3 ms·

Essentially, most of open source is slave labor for big tech who can build their services on top of the "contributions" while extracting ridiculous amounts of v

by oxff 5y ago

Essentially, most of open source is slave labor for big tech who can build their services on top of the "contributions" while extracting ridiculous amounts of value from them and giving maybe pennies back to a single sponsored contributor. This could be changed essentially overnight, if Big Tech wasn't against it. For example, it is trivial to add payment to something like GitHub. There could be PRs that are behind a paywall and someone would have to pay for the contribution so that it can be merged; and ban 0$ dollar PRs. The fact that someone can come into my open repository and tell me something completely orthogonal to it is an "issue" makes me vomit (and this basically reveals the whole sham of GitHub). Posting an issue should probably be behind a paywall too now that I think of it; but you deposit it to the maintainer / repo owner / assignee.

gyulai 5y ago
> Essentially, most of open source is slave labor "slave labor" would imply a lack of freedom on behalf of the slave laborer. I think there's something quite remarkable going on that is quite the contrary of what you say: People who work as software engineers in their day jobs are so starved of freedom, that they spend evenings and weekends doing more software engineering, i.e. more of what they're doing in their day jobs. Only now, they are actually happy doing it, because they're free. This freedom comes at a price, and this price is that they have to give away their work for free. If paid software engineering jobs did a better job at fulfilling people's psychological needs on creative freedom, the drive for mastery, the desire to make a name for oneself through one's work, etc. there probably wouldn't be any open source, because the psychological needs that motivate it would be otherwise met. If software engineering was better organized as a profession (like the way "labour" is organized when doing collective bargaining, or the way certain professions are organized like the legal profession) then maybe paid software engineering jobs would be better. But we are totally disorganized as a profession and each individual seems to be perfectly ready to undercut others at every turn, e.g. being more accepting of bad working conditions, like lack of creative freedom, than the next guy. Studying harder for ridiculous leetcode interviews than the next guy. Putting in more hours than the next guy on hiring projects. Being more accepting than the next guy when employers refuse to give employees time for training on new technologies and instead doing it on weekends. When the work is actually enjoyable, being willing to do it for less money than the next guy. The equilibrium of that last dynamic is where the price is zero, and that's what open source is. A corollary of that is: Since all the enjoyable work gets done for free, there is no enjoyment left in any of the work that one can hope to get paid for. -- We have to stop doing this to each other. We have to stop the race to the bottom. Open source, and not getting paid for it, is not the problem. It's the imperfect solution to a problem that, in a more perfect world, wouldn't exist in the first place.
- passivate 5y ago
  How often does this happen though? You may be correct in a specific context / region / culture. I've only worked at closed-source companies and I never felt starved for anything. I also don't believe that one needs work to be enjoyable. My experience has been that programming work is filled with tedium, and the fun design work is a negligible portion of the project. And the tech people I know (biased sample set : age > 40) spend their free time on their family and non-programming hobbies. I don't want to reject your comment or opinions, just offering my own.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gyulai 5y ago
    I don't understand where you're going with your "region / culture" thing. The rest of your comment makes it sound like your standards are just lower than mine. You describe your work as mostly tedium and say you don't have a problem with that. This is a state of affairs I will never ever accept for myself. And I'm approaching 40 myself and have been a part of this industry since the late 90s, so I'm not speaking out of youthful naiveté either, but rather from the vantage point of a conscious set of choices I've made on personal values and introspection into my own psychological needs. The set of people who share such values/needs may or may not be a majority, but I never claimed they were. This discussion was originally on the broken state of open source, and my contention is that a lot of people who do open source probably do it because they're a little bit like me, frustrated with their day jobs, and looking for a way to contribute to the world in line with personal values that are similar to mine, and an outlet for unmet psychological needs similar to mine.
    - passivate 5y ago
      The majority of programming is tedium, that's my experience. The fun stuff is over early on in most projects. The rest is grinding it out, and incremental polishing to get the code base to a bulletproof level of reliability. I have worked on large commercial embedded code-bases that absolutely needed to have zero crashing bugs with months, if not years of uptime. Maybe you haven't encountered that. Its not surprising since few programmers today seem to care about that sort of reliability. I don't know what "standards" you're setting for yourself, but I'm glad you're happy doing your thing. It's surprising you haven't encountered different programming cultures in the world. The bay area has a distinct culture than eastern Europe which is different than China or India. And this co-relates to varying attitudes on open source and other down-stream effects. Naturally these also differ from industry to industry.
joergrech 5y ago
Slave labor is a little harsh as open source developers act on their own free will but I understand that it is a little loveless that some companies make billions without giving back. Making issues private (behind a paywall) is probable the new approach of Github with their "sponsors-only repositories". However this will probably cause more closed-source where the community cannot contribute bugs or feature requests.
cryptica 5y ago
This is accurate. It is slave labor because corporations go out of their way to harm the developers of open source projects which they benefit from because they view them as competition. They engage in blatant anti-competitive practices while benefiting from their victim's work. It's slave exploitation as evidenced by the lack of payment for labor which, from the perspective of the open source developer, was motivated by the complete deprivation of opportunities for paid labor. Many people make their project open source because they know that their project would have 0 chance of getting any adoption unless they gave it away for free. The masters created market conditions which deprived the slaves of any opportunity for fair remuneration (made possible by the design of the modern monetary system).
goodpoint 5y ago
Unpaid labor, not slave labor.

by oxff 5y ago

gyulai 5y ago

> Essentially, most of open source is slave labor "slave labor" would imply a lack of freedom on behalf of the slave laborer. I think there's something quite remarkable going on that is quite the contrary of what you say: People who work as software engineers in their day jobs are so starved of freedom, that they spend evenings and weekends doing more software engineering, i.e. more of what they're doing in their day jobs. Only now, they are actually happy doing it, because they're free. This freedom comes at a price, and this price is that they have to give away their work for free. If paid software engineering jobs did a better job at fulfilling people's psychological needs on creative freedom, the drive for mastery, the desire to make a name for oneself through one's work, etc. there probably wouldn't be any open source, because the psychological needs that motivate it would be otherwise met. If software engineering was better organized as a profession (like the way "labour" is organized when doing collective bargaining, or the way certain professions are organized like the legal profession) then maybe paid software engineering jobs would be better. But we are totally disorganized as a profession and each individual seems to be perfectly ready to undercut others at every turn, e.g. being more accepting of bad working conditions, like lack of creative freedom, than the next guy. Studying harder for ridiculous leetcode interviews than the next guy. Putting in more hours than the next guy on hiring projects. Being more accepting than the next guy when employers refuse to give employees time for training on new technologies and instead doing it on weekends. When the work is actually enjoyable, being willing to do it for less money than the next guy. The equilibrium of that last dynamic is where the price is zero, and that's what open source is. A corollary of that is: Since all the enjoyable work gets done for free, there is no enjoyment left in any of the work that one can hope to get paid for. -- We have to stop doing this to each other. We have to stop the race to the bottom. Open source, and not getting paid for it, is not the problem. It's the imperfect solution to a problem that, in a more perfect world, wouldn't exist in the first place.

passivate 5y ago
How often does this happen though? You may be correct in a specific context / region / culture. I've only worked at closed-source companies and I never felt starved for anything. I also don't believe that one needs work to be enjoyable. My experience has been that programming work is filled with tedium, and the fun design work is a negligible portion of the project. And the tech people I know (biased sample set : age > 40) spend their free time on their family and non-programming hobbies. I don't want to reject your comment or opinions, just offering my own.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gyulai 5y ago
  I don't understand where you're going with your "region / culture" thing. The rest of your comment makes it sound like your standards are just lower than mine. You describe your work as mostly tedium and say you don't have a problem with that. This is a state of affairs I will never ever accept for myself. And I'm approaching 40 myself and have been a part of this industry since the late 90s, so I'm not speaking out of youthful naiveté either, but rather from the vantage point of a conscious set of choices I've made on personal values and introspection into my own psychological needs. The set of people who share such values/needs may or may not be a majority, but I never claimed they were. This discussion was originally on the broken state of open source, and my contention is that a lot of people who do open source probably do it because they're a little bit like me, frustrated with their day jobs, and looking for a way to contribute to the world in line with personal values that are similar to mine, and an outlet for unmet psychological needs similar to mine.
  - passivate 5y ago
    The majority of programming is tedium, that's my experience. The fun stuff is over early on in most projects. The rest is grinding it out, and incremental polishing to get the code base to a bulletproof level of reliability. I have worked on large commercial embedded code-bases that absolutely needed to have zero crashing bugs with months, if not years of uptime. Maybe you haven't encountered that. Its not surprising since few programmers today seem to care about that sort of reliability. I don't know what "standards" you're setting for yourself, but I'm glad you're happy doing your thing. It's surprising you haven't encountered different programming cultures in the world. The bay area has a distinct culture than eastern Europe which is different than China or India. And this co-relates to varying attitudes on open source and other down-stream effects. Naturally these also differ from industry to industry.

joergrech 5y ago

Slave labor is a little harsh as open source developers act on their own free will but I understand that it is a little loveless that some companies make billions without giving back. Making issues private (behind a paywall) is probable the new approach of Github with their "sponsors-only repositories". However this will probably cause more closed-source where the community cannot contribute bugs or feature requests.

cryptica 5y ago

This is accurate. It is slave labor because corporations go out of their way to harm the developers of open source projects which they benefit from because they view them as competition. They engage in blatant anti-competitive practices while benefiting from their victim's work. It's slave exploitation as evidenced by the lack of payment for labor which, from the perspective of the open source developer, was motivated by the complete deprivation of opportunities for paid labor. Many people make their project open source because they know that their project would have 0 chance of getting any adoption unless they gave it away for free. The masters created market conditions which deprived the slaves of any opportunity for fair remuneration (made possible by the design of the modern monetary system).

goodpoint 5y ago

Unpaid labor, not slave labor.