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Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture and of what makes the Internet special: people choose to experiment and share their work, an

Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture and of what makes the Internet special: people choose to experiment and share their work, and their work can reach every corner of the world. It has no significant parallel in other industries, it's beautiful, and I owe it my career. However, it's not a sustainable, fair, or effective foundation for an industry with the responsibility to power modern society. We need the critical role of Open Source maintainer to professionalize. This is most likely to happen through capture by large intermediaries, but I wish to see it happen through the formation of a serious professional role, organized independently or in small firms, like lawyers. This will require changes both from the maintainers [1] (become legible, get a LLC, send real invoices, offer guarantees) and from companies [2] (pay the maintainers, pay them real money, pay for maintenance, and keep paying them). [1] https://words.filippo.io/professional-maintainers/ https://words.filippo.io/professional-maintainers/ [2] https://words.filippo.io/pay-maintainers/ https://words.filippo.io/pay-maintainers/

jdrc 5y ago
It was also a way to overcome national and economic barriers that would exist if they e.g. set a price for the software. Actually it does have a parallel in most sciences and engineering, academic publishing
- FiloSottile 5y ago
  Academic publishing is a very interesting parallel to think about, indeed! In particular the fact that often when a publication turns out to have industry value, a company is formed around it to commercialize it: both to extract profit from it, and to make it accessible and legible by companies. Companies by and large don't take academic papers off arXiv and implement them. The rest are funded through grants, which have the side effect of directing a sizeable chunk of the academics time to writing grant applications rather than science. I think that would be a regrettable outcome for Open Source.
  - jltsiren 5y ago
    > The rest are funded through grants, which have the side effect of directing a sizeable chunk of the academics time to writing grant applications rather than science. That's not a consequence of grant funding itself. The traditional academic career path jumps directly from a trainee to a manager, and managers have to do what managers do. Larger research institutes have positions for professional researchers. Those researchers don't have to spend that much time on grant writing, unless they want to become managers or they are trying to remain competitive for positions in the traditional PI-centric academia. That's a key lesson for FOSS. If the development is funded by grants and donations, the organization should be large enough that every senior developer doesn't have to become a manager.
yakak 5y ago
The recent elementary OS melt down shows the problem with this path. Creating a business to act as a middle man creates a situation where no one can reach the people who want to do maintenance because business interests will develop and want to hold the code hostage. It is better to form non-profits that hire maintainers.
- FiloSottile 5y ago
  I'm arguing against middleman businesses, not for. I don't see the non-profit model scaling to the whole industry, and the examples we have today of non-profit foundations mostly don't pay maintainers. For example, Log4j is under the Apache Foundation but none of the developers on its committee were being paid.
  - yakak 5y ago
    Elementary OS as a business was the two initial maintainers and that fell apart pretty spectacularly, plus a lot of the work was really not theirs they were just a distribution. Apache's model is the traditional one which isn't aggressive enough. Linux foundation is more aggressive about offering lessons as products etc. I'm not as happy with LF' model as the hippie model but it is better than devolving into no new work causing no one to donate because ex-maintainers are supposed to have vesting future stock, etc.
- apatters 5y ago
  Elementary's problem is it has two inexperienced founders who aren't negotiating with each other very well, I'd hardly call it a meltdown, nor particularly relevant to the examples in this article. The entrepreneur in me will never understand this problem: "programmer creates world famous software used by Microsoft and NASA and doesn't make any money and is burning out from all the work." Here are your solutions: 1) If the users want support, charge them for it. Split the proceeds with someone who will actually do the support. If it's still too much work, raise the price. 2) If the users want features, charge them money to put those features on your roadmap. If they're asking for features you don't want to add, just raise the price or say no until they go away. Here is what will happen when you ask for money: people you don't want to deal with will disappear. Also you'll have more money, and you will work less. Do you need to think about business a bit somewhere in there, sure, but probably a lot less than most people think. The "business side" for the Grunt guy could probably be "register an LLC online then get an Upwork account and let them handle the other shit like your payments and tax forms for 5%." Yes, fucking Upwork.
amelius 5y ago
I'd like to see FOSS funded in the same way as science.
- akvadrako 5y ago
  I would not. Science funding is pretty terrible, decided by politicians or groups the politicians choose who suit their interests. I would suggest something more distributed, like giving each citizen €100 a month they can allocate to FOSS.
  - Leherenn 5y ago
    Your average citizen probably doesn't know what open source is, let alone could name one project. So most likely most people would not give anything because they don't know/care, and a few marketable projects (like VLC) would get most of the rest, way more than they need.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    That would pivot a lot of those merch and drop-shipping hawkers on YouTube to “here’s how to make your own FOSS library and collect your friends’ €100!” We’d get a lot more of “things that qualify for the €100”, but it’s not clear that we’d get a lot more useful FOSS.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    Not all science is taxed directly by governents based on politician's whims. FOSS could be funded by global (non-national) consortium
  - rs999gti 5y ago
    Normal people don't care about FOSS or even know what it is. They would probably use that 100 on food or fuel.
- jan_Inkepa 5y ago
  Germany has government funding/grants available for open source projects. (I haven't looked into it in detail because of a dislike of paperwork).
hpcoke 5y ago
> We need the critical role of Open Source maintainer to professionalize. Do we? I do open source work and maintainership, and am happy that this is outside the control and influence of industry. Must even this that "makes the Internet special" also bow to industry needs?
- FiloSottile 5y ago
  The alternative is not the status quo. Look at all the talk of supply chain security from the big players. The alternative is that all power and profit is just moved to large institutional middlemen or directly to a few big companies who can afford such a program. If you don't care about control over the downstream of your project, or funding, no one is forcing you to professionalize! I just want that to be available as an option to those who do.
  - jka 5y ago
    I worry that if the majority of open source contributors professionalize, then we're left with something that resembles top-down directed corporate work (and an absence of a lot of the freedom that draws people towards developing free and open source software in the first place). Proprietary and corporate players are equally useless at securing their supply chains; I don't love that (from my perspective) they're now blaming and trying to coerce open source to become more like them to ostensibly fix the same problems they propagate themselves. I'm not a security nihilist: I think improvement is possible. But in my experience, not many corporate managers or project sponsors ask for removal of features and reduction of attack surface.
    - jka 5y ago
      Anticipating a counter-argument: wouldn't individuals become the arbiters of the software functionality that is developed, if all open source software was based on a sponsor model? Isn't that more democratic? Perhaps; some financial statistics that I'd suggest to consider would be: - As of June 2018, U.S. households in the 0-40% income-level group had $0 median savings[1] - From the same source: the median savings for a household in the U.S. is approximately $11k. There are approximately 120m households in the U.S. according to the U.S. Government census[2]. - As of 2022, thirteen firms from within the S&P 500 hold a combined $1 trillion in cash-on-reserve[3] And yep, it'd be sensible to debate whether individuals or companies would be more likely to influence the direction of software; it's a disingenuous comparison to draw in that regard. But even if we consider only individual citizens, there would still be significant disenfranchisement in dollar-voting ability. [1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/27/heres-how-much-money-americans-have-in-savings-at-every-income-level.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/27/heres-how-much-money-america... [2] - https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/HSD410219 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/HSD410219 [3] - https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-companies-stockpile-1-trillion-cash-investors-want-it/ https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-compa...
zorr 5y ago
Thank you for these blog posts. One thing that isn't immediately clear to me is how one should start a new open source library (before there is any traction) to be prepared for this structure of maintainership. For example, I'm already a freelance developer with (my countries equivalent of) an LLC and I send invoices to my clients for my work. I'm also in the process of writing a few libraries in the mobile/desktop/web shared-code space that I want to release as open source. Should I just mention this on the projects Github and website properties? A simple "contact me for an invoice" link and process the invoices/payments manually? Is there a platform a la Github sponsors/Patreon that is compatible with this workflow?
- FiloSottile 5y ago
  Honestly, I can't give you an actionable plan at the moment. We are simply not there yet. Eventually I hope there will be social norms (like how you advertise the option), tools (like payment rails and platforms, hopefully not like Patreon, but more like those lawyers use to invoice clients), resources, and even training. I hope it will become a standard transaction, that companies have processes for approving with no ad-hoc work. But for now, whoever wants to try this is in uncharted territory, will have to discover what works by trial and error, will have to teach companies how to think about them, and will need some significant leverage to spend (such as personal networks, visible projects, and savings).
bachmeier 5y ago
I can't read the article because it's paywalled, so I'll respond to this comment instead. > Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture I don't agree with that take. There was not, to my knowledge, a "volunteerism" component of either early open source or early hacking culture (though my roots only go back to about the mid-80s). The "volunteer" part came later, as there was an explicit effort to emphasize open source as free as in free labor. What I used to see was openness in the sense of knowing what the code did and being able to make changes if you want. It was more of scratching your own itch and letting others play with the code if they wanted.
- FiloSottile 5y ago
  I agree! I think Open Source volunteerism is the result of that culture, not its embodiment. No other industry had a large portion of its R&D done by people scratching their own itch and sharing the results freely. That led to relying on that freely available work, which led to volunteerism.
- blihp 5y ago
  I remember the volunteerism as being a way for non-developers, who couldn't otherwise support a project, as being able to contribute to a project: write docs, triage bug reports, answer user questions etc. so that the developers could focus on the code, which usually was to scratch their own itch that others found useful. It wasn't ever really a hard sell, just an alternative way for less- or non-technical people to participate and also shut up whiners. As open source foundations started popping up all over the place hoovering up sponsorship dollars, that's when I recall the 'hard sell' of volunteerism starting (i.e. making people feel better about scratching someone else's itch for no money... what most of us call jobs and demand payment for)
SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
Isn’t what you’re describing just the business model of open core companies like Confluent, or MySQL -> MariaDB? The intermediaries tend to grow large for successful open source projects, because there’s a lot of money to be made, but it’s not uncommon in my experience for the core maintainers of a project to go found a company around it. If it’s just an awareness thing, by all means, let’s make sure open source maintainers know this is an option available to them.
goodpoint 5y ago
The early hacking culture is the Free Software culture and copyleft. For the last decades it has been coopted by corporations and especially SaaS. Now a lot of FOSS is either corporate-driven or... unpaid labor for SaaS companies.
Icathian 5y ago
There are an uncountable many "consultants" that basically did this, and use their GitHub basically for lead gen (I've gotten a good handful billable hours off people finding mediocre little packages I've posted for articles, and that's without even trying). I think the disconnect is for devs that don't want to do that. But those same devs probably don't want to incorporate and go through the hassle of running their own business either. For them, who really just want to hack around and make software, I don't know if there's any real path. The whole value proposition of full time employment for a company is that someone else takes care of all that nonsense and you get to just do the thing you're trained for. Trying to extract that narrow piece out onto its own doesn't work well, and I honestly don't know if your solution really solves for that.
hiq 5y ago
Most companies are just free-riding because they can and because it makes financial sense, at least superficially. I don't see why this would change. Sometimes they get hit by the occasional security vulnerability in a badly supported dependency, but if it's commonly used in the industry the fallout will be negligible anyway, so why would they reevaluate their stance? Companies that heavily rely on one specific FOSS project and have well-defined requests naturally get more invested in them one way or another. But even for these, which tend to be bigger tech companies with more cash, "just pay the maintainer" is a tough sell when they can just either come up with their own project (even FOSS and recoup the "losses" in proprietary IP with hiring marketing) or fork it if PRs from employees are not well-received by the maintainer.
- pengaru 5y ago
  > "just pay the maintainer" is a tough sell when they can just either come up with their own project (even FOSS and recoup the "losses" in proprietary IP with hiring marketing) or fork it if PRs from employees are not well-received by the maintainer. Also "just pay the maintainer" doesn't contribute towards most managers' primary goal of empire-building. In my experience even getting individual contractors paid for work can be a tough sell, managers want headcount and the opportunity to abuse their minions. A "maintainer" receiving funds somewhere on the internet to play in their sandbox just looks like enabling escape from management's prison.
- wmf 5y ago
  Maybe liability would encourage some changes. If you pay the maintainer they are liable for security vulnerabilities but if you don't pay then you are liable.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
misslibby 5y ago
There are many commercial open source projects already, with developers who get paid. I don't quite get the moaning. If you are unhappy with FOSS, don't do it? Nobody is entitled to a FOSS developers time. But on the other hand, FOSS developers are also not entitled to anything.
- graderjs 5y ago
  If people were adept at consistently setting their boundaries, in the face of demands that can be overwhelming, indeed the problem would be trivial maybe. Just say no. But just saying no for many people is still a non-trivial skill. Also, just saying no in the face of consistent and repeated demands while mixing that with a desire that many creators have to be responsive to the people who use their software and to satisfy those people to some extent, compounds the difficulties creators face. I definitely think it's an obvious opportunity to bring more order and structure to these currently ambiguously defined exchanges. I believe we can do better than stress and ambiguity on either side of that. Sure, one solution is creators just saying, "I don't want to do this right now," so just shut it down, close it, block them whatever, heh. I actually think that that's not as much of a general purpose solution as it looks like at first because creators do actually want to help people with their stuff, and they also want to get rewarded for doing so (because you know they need to eat and everything), and doing so actually takes a lot of time, and they also want to control their taskflow to some extent.
  - misslibby 5y ago
    I think a solution would be to not make one's contact information public, or limit the channel that can be used to get in contact.
    - graderjs 5y ago
      Trouble with that is creators use Issues / Discussions / PRs to collaborate with people.
yeetsfromhell 5y ago
Part of a workable solution might be to incentivize companies funding the FOSS they depend on. Tax incentives and the like. Developers only get so much say, get the beancounters involved.
machiaweliczny 5y ago
If it’s critical for you then ask for commercial license with support, hire em or just fork and maintain on you own.
Schroedingersat 5y ago
Like all infrastructure with network effects and pksitive externalities, it should be tax funded. Privatised OSes or other platform software is an absurd and insane proposition
aw9f70gae 5y ago
Perhaps we should consider how modern society can change to fit the open source model rather than the other way around

jdrc 5y ago

It was also a way to overcome national and economic barriers that would exist if they e.g. set a price for the software. Actually it does have a parallel in most sciences and engineering, academic publishing

FiloSottile 5y ago
Academic publishing is a very interesting parallel to think about, indeed! In particular the fact that often when a publication turns out to have industry value, a company is formed around it to commercialize it: both to extract profit from it, and to make it accessible and legible by companies. Companies by and large don't take academic papers off arXiv and implement them. The rest are funded through grants, which have the side effect of directing a sizeable chunk of the academics time to writing grant applications rather than science. I think that would be a regrettable outcome for Open Source.
- jltsiren 5y ago
  > The rest are funded through grants, which have the side effect of directing a sizeable chunk of the academics time to writing grant applications rather than science. That's not a consequence of grant funding itself. The traditional academic career path jumps directly from a trainee to a manager, and managers have to do what managers do. Larger research institutes have positions for professional researchers. Those researchers don't have to spend that much time on grant writing, unless they want to become managers or they are trying to remain competitive for positions in the traditional PI-centric academia. That's a key lesson for FOSS. If the development is funded by grants and donations, the organization should be large enough that every senior developer doesn't have to become a manager.

yakak 5y ago

The recent elementary OS melt down shows the problem with this path. Creating a business to act as a middle man creates a situation where no one can reach the people who want to do maintenance because business interests will develop and want to hold the code hostage. It is better to form non-profits that hire maintainers.

FiloSottile 5y ago
I'm arguing against middleman businesses, not for. I don't see the non-profit model scaling to the whole industry, and the examples we have today of non-profit foundations mostly don't pay maintainers. For example, Log4j is under the Apache Foundation but none of the developers on its committee were being paid.
- yakak 5y ago
  Elementary OS as a business was the two initial maintainers and that fell apart pretty spectacularly, plus a lot of the work was really not theirs they were just a distribution. Apache's model is the traditional one which isn't aggressive enough. Linux foundation is more aggressive about offering lessons as products etc. I'm not as happy with LF' model as the hippie model but it is better than devolving into no new work causing no one to donate because ex-maintainers are supposed to have vesting future stock, etc.
apatters 5y ago
Elementary's problem is it has two inexperienced founders who aren't negotiating with each other very well, I'd hardly call it a meltdown, nor particularly relevant to the examples in this article. The entrepreneur in me will never understand this problem: "programmer creates world famous software used by Microsoft and NASA and doesn't make any money and is burning out from all the work." Here are your solutions: 1) If the users want support, charge them for it. Split the proceeds with someone who will actually do the support. If it's still too much work, raise the price. 2) If the users want features, charge them money to put those features on your roadmap. If they're asking for features you don't want to add, just raise the price or say no until they go away. Here is what will happen when you ask for money: people you don't want to deal with will disappear. Also you'll have more money, and you will work less. Do you need to think about business a bit somewhere in there, sure, but probably a lot less than most people think. The "business side" for the Grunt guy could probably be "register an LLC online then get an Upwork account and let them handle the other shit like your payments and tax forms for 5%." Yes, fucking Upwork.

amelius 5y ago

I'd like to see FOSS funded in the same way as science.

akvadrako 5y ago
I would not. Science funding is pretty terrible, decided by politicians or groups the politicians choose who suit their interests. I would suggest something more distributed, like giving each citizen €100 a month they can allocate to FOSS.
- Leherenn 5y ago
  Your average citizen probably doesn't know what open source is, let alone could name one project. So most likely most people would not give anything because they don't know/care, and a few marketable projects (like VLC) would get most of the rest, way more than they need.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  That would pivot a lot of those merch and drop-shipping hawkers on YouTube to “here’s how to make your own FOSS library and collect your friends’ €100!” We’d get a lot more of “things that qualify for the €100”, but it’s not clear that we’d get a lot more useful FOSS.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  Not all science is taxed directly by governents based on politician's whims. FOSS could be funded by global (non-national) consortium
- rs999gti 5y ago
  Normal people don't care about FOSS or even know what it is. They would probably use that 100 on food or fuel.
jan_Inkepa 5y ago
Germany has government funding/grants available for open source projects. (I haven't looked into it in detail because of a dislike of paperwork).

hpcoke 5y ago

> We need the critical role of Open Source maintainer to professionalize. Do we? I do open source work and maintainership, and am happy that this is outside the control and influence of industry. Must even this that "makes the Internet special" also bow to industry needs?

FiloSottile 5y ago
The alternative is not the status quo. Look at all the talk of supply chain security from the big players. The alternative is that all power and profit is just moved to large institutional middlemen or directly to a few big companies who can afford such a program. If you don't care about control over the downstream of your project, or funding, no one is forcing you to professionalize! I just want that to be available as an option to those who do.
- jka 5y ago
  I worry that if the majority of open source contributors professionalize, then we're left with something that resembles top-down directed corporate work (and an absence of a lot of the freedom that draws people towards developing free and open source software in the first place). Proprietary and corporate players are equally useless at securing their supply chains; I don't love that (from my perspective) they're now blaming and trying to coerce open source to become more like them to ostensibly fix the same problems they propagate themselves. I'm not a security nihilist: I think improvement is possible. But in my experience, not many corporate managers or project sponsors ask for removal of features and reduction of attack surface.
  - jka 5y ago
    Anticipating a counter-argument: wouldn't individuals become the arbiters of the software functionality that is developed, if all open source software was based on a sponsor model? Isn't that more democratic? Perhaps; some financial statistics that I'd suggest to consider would be: - As of June 2018, U.S. households in the 0-40% income-level group had $0 median savings[1] - From the same source: the median savings for a household in the U.S. is approximately $11k. There are approximately 120m households in the U.S. according to the U.S. Government census[2]. - As of 2022, thirteen firms from within the S&P 500 hold a combined $1 trillion in cash-on-reserve[3] And yep, it'd be sensible to debate whether individuals or companies would be more likely to influence the direction of software; it's a disingenuous comparison to draw in that regard. But even if we consider only individual citizens, there would still be significant disenfranchisement in dollar-voting ability. [1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/27/heres-how-much-money-americans-have-in-savings-at-every-income-level.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/27/heres-how-much-money-america... [2] - https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/HSD410219 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/HSD410219 [3] - https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-companies-stockpile-1-trillion-cash-investors-want-it/ https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-compa...

zorr 5y ago

Thank you for these blog posts. One thing that isn't immediately clear to me is how one should start a new open source library (before there is any traction) to be prepared for this structure of maintainership. For example, I'm already a freelance developer with (my countries equivalent of) an LLC and I send invoices to my clients for my work. I'm also in the process of writing a few libraries in the mobile/desktop/web shared-code space that I want to release as open source. Should I just mention this on the projects Github and website properties? A simple "contact me for an invoice" link and process the invoices/payments manually? Is there a platform a la Github sponsors/Patreon that is compatible with this workflow?

FiloSottile 5y ago
Honestly, I can't give you an actionable plan at the moment. We are simply not there yet. Eventually I hope there will be social norms (like how you advertise the option), tools (like payment rails and platforms, hopefully not like Patreon, but more like those lawyers use to invoice clients), resources, and even training. I hope it will become a standard transaction, that companies have processes for approving with no ad-hoc work. But for now, whoever wants to try this is in uncharted territory, will have to discover what works by trial and error, will have to teach companies how to think about them, and will need some significant leverage to spend (such as personal networks, visible projects, and savings).

bachmeier 5y ago

I can't read the article because it's paywalled, so I'll respond to this comment instead. > Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture I don't agree with that take. There was not, to my knowledge, a "volunteerism" component of either early open source or early hacking culture (though my roots only go back to about the mid-80s). The "volunteer" part came later, as there was an explicit effort to emphasize open source as free as in free labor. What I used to see was openness in the sense of knowing what the code did and being able to make changes if you want. It was more of scratching your own itch and letting others play with the code if they wanted.

FiloSottile 5y ago
I agree! I think Open Source volunteerism is the result of that culture, not its embodiment. No other industry had a large portion of its R&D done by people scratching their own itch and sharing the results freely. That led to relying on that freely available work, which led to volunteerism.
blihp 5y ago
I remember the volunteerism as being a way for non-developers, who couldn't otherwise support a project, as being able to contribute to a project: write docs, triage bug reports, answer user questions etc. so that the developers could focus on the code, which usually was to scratch their own itch that others found useful. It wasn't ever really a hard sell, just an alternative way for less- or non-technical people to participate and also shut up whiners. As open source foundations started popping up all over the place hoovering up sponsorship dollars, that's when I recall the 'hard sell' of volunteerism starting (i.e. making people feel better about scratching someone else's itch for no money... what most of us call jobs and demand payment for)

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago

Isn’t what you’re describing just the business model of open core companies like Confluent, or MySQL -> MariaDB? The intermediaries tend to grow large for successful open source projects, because there’s a lot of money to be made, but it’s not uncommon in my experience for the core maintainers of a project to go found a company around it. If it’s just an awareness thing, by all means, let’s make sure open source maintainers know this is an option available to them.

goodpoint 5y ago

The early hacking culture is the Free Software culture and copyleft. For the last decades it has been coopted by corporations and especially SaaS. Now a lot of FOSS is either corporate-driven or... unpaid labor for SaaS companies.

Icathian 5y ago

There are an uncountable many "consultants" that basically did this, and use their GitHub basically for lead gen (I've gotten a good handful billable hours off people finding mediocre little packages I've posted for articles, and that's without even trying). I think the disconnect is for devs that don't want to do that. But those same devs probably don't want to incorporate and go through the hassle of running their own business either. For them, who really just want to hack around and make software, I don't know if there's any real path. The whole value proposition of full time employment for a company is that someone else takes care of all that nonsense and you get to just do the thing you're trained for. Trying to extract that narrow piece out onto its own doesn't work well, and I honestly don't know if your solution really solves for that.

hiq 5y ago

Most companies are just free-riding because they can and because it makes financial sense, at least superficially. I don't see why this would change. Sometimes they get hit by the occasional security vulnerability in a badly supported dependency, but if it's commonly used in the industry the fallout will be negligible anyway, so why would they reevaluate their stance? Companies that heavily rely on one specific FOSS project and have well-defined requests naturally get more invested in them one way or another. But even for these, which tend to be bigger tech companies with more cash, "just pay the maintainer" is a tough sell when they can just either come up with their own project (even FOSS and recoup the "losses" in proprietary IP with hiring marketing) or fork it if PRs from employees are not well-received by the maintainer.

pengaru 5y ago
> "just pay the maintainer" is a tough sell when they can just either come up with their own project (even FOSS and recoup the "losses" in proprietary IP with hiring marketing) or fork it if PRs from employees are not well-received by the maintainer. Also "just pay the maintainer" doesn't contribute towards most managers' primary goal of empire-building. In my experience even getting individual contractors paid for work can be a tough sell, managers want headcount and the opportunity to abuse their minions. A "maintainer" receiving funds somewhere on the internet to play in their sandbox just looks like enabling escape from management's prison.
wmf 5y ago
Maybe liability would encourage some changes. If you pay the maintainer they are liable for security vulnerabilities but if you don't pay then you are liable.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

misslibby 5y ago

There are many commercial open source projects already, with developers who get paid. I don't quite get the moaning. If you are unhappy with FOSS, don't do it? Nobody is entitled to a FOSS developers time. But on the other hand, FOSS developers are also not entitled to anything.

graderjs 5y ago
If people were adept at consistently setting their boundaries, in the face of demands that can be overwhelming, indeed the problem would be trivial maybe. Just say no. But just saying no for many people is still a non-trivial skill. Also, just saying no in the face of consistent and repeated demands while mixing that with a desire that many creators have to be responsive to the people who use their software and to satisfy those people to some extent, compounds the difficulties creators face. I definitely think it's an obvious opportunity to bring more order and structure to these currently ambiguously defined exchanges. I believe we can do better than stress and ambiguity on either side of that. Sure, one solution is creators just saying, "I don't want to do this right now," so just shut it down, close it, block them whatever, heh. I actually think that that's not as much of a general purpose solution as it looks like at first because creators do actually want to help people with their stuff, and they also want to get rewarded for doing so (because you know they need to eat and everything), and doing so actually takes a lot of time, and they also want to control their taskflow to some extent.
- misslibby 5y ago
  I think a solution would be to not make one's contact information public, or limit the channel that can be used to get in contact.
  - graderjs 5y ago
    Trouble with that is creators use Issues / Discussions / PRs to collaborate with people.

yeetsfromhell 5y ago

Part of a workable solution might be to incentivize companies funding the FOSS they depend on. Tax incentives and the like. Developers only get so much say, get the beancounters involved.

machiaweliczny 5y ago

If it’s critical for you then ask for commercial license with support, hire em or just fork and maintain on you own.

Schroedingersat 5y ago

Like all infrastructure with network effects and pksitive externalities, it should be tax funded. Privatised OSes or other platform software is an absurd and insane proposition

aw9f70gae 5y ago

Perhaps we should consider how modern society can change to fit the open source model rather than the other way around