to see what they have in common. Security breaches grow like hardy weeds on the ground of "I don't have to face the consequences of bad security, my customers do". The Solar Winds and Log4j breach/hole came from wildly different software types but each had the quality of paying for security at the rate that it might harm you, not at the rate it might do harm in general. And comes because security is inherently expensive - since "security is a process, not feature", done right costs the entire organization time and money rather than simply involving a purchase. Which to say: "Everyone is mad there’s no money in writing free/os software, but if there was money it wouldn’t be free/os software. It would just be like what we do at our day jobs." seems totally incorrect. QT makes money selling open source software. Red Hat makes money selling open source soft. If there was a market for tightly secure, verified open source software, people would be working writing (and especially testing) that. But companies whatever crap onto their machines, whether barely maintained java or dubious closed source stuff.
- jaredklewis 5y ago
  I see what you're saying, but just to be clear I'm using "free" here in the very idiosyncratic way the article does. Things like Red Hat, GitLab, or MongoDB from a license perspective are free/open source. But these types of projects are a totally different beast than "real" (for lack of a better word) open source projects like the linux kernel, emacs, ruby on rails, or lucene.
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    1) Most people doing open source don't share the author's definition so this discussion winds-up not being about their 2) Tremendous effort and money goes into making the Linux Kernel secure. The fact that you fail to draw a good line between paid open source and "real" open open is indication that this idiosyncratic definition is fallacious and disingenuous. 3) Which brings me back to what I think the real, reasonable line is. The line is between cheap software, software that involves the minimal effort to squeeze out a feature and a full, carefully secured software process. Open source is virtually irrelevant. If some people didn't volunteer to produce free apps that got duplicated everywhere, you'd have a low-paid smuck doing somewhere, probably producing worse quality. Oppositely, highly secure software should be open source or source-available - the eyes the better. Linux, notably, benefits from many, many people testing it and that benefits the very heavy users of Linux who do employ people developing it. good quality software where people pay for the quality.
darepublic 5y ago
If you want to make money off your library it kind of has to be complicated. Something that could be written in 500 lines should clock in at around 10k. And create a slick needlessly complicated marketing + docs site that conveniently glosses over the ugly warts of the library. Make sure to support react native, it's something very few will care about but adds to the perceived impenetrable fortress of pristine functionality. Make sure to tell your readers-- Don't roll _this_ at home!
remram 5y ago
That is very much not true. I get paid to write free software. Linux, arguably the most successful piece of free software, is almost entirely written by people who are paid to do it. You don't pay for the software, but that doesn't mean "there is no money" or that it is very different from "what we do at our day jobs".
- brianpan 5y ago
  I think the point is, like the gift analogy in the post, that once you're doing it for money it's no longer free. Not free as in beer or free as in speech, but free as in choice (or free as in time). :D
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    Well that's not what FOSS software means, but even if you creatively change what it means to fit, that's still not true. I'm also paid to work on free software. I work on what I like and choose to at my job. That is why I chose to take a job where I am. If I didn't have a job I'd be doing this anyway as I was when I started getting into it as an unpaid hobby for several years. If my employer decided they wanted me to work on something I don't want to, I would choose to quit and look for something else.
  - remram 5y ago
    That's not true. You are paid to do it, but it can very much be grabbed by anyone for free (as in free beer).
hooande 5y ago
Most money made by open source developers comes in the form of donations. Those have no obligation attached by definition. If a developer doesn't do what the community wants, the donations could stop coming. Or not. If they don't do want an employer wants, the paychecks will definitely stop coming.
pastacacioepepe 5y ago
In an ideal socialist economy, I could imagine engineers being sponsored by the state to work on FOSS, similarly to what happened in USSR with the Artists' union or in Tito's Yugoslavia.
jimhefferon 5y ago
I think the question can be a little more subtle than that. I'm involved with an organization that does a lot of Free software. But sometimes money is involved. For instance, we have collected some money and funneled it to developers to give them time to do what would otherwise either take many years of nights and weekends, or just be too hard to get done without time to focus on it alone. This software is still Free, though.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I always wonder how much of the most popular open source projects are written by people who are actually being paid for the work by their employers Many of my open source contributions came from fixing bugs or adding features because I needed them for my job. Many of the biggest open source projects I use come from big companies that have full-time engineers working on them. I’ve also worked at two separate companies that have hired developers of very popular open-source projects. It didn’t work out in either case because the company wanted them to prioritize work related to the company, but they wanted to continue focusing on the community as before. On a micro level, it’s surprisingly difficult to arrange to pay someone outside of a company to work on a project for you. The amount of overhead that goes into arranging the contracting agreement, communicating the issue, setting up the contractor with your environment, and managing it all can quickly snowball into a massive commitment for even small work. The exception is hiring contractors or contracting companies who have made a business out of working in that exact domain and are already up to speed on the project and have good relationships with upstream maintainers, but those are rare.
- pm215 5y ago
  Conversely, on the receiving end, if you aren't somebody who's made a business out of being a contractor then taking some company's money to do a specific piece of work also seems like too much hassle and overhead to be worth it...
WJW 5y ago
I think the "dream" of writing FOSS for a living is that it's like a normal job except for all the non-fun parts like mandatory HR meetings, boring standups, performance reviews, having to deal with customers/PMs/etc who don't understand the technical constraints, etc etc etc. It is just writing code you want to write with zero other obligations but somehow you get paid for it. When it's written out like that I think most people would recognize why it is not very realistic to get paid for something like that, but it is still a very tempting vision.
- dblock 5y ago
  I work at AWS on opensearch.org, literally to do this as described.
- Kinrany 5y ago
  It's perfectly reasonable to want to be paid when your work has positive externalities. It doesn't matter whether you liked doing the work.
  - karaterobot 5y ago
    I wish there was an open source fairy that put money in my bank account every time someone used my software! Until then, it's reasonable to want to be paid without having to deal with the attendant hassles and responsibilities of participating in a business venture, but not reasonable to expect that to happen.
    - mjmahone17 5y ago
      Starting around the renaissance, we kind of had “open source fairies” in the form of research grants, professorships and other forms of patronage. If you look at 19th century scientists, it seems like most the famous ones weren’t paid to do specific research, but instead we’re given space to do whatever research they could. This has gotten more and more restrictive: even in academia today, it seems rare for open ended grants to be given, and even when there are, there’s a lot more competition for those grants than we can sustain with current funding. Open ended research doesn’t necessarily work in a pure market system. And most open ended research probably won’t provide any concrete monetary benefit to the person funding that research. Even Bell Labs wasn’t really self-funding despite having developed some of the underpinnings of our modern economy. This is an (if not totally compelling) argument for a basic income: anyone can focus on fundamental research without worrying about covering life’s fundamentals, so long as they’re OK living a bare bones life while they can’t get outside funding for it.
pm215 5y ago
I write code somebody else wants and get paid for it as my day job. It happens to be open source. Some people write the code they want to write, but keep it closed-source. So I don't think your contrast quite works. I think some of the "no money in open source software" unease isn't because people would like to get paid to write whatever code they feel like, but a desire to retain the benefits of having a massive amount of open source code out there (less reinvention of the wheel by multiple companies, low-cost low-friction way to bootstrap whatever actually interesting/novel software your company is doing, etc) but put it on a more sustainable footing where money is directed reliably enough at the people keeping it together that we can avoid the xkcd "one person in Nebraska" failure mode.
- treis 5y ago
  IMHO the underlying problem is value based pricing. Roughly that means you take how much money your software generates for your clients and try to capture as much of that as you can. That leads to huge incentive for companies to not depend on commercial software since as soon as that happens the vendor will take them to pound town in contract negotiations. That fear makes it nearly impossible for something like Log4J to charge anything. Even if it's a penny per year per server you don't want to build on it because they can come back next year and make it $10 a year. And what are you going to do about it? FOSS removes that threat but it also makes the path of least resistance to not pay anything. The ideal solution is something like "You have to pay a little bit but it's guaranteed that it will never be more than a little bit". But I don't see how to do something like that.
  - cromulent 5y ago
    It is, isn’t it. The article talks about “open source is communism” but not authoritarianism, real communism. Which made me daydream about if the various licenses for FOSS required profit making companies to pay 100$ per year for all you can eat FOSS. And then it got distributed on some usage based basis. Would things be better? Not practical though.
    - DarylZero 5y ago
coldpie 5y ago
> Everyone is mad there’s no money in writing free/os software, but if there was money it wouldn’t be free/os software. This doesn't hold up for me. I develop GPL'd software and I get paid for it. I probably wouldn't develop this particular GPL'd software if I wasn't getting paid to do it. The issues of payment and license seem related, but orthogonal.
- jaredklewis 5y ago
  Right, so this is why the article tries to make the subtle distinction around "free" vs "open," not in the sense of the license, but in the spirit of the project. Different licenses, but working at GitLab or working at GitHub probably feels pretty similar; you have a boss, there are probably sprints, you build features, fix bugs, and so on. This is fundamentally different than working on a rust port of a GNU utility. This is the sense in which the article is using the word "free." This is idiosyncratic and doesn't align with its either of free's typical usages (free as in beer or free as in FOSS), but there really isn't a perfect word for what the article is talking about.
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    Self-directed programmers. Autonomous programming. Independent programming. Volunteer programming.
- kelnos 5y ago
  I think there's an important distinction, though. You're not getting paid for the GPL'd software as a product; some company is (presumably, apologies if I've mischaracterized your work) paying you to write some software that also happens to be released to the public under the terms of the GPL. Presumably this company would also pay you to build the same thing, in house, and not open-source it at all. I read the "everyone is mad there's no money in writing free/os software" as meaning that people are upset that you can't really sell GPL'd software to other parties. Sure, you can dual-license, and require payment for the non-GPL version, but then it's not really "free/os software" anymore, at least not for the part you're getting paid for. You can also sell support and consulting services around the GPL'd software, but, again, that's not really getting paid for selling the software, at least not directly. And if you're writing software for a company that wants to use it directly, and decides to also GPL it, you're not really getting paid to sell GPL'd software, you're just getting paid to write it for someone else, and the license is incidental. I agree that sometimes people's motivation for working on (or not working on) some piece of software can be tied both to the license it ends up getting released under, and whether or not they get paid for working on it. But I also agree that's orthogonal to the point being made. It's still true that getting paid to write free software is harder than getting paid to write proprietary software. Companies that would pay you just to write some piece of software are more likely to keep the source closed than open it. If you write something yourself, selling it directly to others is hard enough if it's proprietary, but even more difficult if the code is available under a permissive license. Selling support or consulting services around the software might be viable sometimes, but can also be very difficult, and requires a different skill set from writing the software in the first place.

pronlover723 5y ago

> You literally cannot pay for it Sure you can. You can hire someone to fix it to your liking. As an example, I'm pretty sure that's RedHat's M.O. Pay them to fix whatever you want them to fix.

r_hoods_ghost 5y ago

One of the problems is that if your target market is other devs, there is a knee jerk demand that your software should be foss and free (as in beer). I hope that we'll see a move away from foss licensing to source available licenses over the next few years and an increased acceptance of this model in more areas. Dropping the non discrimination clauses in open source licenses while giving licensees the right to view and modify the source and integrate it with their own software, but not the right to redistribute, is to me a good middle ground for a lot of projects. This would allow developers to charge different rates (or not charge) depending on the licensee and ensure that they can capture more of the value from their work if they need to do so in the future, or if their project becomes popular. It works for Epic with Unreal Engine and more generally in the game industry where it is common to have source available licenses. While free software has its place in certain areas (academia, government, hobby projects), and I agree you should be able to audit and fix the software that runs on your own devices, it also has downsides and I don't think foss licensing should always, or even usually, be the default outside of these cases.

mcguire 5y ago
"...giving licensees the right to view and modify the source and integrate it with their own software, but not the right to redistribute, is to me a good middle ground for a lot of projects." Licensees have that right with (most) free software licenses. The downside of this is that, if the owner, Epic say, is not interested in changes you need, then you cannot distribute those changes no matter how valuable they are to you or anyone else. Further, you will have to maintain those changes in the face of whatever architectural differences the owner decides to introduce.[1] You are in the same position as the good old days of proprietary software (Believe me, you could absolutely pay IBM to make changes its OS's. If you were, say, Ford.) except that you get to see the source. Yay. [1] Yes, you should be expected to maintain your own changes if the original maintainers don't want to. However, that's significantly more difficult if the owner is uninterested in your features or is actively trying to break you. (Microsoft waves in the distance.)
ignoramous 5y ago
> One of the problems is that if your target market is other devs, there is a knee jerk demand that your software should be foss and free (as in beer). The problem with source-available COSS licenses like SSPLv1, BSLv1, Perimeter etc is that, it almost to the point of insulting developers who care about FOSS, wants to have its cake and eat it too: That is, the benefits of both, open and proprietary software. That's a hard sell, and it remains to be seen if they'd be as successful as FOSS for developer tools: http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts-its-midlife-crisis/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts... and https://steveklabnik.com/writing/the-culture-war-at-the-heart-of-open-source https://steveklabnik.com/writing/the-culture-war-at-the-hear... Another popular strategy is to open source just enough bits, but not all of it: Previously named "open-core", pioneered by Elastic (who have since moved to SSPLv1) and GitLab, but is now accepted as open-source, anyway. Tailscale falls in this category. https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-source-business-strategies/ https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-sourc... > I hope that we'll see a move away from foss licensing to source available licenses over the next few years and an increased acceptance of this model in more areas. Nouveau open source strategy is to have a strangle hold on the software itself (think Chrome / Android) by keeping the development tightly guarded along with the business interests of the original sponsor. Typically, these projects are open sourced to commodotise competitor's advantages (Symbian/Blackberry in the case of Android, IE in the case of Chrome): https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ The traditional way of being in a F/OSS business was through associate services like deployments and consulting ala RedHat for Linux / Acquia for Drupal: http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-software/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft... Open source, in particular FOSS (free-as-in-beer), in itself is a business strategy (but not a business model) if one knows how to use it to their advantage (as the author points out, many startups doing so these days): https://a16z.com/2019/01/22/what-comes-after-open-source/ https://a16z.com/2019/01/22/what-comes-after-open-source/

RicoElectrico 5y ago

I think of platonic ideal FOSS as liberal art in the ancient definition: you do it because you can afford it. Having said that, this does not imply FOSS developers shouldn't have the "product mindset". Quite the opposite, in fact.

kelnos 5y ago
> Having said that, this does not imply FOSS developers shouldn't have the "product mindset". Quite the opposite, in fact. Disagree. FOSS developers should have whatever mindset they feel like having. Motivations run the entire gamut. Some FOSS developers really do want to build a polished "product" that others will want to buy (or whatever the non-paying equivalent might be). Others just want to scratch their itch and share what they've made. Telling either of those people (or any of the people in between) that they're "doing it wrong" is incorrect by definition.

joe_the_user 5y ago

JM Keynes said: “A ‘sound’ banker, alas, is not one who sees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.” and same applies to software managers. We're had lots of nasty security breaches lately. These breaches overall have nothing directly to do with free software but it's pretty easy to see what they have in common. Security breaches grow like hardy weeds on the ground of "I don't have to face the consequences of bad security, my customers do". The Solar Winds and Log4j breach/hole came from wildly different software types but each had the quality of paying for security at the rate that it might harm you, not at the rate it might do harm in general. And comes because security is inherently expensive - since "security is a process, not feature", done right costs the entire organization time and money rather than simply involving a purchase. Which to say: "Everyone is mad there’s no money in writing free/os software, but if there was money it wouldn’t be free/os software. It would just be like what we do at our day jobs." seems totally incorrect. QT makes money selling open source software. Red Hat makes money selling open source soft. If there was a market for tightly secure, verified open source software, people would be working writing (and especially testing) that. But companies whatever crap onto their machines, whether barely maintained java or dubious closed source stuff.

jaredklewis 5y ago
I see what you're saying, but just to be clear I'm using "free" here in the very idiosyncratic way the article does. Things like Red Hat, GitLab, or MongoDB from a license perspective are free/open source. But these types of projects are a totally different beast than "real" (for lack of a better word) open source projects like the linux kernel, emacs, ruby on rails, or lucene.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  1) Most people doing open source don't share the author's definition so this discussion winds-up not being about their 2) Tremendous effort and money goes into making the Linux Kernel secure. The fact that you fail to draw a good line between paid open source and "real" open open is indication that this idiosyncratic definition is fallacious and disingenuous. 3) Which brings me back to what I think the real, reasonable line is. The line is between cheap software, software that involves the minimal effort to squeeze out a feature and a full, carefully secured software process. Open source is virtually irrelevant. If some people didn't volunteer to produce free apps that got duplicated everywhere, you'd have a low-paid smuck doing somewhere, probably producing worse quality. Oppositely, highly secure software should be open source or source-available - the eyes the better. Linux, notably, benefits from many, many people testing it and that benefits the very heavy users of Linux who do employ people developing it. good quality software where people pay for the quality.

darepublic 5y ago

If you want to make money off your library it kind of has to be complicated. Something that could be written in 500 lines should clock in at around 10k. And create a slick needlessly complicated marketing + docs site that conveniently glosses over the ugly warts of the library. Make sure to support react native, it's something very few will care about but adds to the perceived impenetrable fortress of pristine functionality. Make sure to tell your readers-- Don't roll _this_ at home!

remram 5y ago

That is very much not true. I get paid to write free software. Linux, arguably the most successful piece of free software, is almost entirely written by people who are paid to do it. You don't pay for the software, but that doesn't mean "there is no money" or that it is very different from "what we do at our day jobs".

brianpan 5y ago
I think the point is, like the gift analogy in the post, that once you're doing it for money it's no longer free. Not free as in beer or free as in speech, but free as in choice (or free as in time). :D
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Well that's not what FOSS software means, but even if you creatively change what it means to fit, that's still not true. I'm also paid to work on free software. I work on what I like and choose to at my job. That is why I chose to take a job where I am. If I didn't have a job I'd be doing this anyway as I was when I started getting into it as an unpaid hobby for several years. If my employer decided they wanted me to work on something I don't want to, I would choose to quit and look for something else.
- remram 5y ago
  That's not true. You are paid to do it, but it can very much be grabbed by anyone for free (as in free beer).

hooande 5y ago

Most money made by open source developers comes in the form of donations. Those have no obligation attached by definition. If a developer doesn't do what the community wants, the donations could stop coming. Or not. If they don't do want an employer wants, the paychecks will definitely stop coming.

pastacacioepepe 5y ago

In an ideal socialist economy, I could imagine engineers being sponsored by the state to work on FOSS, similarly to what happened in USSR with the Artists' union or in Tito's Yugoslavia.

jimhefferon 5y ago

I think the question can be a little more subtle than that. I'm involved with an organization that does a lot of Free software. But sometimes money is involved. For instance, we have collected some money and funneled it to developers to give them time to do what would otherwise either take many years of nights and weekends, or just be too hard to get done without time to focus on it alone. This software is still Free, though.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

I always wonder how much of the most popular open source projects are written by people who are actually being paid for the work by their employers Many of my open source contributions came from fixing bugs or adding features because I needed them for my job. Many of the biggest open source projects I use come from big companies that have full-time engineers working on them. I’ve also worked at two separate companies that have hired developers of very popular open-source projects. It didn’t work out in either case because the company wanted them to prioritize work related to the company, but they wanted to continue focusing on the community as before. On a micro level, it’s surprisingly difficult to arrange to pay someone outside of a company to work on a project for you. The amount of overhead that goes into arranging the contracting agreement, communicating the issue, setting up the contractor with your environment, and managing it all can quickly snowball into a massive commitment for even small work. The exception is hiring contractors or contracting companies who have made a business out of working in that exact domain and are already up to speed on the project and have good relationships with upstream maintainers, but those are rare.

pm215 5y ago
Conversely, on the receiving end, if you aren't somebody who's made a business out of being a contractor then taking some company's money to do a specific piece of work also seems like too much hassle and overhead to be worth it...

WJW 5y ago

I think the "dream" of writing FOSS for a living is that it's like a normal job except for all the non-fun parts like mandatory HR meetings, boring standups, performance reviews, having to deal with customers/PMs/etc who don't understand the technical constraints, etc etc etc. It is just writing code you want to write with zero other obligations but somehow you get paid for it. When it's written out like that I think most people would recognize why it is not very realistic to get paid for something like that, but it is still a very tempting vision.

dblock 5y ago
I work at AWS on opensearch.org, literally to do this as described.
Kinrany 5y ago
It's perfectly reasonable to want to be paid when your work has positive externalities. It doesn't matter whether you liked doing the work.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  I wish there was an open source fairy that put money in my bank account every time someone used my software! Until then, it's reasonable to want to be paid without having to deal with the attendant hassles and responsibilities of participating in a business venture, but not reasonable to expect that to happen.
  - mjmahone17 5y ago
    Starting around the renaissance, we kind of had “open source fairies” in the form of research grants, professorships and other forms of patronage. If you look at 19th century scientists, it seems like most the famous ones weren’t paid to do specific research, but instead we’re given space to do whatever research they could. This has gotten more and more restrictive: even in academia today, it seems rare for open ended grants to be given, and even when there are, there’s a lot more competition for those grants than we can sustain with current funding. Open ended research doesn’t necessarily work in a pure market system. And most open ended research probably won’t provide any concrete monetary benefit to the person funding that research. Even Bell Labs wasn’t really self-funding despite having developed some of the underpinnings of our modern economy. This is an (if not totally compelling) argument for a basic income: anyone can focus on fundamental research without worrying about covering life’s fundamentals, so long as they’re OK living a bare bones life while they can’t get outside funding for it.

pm215 5y ago

I write code somebody else wants and get paid for it as my day job. It happens to be open source. Some people write the code they want to write, but keep it closed-source. So I don't think your contrast quite works. I think some of the "no money in open source software" unease isn't because people would like to get paid to write whatever code they feel like, but a desire to retain the benefits of having a massive amount of open source code out there (less reinvention of the wheel by multiple companies, low-cost low-friction way to bootstrap whatever actually interesting/novel software your company is doing, etc) but put it on a more sustainable footing where money is directed reliably enough at the people keeping it together that we can avoid the xkcd "one person in Nebraska" failure mode.

treis 5y ago
IMHO the underlying problem is value based pricing. Roughly that means you take how much money your software generates for your clients and try to capture as much of that as you can. That leads to huge incentive for companies to not depend on commercial software since as soon as that happens the vendor will take them to pound town in contract negotiations. That fear makes it nearly impossible for something like Log4J to charge anything. Even if it's a penny per year per server you don't want to build on it because they can come back next year and make it $10 a year. And what are you going to do about it? FOSS removes that threat but it also makes the path of least resistance to not pay anything. The ideal solution is something like "You have to pay a little bit but it's guaranteed that it will never be more than a little bit". But I don't see how to do something like that.
- cromulent 5y ago
  It is, isn’t it. The article talks about “open source is communism” but not authoritarianism, real communism. Which made me daydream about if the various licenses for FOSS required profit making companies to pay 100$ per year for all you can eat FOSS. And then it got distributed on some usage based basis. Would things be better? Not practical though.
  - DarylZero 5y ago

coldpie 5y ago

> Everyone is mad there’s no money in writing free/os software, but if there was money it wouldn’t be free/os software. This doesn't hold up for me. I develop GPL'd software and I get paid for it. I probably wouldn't develop this particular GPL'd software if I wasn't getting paid to do it. The issues of payment and license seem related, but orthogonal.

jaredklewis 5y ago
Right, so this is why the article tries to make the subtle distinction around "free" vs "open," not in the sense of the license, but in the spirit of the project. Different licenses, but working at GitLab or working at GitHub probably feels pretty similar; you have a boss, there are probably sprints, you build features, fix bugs, and so on. This is fundamentally different than working on a rust port of a GNU utility. This is the sense in which the article is using the word "free." This is idiosyncratic and doesn't align with its either of free's typical usages (free as in beer or free as in FOSS), but there really isn't a perfect word for what the article is talking about.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  Self-directed programmers. Autonomous programming. Independent programming. Volunteer programming.
kelnos 5y ago
I think there's an important distinction, though. You're not getting paid for the GPL'd software as a product; some company is (presumably, apologies if I've mischaracterized your work) paying you to write some software that also happens to be released to the public under the terms of the GPL. Presumably this company would also pay you to build the same thing, in house, and not open-source it at all. I read the "everyone is mad there's no money in writing free/os software" as meaning that people are upset that you can't really sell GPL'd software to other parties. Sure, you can dual-license, and require payment for the non-GPL version, but then it's not really "free/os software" anymore, at least not for the part you're getting paid for. You can also sell support and consulting services around the GPL'd software, but, again, that's not really getting paid for selling the software, at least not directly. And if you're writing software for a company that wants to use it directly, and decides to also GPL it, you're not really getting paid to sell GPL'd software, you're just getting paid to write it for someone else, and the license is incidental. I agree that sometimes people's motivation for working on (or not working on) some piece of software can be tied both to the license it ends up getting released under, and whether or not they get paid for working on it. But I also agree that's orthogonal to the point being made. It's still true that getting paid to write free software is harder than getting paid to write proprietary software. Companies that would pay you just to write some piece of software are more likely to keep the source closed than open it. If you write something yourself, selling it directly to others is hard enough if it's proprietary, but even more difficult if the code is available under a permissive license. Selling support or consulting services around the software might be viable sometimes, but can also be very difficult, and requires a different skill set from writing the software in the first place.