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It's a bit wild that the sum total money spent on salaries for engineers handling potential problems stemming from this or defending against the possibility in

by Osmose 5y ago

It's a bit wild that the sum total money spent on salaries for engineers handling potential problems stemming from this or defending against the possibility in the future could probably have covered paying the maintainer a living wage many times over.

thefourthchime 5y ago
Living wage? haha, more like 100 peoples living wage.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  In America, most unskilled software developers make somewhere in the $80k to $140k range. A living wage is around $20k for absolute bare minimum essentials. Skilled devs still get around $200k. Point is, maybe 10 people. And that’s if you like ramen.
  - aiisjustanif 5y ago
    > Skilled devs still get around $200k. Moderately skilled it engineers other of backgrounds and devs can make much more than $200k, just go check levels.fyi To the parent comments point > It's a bit wild that the sum total money spent on salaries for engineers handling potential problems stemming from this or defending against the possibility in the future could probably have covered paying the maintainer a living wage many times over. The collective effort across numerous companies is much more than just $200k and you can bet your butt on that.
  - llamataboot 5y ago
    I don't know where people get these crazy numbers - Even in America outside of the coasts and outside of FAANG, making $140-$150+ as a senior developer is very good (and compared to almost all other industries is absurd) - salary.com which doesn't just rely on self-reported info as levels does reports the median salary + bonus for senior software engineers as $120k https://www.salary.com/tools/salary-calculator/senior-software-engineer?type=bonus https://www.salary.com/tools/salary-calculator/senior-softwa... Outside of the US, even in more expensive places in the EU, even the equivalent of $100k for a super senior lead architect would be Very Good - I don't know a single SWE in the midwest in the US - including senior embedded systems engineers working on medical devices, senior firmware devs working on networking equipment, or any web engineer that makes more than $175k and I know plenty of Very Good senior full-stack web devs that make $125-$150 $125k a year is still a top of the top salary in the US, so don't cry for them tho
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      They were using extreme numbers to say that even then you barely hit 10x. That's why the number they used for a living wage is so low too.
      - sillysaurusx 5y ago
        I just don’t think HN is interested in this anymore. There was a time. It’s gone now. Dumb comments saying software engineers make 100x a living wage (as if this would be a bad thing) are the flavor du jour. It’s hard not to respond in kind. But thank you, for what it’s worth. I remember you from 2010. It was quite a time.
        mmmmmbop 5y ago
        For what it's worth, I didn't read thefourthchime's comment in a way that would suggest that software engineers are making 100x a living wage. The way I understood it, they meant that the total cost of all engineer hours spent on rectifying the problems caused by the 'colors' and 'faker' issue would easily cover 100 living wages.
oblio 5y ago
Tragedy of the commons, shortsightedness and misaligned individual incentives. Individual contributors in large companies, especially, would want their companies to fund FOSS projects they use. But approval processes are generally extremely complicated and there's nothing to gain internally by doing it. And we're talking about money that these corporations spend each millisecond. They barely need approvals for many other activities costing 10x, 100x in other domains.
- AmericanChopper 5y ago
  Most of the companies that I’ve worked for have funded the FOSS that we used. By allowing me and my colleagues to contribute features we needed, or fix bugs that were affecting us. The core maintainers probably never knew these PRs were funded at an hourly rate paid for by some big bank, and sadly quite a few of the projects that I’ve contributed to have rug-pulled into some sort of non-FOSS enterprise product. We all benefit from FOSS, including all these disgruntled maintainers. The FOSS way should be to pay it forward, to contribute to projects where you can. If you’re expecting to get paid for it, it’s not FOSS. Deciding you can’t maintain a project anymore is fine, but pulling it out from under the people that are using it is incredibly anti-FOSS.
  - Osmose 5y ago
    > The FOSS way should be to pay it forward, to contribute to projects where you can. In theory, this was enforced by copyleft requiring derivative works to also be free software. In practice, companies use software with permissible licenses instead because then they can reap the benefits without any requirement to pay it forward. > If you’re expecting to get paid for it, it’s not FOSS. Being paid for your time has nothing to do with whether your source code is public or what freedoms users have when using your software. Conflating free software with volunteer labor is exactly what leads to situations like this one, where the author's business based on faker got copied wholesale by a competitor who simply ignored their attempts to reach out. > Deciding you can’t maintain a project anymore is fine, but pulling it out from under the people that are using it is incredibly anti-FOSS. The mechanisms that allow a rug-pull are entirely choices made by the users of the libraries for their own convenience; the author did everything needed for you to download a working copy and use it in perpetuity. It's your fault for choosing to rely on NPM, choosing to not cache your dependencies, and choosing not to pin your dependencies.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
The author didn’t write all of the code, though. The code has a long history (including in other languages) and many contributors. Why should this one developer collect payment but not everyone else who contributed it? Regardless, it’s ridiculous to give something away openly under a permissive license and then later get angry when people use it exactly as you license it.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  > Regardless, it’s ridiculous to give something away openly under a permissive license and then later get angry when people use it exactly as you license it. Doing your best to live in a bad system does not invalidate the complaints you have about that system.
  - slibhb 5y ago
    By publishing free, open source software he wasn't "doing his best to live in the system". That would involve exchanging his labor for currency.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      > That would involve exchanging his labor for currency. That's the goal. Or at least one goal. But you can't just press a button and do that. Being in charge of and an expert on open source software can be a way get people to buy your labor, but it's much harder than it should be. Instead many companies will demand you work for free, because it's open source! Also trying to do something good for the world shouldn't make it so hard to make money. The companies get value but don't want to pay even a pittance.
      - slibhb 5y ago
        > Being in charge of and an expert on open source software can be a way get people to buy your labor, but it's much harder than it should be. Instead many companies will demand you work for free, because it's open source! It's hard to get paid when you decide to give your work away. If only there was some way a person could enter into a contract in order to guarantee payment in exchange for their work. What a radical idea...
krapp 5y ago
The maintainer gave their work away for free. By definition - and by explicit license it isn't worth any wage, much less a "living wage many times over." The maintainer wants to have their cake and eat it too - they likely believe in FOSS for moral reasons yet consider it immoral when companies take their software and use it freely under the terms offered. If you want people to pay you for your work, don't give it away for free. If you give it away for free, don't have a temper tantrum if someone gets rich off of your work without compensating you, because those were the rules you chose to play under.

by Osmose 5y ago

thefourthchime 5y ago

Living wage? haha, more like 100 peoples living wage.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
In America, most unskilled software developers make somewhere in the $80k to $140k range. A living wage is around $20k for absolute bare minimum essentials. Skilled devs still get around $200k. Point is, maybe 10 people. And that’s if you like ramen.
- aiisjustanif 5y ago
  > Skilled devs still get around $200k. Moderately skilled it engineers other of backgrounds and devs can make much more than $200k, just go check levels.fyi To the parent comments point > It's a bit wild that the sum total money spent on salaries for engineers handling potential problems stemming from this or defending against the possibility in the future could probably have covered paying the maintainer a living wage many times over. The collective effort across numerous companies is much more than just $200k and you can bet your butt on that.
- llamataboot 5y ago
  I don't know where people get these crazy numbers - Even in America outside of the coasts and outside of FAANG, making $140-$150+ as a senior developer is very good (and compared to almost all other industries is absurd) - salary.com which doesn't just rely on self-reported info as levels does reports the median salary + bonus for senior software engineers as $120k https://www.salary.com/tools/salary-calculator/senior-software-engineer?type=bonus https://www.salary.com/tools/salary-calculator/senior-softwa... Outside of the US, even in more expensive places in the EU, even the equivalent of $100k for a super senior lead architect would be Very Good - I don't know a single SWE in the midwest in the US - including senior embedded systems engineers working on medical devices, senior firmware devs working on networking equipment, or any web engineer that makes more than $175k and I know plenty of Very Good senior full-stack web devs that make $125-$150 $125k a year is still a top of the top salary in the US, so don't cry for them tho
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    They were using extreme numbers to say that even then you barely hit 10x. That's why the number they used for a living wage is so low too.
    - sillysaurusx 5y ago
      I just don’t think HN is interested in this anymore. There was a time. It’s gone now. Dumb comments saying software engineers make 100x a living wage (as if this would be a bad thing) are the flavor du jour. It’s hard not to respond in kind. But thank you, for what it’s worth. I remember you from 2010. It was quite a time.
      - mmmmmbop 5y ago
        For what it's worth, I didn't read thefourthchime's comment in a way that would suggest that software engineers are making 100x a living wage. The way I understood it, they meant that the total cost of all engineer hours spent on rectifying the problems caused by the 'colors' and 'faker' issue would easily cover 100 living wages.

oblio 5y ago

Tragedy of the commons, shortsightedness and misaligned individual incentives. Individual contributors in large companies, especially, would want their companies to fund FOSS projects they use. But approval processes are generally extremely complicated and there's nothing to gain internally by doing it. And we're talking about money that these corporations spend each millisecond. They barely need approvals for many other activities costing 10x, 100x in other domains.

AmericanChopper 5y ago
Most of the companies that I’ve worked for have funded the FOSS that we used. By allowing me and my colleagues to contribute features we needed, or fix bugs that were affecting us. The core maintainers probably never knew these PRs were funded at an hourly rate paid for by some big bank, and sadly quite a few of the projects that I’ve contributed to have rug-pulled into some sort of non-FOSS enterprise product. We all benefit from FOSS, including all these disgruntled maintainers. The FOSS way should be to pay it forward, to contribute to projects where you can. If you’re expecting to get paid for it, it’s not FOSS. Deciding you can’t maintain a project anymore is fine, but pulling it out from under the people that are using it is incredibly anti-FOSS.
- Osmose 5y ago
  > The FOSS way should be to pay it forward, to contribute to projects where you can. In theory, this was enforced by copyleft requiring derivative works to also be free software. In practice, companies use software with permissible licenses instead because then they can reap the benefits without any requirement to pay it forward. > If you’re expecting to get paid for it, it’s not FOSS. Being paid for your time has nothing to do with whether your source code is public or what freedoms users have when using your software. Conflating free software with volunteer labor is exactly what leads to situations like this one, where the author's business based on faker got copied wholesale by a competitor who simply ignored their attempts to reach out. > Deciding you can’t maintain a project anymore is fine, but pulling it out from under the people that are using it is incredibly anti-FOSS. The mechanisms that allow a rug-pull are entirely choices made by the users of the libraries for their own convenience; the author did everything needed for you to download a working copy and use it in perpetuity. It's your fault for choosing to rely on NPM, choosing to not cache your dependencies, and choosing not to pin your dependencies.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

The author didn’t write all of the code, though. The code has a long history (including in other languages) and many contributors. Why should this one developer collect payment but not everyone else who contributed it? Regardless, it’s ridiculous to give something away openly under a permissive license and then later get angry when people use it exactly as you license it.

Dylan16807 5y ago
> Regardless, it’s ridiculous to give something away openly under a permissive license and then later get angry when people use it exactly as you license it. Doing your best to live in a bad system does not invalidate the complaints you have about that system.
- slibhb 5y ago
  By publishing free, open source software he wasn't "doing his best to live in the system". That would involve exchanging his labor for currency.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    > That would involve exchanging his labor for currency. That's the goal. Or at least one goal. But you can't just press a button and do that. Being in charge of and an expert on open source software can be a way get people to buy your labor, but it's much harder than it should be. Instead many companies will demand you work for free, because it's open source! Also trying to do something good for the world shouldn't make it so hard to make money. The companies get value but don't want to pay even a pittance.
    - slibhb 5y ago
      > Being in charge of and an expert on open source software can be a way get people to buy your labor, but it's much harder than it should be. Instead many companies will demand you work for free, because it's open source! It's hard to get paid when you decide to give your work away. If only there was some way a person could enter into a contract in order to guarantee payment in exchange for their work. What a radical idea...

krapp 5y ago

The maintainer gave their work away for free. By definition - and by explicit license it isn't worth any wage, much less a "living wage many times over." The maintainer wants to have their cake and eat it too - they likely believe in FOSS for moral reasons yet consider it immoral when companies take their software and use it freely under the terms offered. If you want people to pay you for your work, don't give it away for free. If you give it away for free, don't have a temper tantrum if someone gets rich off of your work without compensating you, because those were the rules you chose to play under.