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> The OSS community almost seems to require OSS maintainers to be in poverty, while allowing large corporations to freely consume all of their work. That just i

> The OSS community almost seems to require OSS maintainers to be in poverty, while allowing large corporations to freely consume all of their work. That just isn't sustainable. First of all, it's been sustainable for a long time -- what changed? Secondly, a lot of major open source projects are being worked on by developers who are employed full-time by large corporations to do it. And I don't just mean Red Hat or the Linux kernel. Those devs get paid by their employers to work on open source projects that benefit their employers and also the wider community -- it seems like a really successful, scalable, sustainable model. The people who are having a hard time are the indie devs, but let's be honest, being an indie dev who gives away software for free has always been, and always will be, a bad business model. It's not a good idea to do that for a living. It never will be.

xani_ 4y ago
> First of all, it's been sustainable for a long time -- what changed? Big failures like OpenSSL fiasco happened - where sure, company was sustainable but due to skewed priorities coz of funding (companies that founded it founded features that from perspective of any other company were bloat, and not enough work went into modernizing the code) the code was shit and full of traps. And it's still a fact that vast majority of developers of stuff used everywhere wouldn't be able to do it as full or even part time job for financial reasons. All while the corporate is pushing same "BSD/MIT good, GPL bad" agenda, coz they don't need to contribute anything back to stuff they take
- LtWorf 4y ago
  > All while the corporate is pushing same "BSD/MIT good, GPL bad" agenda, coz they don't need to contribute anything back to stuff they take Yeah and people eat it up. "oh it won't have as many users" well who cares? It's less hassle. Not like you get anything back from having 100x more downloads.
lamontcg 4y ago
Companies that are NOT RedHat though have a problem with making that sustainable. It isn't just the Indie devs it is the smaller businesses as well. Those are the ones pulling license changes, doing "freemium" models and other things that the OSS community is objecting to and the author is throwing shade at. Those models are NOT working well or we wouldn't be having these discussions. The models that "work" for the coder are just tossing your code into public and not caring because it is a side project or something that you're doing to learn to code and you'll abandon it in a few years. Or else working for an existing Fortune 500 company getting hired to work on open source, or one of the few large open source foundations (sponsored heavily by massive corporations and/or academia). And I worked for the past 10 years in open source at a startup-to-small-business getting paid by my employer for open source. That model is not very good, which is why we're seeing so many issues with "bait and switch" at those kinds of smaller corporations.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Yeah, I was at Red Hat for a bit, and loved the business model - sup, we employ a lot of the lead devs on FOSS projects you use, so we've got fantastic support for you. And that's it, no "enterprise editions", the only extra code you're paying for is backported critical patches, and deterministic builds of software (and all its dependencies) from source. RH puts a huge amount of effort into those builds, it's incredibly painful as an RH dev sometimes, but it seems to be a huge factor in building trust. But, I can see why it doesn't really work for other companies, step 1 is "Be Red Hat, and have Red Hat's reputation." I've been involved in Kafka a bit, and it's been very sad seeing Confluent devs having to deprioritise work on FOSS Kafka to focus work on stuff that, well, they can sell for money, but I totally get why.

xani_ 4y ago

> First of all, it's been sustainable for a long time -- what changed? Big failures like OpenSSL fiasco happened - where sure, company was sustainable but due to skewed priorities coz of funding (companies that founded it founded features that from perspective of any other company were bloat, and not enough work went into modernizing the code) the code was shit and full of traps. And it's still a fact that vast majority of developers of stuff used everywhere wouldn't be able to do it as full or even part time job for financial reasons. All while the corporate is pushing same "BSD/MIT good, GPL bad" agenda, coz they don't need to contribute anything back to stuff they take

LtWorf 4y ago
> All while the corporate is pushing same "BSD/MIT good, GPL bad" agenda, coz they don't need to contribute anything back to stuff they take Yeah and people eat it up. "oh it won't have as many users" well who cares? It's less hassle. Not like you get anything back from having 100x more downloads.

lamontcg 4y ago

Companies that are NOT RedHat though have a problem with making that sustainable. It isn't just the Indie devs it is the smaller businesses as well. Those are the ones pulling license changes, doing "freemium" models and other things that the OSS community is objecting to and the author is throwing shade at. Those models are NOT working well or we wouldn't be having these discussions. The models that "work" for the coder are just tossing your code into public and not caring because it is a side project or something that you're doing to learn to code and you'll abandon it in a few years. Or else working for an existing Fortune 500 company getting hired to work on open source, or one of the few large open source foundations (sponsored heavily by massive corporations and/or academia). And I worked for the past 10 years in open source at a startup-to-small-business getting paid by my employer for open source. That model is not very good, which is why we're seeing so many issues with "bait and switch" at those kinds of smaller corporations.

EdwardDiego 4y ago
Yeah, I was at Red Hat for a bit, and loved the business model - sup, we employ a lot of the lead devs on FOSS projects you use, so we've got fantastic support for you. And that's it, no "enterprise editions", the only extra code you're paying for is backported critical patches, and deterministic builds of software (and all its dependencies) from source. RH puts a huge amount of effort into those builds, it's incredibly painful as an RH dev sometimes, but it seems to be a huge factor in building trust. But, I can see why it doesn't really work for other companies, step 1 is "Be Red Hat, and have Red Hat's reputation." I've been involved in Kafka a bit, and it's been very sad seeing Confluent devs having to deprioritise work on FOSS Kafka to focus work on stuff that, well, they can sell for money, but I totally get why.