11 ms·

Open source development is not sustainable

47 points by ankitmundada 4y ago

ankitmundada 4y ago
It seems that donation based model is not sustainable for OSS. Even the latest report of Open Collective (https://blog.opencollective.com/12m-for-open-source/ https://blog.opencollective.com/12m-for-open-source/) suggests that an OSS projects are receiving just ~4k USD per project in a year on an average. This is below the min-wage of many countires if you look at it at a contributor level. Isn't there any alternative possible? This seems like a huge opportunity if solved correctly.
- keikobadthebad 4y ago
  It won't get solved while there are no real downsides to the companies leeching it to ignore it.
  - ankitmundada 4y ago
    Yes, companies probably need to be donating more, but I also think individual donors can also do their bit.
- wmf 4y ago
  There are several alternatives to donations although some of them are derided as "fake open source".
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    That is because they are fake open source. It's not derision, it's a fact that they switch from OSS to proprietary software. Nothing wrong with that, I also use Windows and macOS, but let's call a spade a spade and not "open source."
  - ankitmundada 4y ago
    Like what?
  - Arnt 4y ago
    Some of those derisive people are terribly draining. Enough to be a factor in in abandoning an open source project and getting a job at Accenture instead. I might go to fosdem this winter. If I do, it'll be the first such event in almost 20 years: https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/openssl-hate https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/openssl-hate
- feoren 4y ago
  There are two alternatives possible. One is that we collectively decide to stop shaming software developers for having the audacity to want some level of ownership over the product of their work. We don't shame authors for wanting copyright on their books; we don't shame musicians, artists, designers, or aerospace engineers for asking for some copyright protection for their creative babies. Yet when a software developer does it: fuck that guy! He's trying to take control of what's running on your computer (or the internet server that you're sending requests to ...). Nobody throws a hissy fit when J.K. Rowling has (gasp!) copyright over the Harry Potter books that are sitting on your Kindle. It's your Kindle! Shouldn't you have the right to copy off the words in the books and re-sell it to other people for much less money, undercutting Rowling? How dare she try to get some legal protection that says you can't do that! It's fucking ridiculous when we talk about authors that way, but somehow it's OK to talk about software developers that way. Do you think "open source authors" would make a living from their books? It's already difficult enough for new authors to get any notice; how much worse would it be if prominent authors (who were already rich) came out and founded the "Free Books Foundation" that comes out and says every young author who's trying to sell her books for money is being a greedy asshole and we should fight against them and every author needs to spend a significant portion of their free time contributing to "open books" or they're assholes? Of-fucking-course it's not sustainable. That's because it's always been OK to want copyright on your creative work. I'll be the first to say patents are a huge problem right now and we might be better off without any patent law, but copyright is not the same. Yes, the terms are way too long, and the family of Marvin Gaye proves that "copyright trolls" are possible, but the fundamental concept of copyright is actually critical if we want creative people to ever get a paycheck. The other alternative is Universal Basic Income, so that making "below the minimum wage" doesn't mean "fuck you, you get to die sick and homeless in a tent on the side of the highway". Then people could actually just contribute to OSS because they want to.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    Any developer regardless of open sourcing their work or not automatically gets copyright for whatever they write. That is in fact how they're even able to assign a license in the first place. I also think you're misunderstanding the FSF. Nowhere do they say that selling software is bad, in fact they explicitly say that you can sell your open source software, and also note that it's free as in freedom, not beer. The real argument is that open source is not a business model. Just because someone writes OSS does not mean they will automatically make money, because again, it's a distribution model, not a business model. There are plenty of OSS that make money because they focus on the business and marketing side instead of only the developer side. That most devs don't want to do that and prefer to write code does not justify their crying when no one pays for their free product.
asplake 4y ago
And yet… here we are. A more accurate headline: “It’s hard to make a living off most open source projects”. As for the projects themselves, enough of them are doing just fine.
- ankitmundada 4y ago
  Probably they're. But majority of the projects are not. Most of them are not even asking for it. Check this - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ckaestne/pdf/icse20-donations.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ckaestne/pdf/icse20-donations.pdf Just 0.2% npm packages asked for donations in 2019.
  - asplake 4y ago
    In other words, the vast majority of projects are sustained by something other than donations, and the article has an unsustainable definition of “unsustainable”.
tomdale 4y ago
It seems to me this accounting is missing the significant financial contribution many companies make to open source by way of paying employees to contribute, either part time or full time. Many of the arguments here are premised on the idea that the only valid model for open source funding is a donation model. But if a company believes they get more benefit by contributing via employment instead of patronage, I don’t think it’s fair to say they’re exploiting open source. (Disclaimer: I work at a BigCo where my role sometimes involves open source and standards bodies)
- ankitmundada 4y ago
  Indeed, but most of these projects are really big & popular projects that the organization depends upon. New/Upcoming projects will still be left out due to this. But we should also note that individual donations can make a huge difference too, if a propoer system is created around it.
socialismisok 4y ago
I'm a huge fan of open source (which, given my username and the fact that open source is basically socialist principles in practice should be no surprise), and it bums me out to no end that we haven't figured out how to keep the folks working on it fed, sheltered, and healthy. How much more open source would we have with a healthy safety net, basic income, and social housing? I'd guess a whole lot more.
- vasco 4y ago
  > and it bums me out to no end that we haven't figured out how to keep the folks working on it fed, sheltered, and healthy. Is this true? Do you personally know anyone that actively contributes to meaningful open source projects that can't support themselves through a job? > I'd guess a whole lot more I'd guess we'd get a lot of very useless projects, many forks of each other to just slap a different logo on a UI, and the general shenanigans you see people doing when there's open source competitions with prizes for contributions. For some very prolific people, society probably would be better off paying them for work on it full time, say antirez, but that's not going to be a lot of people in the whole world.
  - krageon 4y ago
    If 100% of my work was on OSS, I would add probably 10x the value to everyone else's life than I bring at my job. I'm hardly alone in this - most jobs are useless. As such, it is logical for it to bum you out - if only the folks that are capable of making everyone's lives better could be able to do so while being fed, sheltered and cared for medically. It would make society as a whole better, even if it is just due to the fact that we would have to acknowledge that bullshit jobs are not worth more than actual human value.
ranger_danger 4y ago
> Open source is the very worst thing currently going on because it is so incredibly exploitative, it's far more exploitative than any actual company is of the workers who work at the company. > Even the people who are getting paid in open source are getting massively underpaid to do it compared to how much the people who are using their code are making, it's nothing compared to the power that is accreted by the people who have co-opted that work thanks to the open source model. And then mark zuckerberg gets to define how the internet works despite having paid for almost none of the software that his company actually needed to make that work. > It's like feudalism or serfdom, these people did the work and got nothing for it. It's like you took the worst aspects of capitalism for workers and the worst aspects of socialism for workers and put them together, that's open source. You get no power and you get no money. > It's exploitative whether the people chose to be exploited, just because someone chooses to let you exploit them does not meant that you didn't exploit them. And for the record that's how most exploitation works; convincing people to do something that turns out to be very bad for them and very good for you, and that's exactly what the open source movement has turned out to be. > I really don't see the "we post stuff on github under a gpl2 or lgpl or apache or mit license", all that is to me now is just exploitation. You can say that there's solutions but until someone demonstrates that those solutions work, it's the standard "real communism has never been tried" argument. AGPL is the only thing that I've seen so far that's an attempt to fix these fundamentally unfair compensation practices.
- c0nducktr 4y ago
  What are you quoting? It doesn't appear to be anything from the submitted post. If you just want to reply with your comments there is no need to use the less-than sign.
m463 4y ago
I think people - people in business selling software - try to apply their mental models to open source software. But sometimes these models just don't quite fit. maybe open source software doesn't actually need money - it just needs ways to attract people to give their time and attention. Why does it have to match traditional business models? It's like saying: hacker news isn't sustainable - we need to figure out how to pay people for their submissions and comments. I'm not saying we should ignore capitalism -- It works! But maybe all projects don't need to fit the same model to work well.
mikl 4y ago
> The struggle of open source sustainability is the millennium-old struggle of humanity to free itself from slavery, colonization, and exploitation. This kind of over-dramatisation is totally unwarranted. Unlike slavery, participating in open source is completely voluntary. Unlike colonization, no one is taking your ancestral lands from you. Unlike most kinds of exploitation, the “exploited” can end it any time they want to. No one forces them to continue working on their open source project. I fully agree that more people should donate to support open source, but this is not a violent or coercive situation. Money is not the only motivator in the world. Most open source maintainers are (evidently) not doing it for money, but are motivated by altruism, passion, recognition, etc.
- mxkopy 4y ago
  > Money is not the only motivator in the world. Money + law are the media through which the most well-defined & extensible social structures are expressed. In the U.S. (as example) it's nonstandard to work outside of this. Obviously they're not the same but the struggle of open source does seem to be one face of a much older struggle. How does someone engage in a sustainable, nonexploitative social contract. How do I trade my cool gizmos that have some benefit to society for food, without having to sell my soul or play some game. Etc.
  - mikl 4y ago
    Everyone would like to get paid for doing their hobby, whether it’s music, sports or yes, programming. But very few have such superlative talent that they can make it as musicians or athletes. Getting paid for programming is comparatively easy, there’s lots of open jobs for all kinds of programming. We’re kinda privileged, really. When your engage in open source, you’re deliberately offering your labor for free, it’s right there in the license. So claiming that people are _exploiting_ you when they choose to accept _your offer_ of using the software _gratis_ is complete poppycock. There are some unhealthy dynamics in open source, but over-dramatising the problem with words like _exploitation_ is disingenuous, not helpful.
    - actionfromafar 4y ago
atoav 4y ago
Yeah sure, violent cultural imperialism, with forced relocations, forced re-education, children taken away, men killed is totally the same as me, a white middle european dude, deciding the software they wrote for themselves might serve others and putting it on github. I mean while I agree that the conditions for people writing open source software could be better (e.g. more government money for it), comparing this self chosen past time to slavery, colonialization and exploitation is ... quite bad? Colonialization and slavery have produced magnitudes more of human suffering.
- aaa_aaa 4y ago
  Why do you say `a white middle european dude`?
  - 9dev 4y ago
    To highlight the privilege they have, such as not drowning in the Mediterranean due to being born too far in the south, or having access to highly payed jobs and free education, or not being sexually harassed for having a vagina..?
    - aaa_aaa 4y ago
      This is just unnecessary projection.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    Because presumably parent commenter is one?
  - atoav 4y ago
    Because this is my heritage? I grew up in a very wealthy, stable, safe society with social healthcare and social safety. On top of that: within that society I grew up as the kid of wealthy parents who did not have to learn a new language to survive and I do not have visual features that make it harder for me to survive. I am basically playing life on toddler-difficulty. Giving this background programming open source software is not something that is forced upon me by evil, exploitative corporate overlords, but a past time I chose to do, partly because I believe in the values of open source software and partly because I like and use open source software and giving back is the right thing to do. If I liked I could immidiately leave open source and still have the happiest of lifes. People which have been really exploited: 1. have a totally different starting point ("difficulty level") 2. have had no choice to do what they liked if they wanted to survive 3. had no rules that they could follow if they just wanted a happy life, the colonizers/exploiters make up the rules as they like. The exploited being on the wrong end of the stick has to buckle 4. have to hide their own culture, religion, believes and/or language if they wanted to survive So I highlighted my own position in history to underline how ridiculous the comparison is. And this is just about the comparison used, I actually agree with the general idea that open source maintainers need to watch for their own well being, should get better (and more predictable) compensation etc. But comparing this to have your children taken away, to have families torn apart, to all the attrocities of slavery is utterly over the top and should not stand uncorrected.
r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
This is why I think that open source / free software is the greatest trick that late stage capitalism ever pulled. It exploits the generosity and naivity of devs who have committed to a particular ideology that, while well motivated at the start, has nevertheless turned out to be extremely easily exploited by corporations who now essentially get an enormous amount of labour for free. What's more there is intense social pressure from large segments of the dev community to both contribute to open source and to publicly endorse and promote "open source values". Even the author refuses to acknowledge that the problem with open source is open source licensing. Dropping the non discrimination clause in open source licenses and demanding payment for labour from large companies, would be enough to solve all these issues. But that is anathema to the ideologues who dominate the conversation.
- nivenkos 4y ago
  It'd be much less so if the developers actually used the AGPL and GPLv3+ etc. Adding payment makes things complicated internationally, etc. though.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "Dropping the non discrimination clause in open source licenses and demanding payment for labour from large companies, would be enough to solve all these issues. " Yes indeed, it would solve all these issues by making companies not use that software anymore and rather have someone rewrite essential parts under a standard proprietary licence.
  - krageon 4y ago
    Good riddance. Corporations getting rich on the backs of unpaid labour that is far more skilled than anything they'll ever have in-house is a travesty.
- Ferret7446 4y ago
  People being too generous for their own good was not invented in the 20th century. If a dev doesn't want to work (with or without pay as the case may be), they can just... not. That is not a fault of the license, which the dev themselves applied to their code, especially when the license explicitly states that the dev is not obligated to provide any support or additional work.
Ferret7446 4y ago
What a strange statement. FOSS development isn't a thing that you sustain. I write some code for myself and I decide to share it. I want to solve a problem, and I find that someone else already solved it and shared it. Sustainability doesn't even enter into the picture. I don't ask to be "sustained" when I work on a hobby any more than were I to read a book or play a game. At some point, perhaps when young programmers joined companies accustomed to using FOSS for everything, many of the community seems to have forgotten this, despite it being front and center on every FOSS license. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. You want it? You do it, or you pay someone to do it. You don't ask for FOSS devs to be sustained, which implies that other people are doing the paying for you.
- jerojero 4y ago
  Well... I don't think things are that simple. Is open source software (OSS) something that benefits society more than closed source software (CSS) ? That's a big question, I think a lot of people consider that yes OSS is better for society. A software that is accesible by many, even those that don't have the means to afford a paid alternative can change someone's life. But then the fact that this kind of work, although good, is not really sustainable in our modern society points out that maybe there are flaws in the system. In reality, it is in most cases more profitable to lock down your software; but although this brings you personally more benefits it does harm society so it seems as though a lot of the incentives in the system are misplaced, because the socio-economic system should probably allow for open source software to be more desirable to produce than closed-source one. So in this sense, why wouldn't we want for producing FOSS to be sustainable? It's a legitimate question and a legitimate critique imo. Again, only if you view FOSS as truly desirable. I think a lot of times people fall into the trap of not really understanding where a statement is coming from; it's important to think about what are the ideas behind one or another statement. If you're a very pragmatic people you will look at reality and construct from there, but if you're a more idealistic person then you're going to construct from where you'd like to be and not from where you are.
creshal 4y ago
Some people really don't understand the concept of pursuing a hobby for the sake of having a hobby, do they?
cercatrova 4y ago
Open source is not a business model. How many articles do we need decrying the lack of OSS devs making money? Like anything, one must market a product for it to have customers, regardless of being OSS or not. A great example is Plausible analytics (MIT licensed so not even copyleft, many might say they're just giving their software away for free) which reached 1.2 million dollars in annual recurring revenue in around 2 years with only a couple of founders. They posted an article where it shows how when it was just the solo developer, they were making a small, somewhat insignificant amount of money, but when they got a marketing co-founder, their growth exploded [0]. They literally went from $400 MRR to $100k MRR, an increase of 2500x in 2 years, all due to having someone market a product they built. I think it's mostly developers who don't really want to (or even understand the value of) marketing for their product who then cry about not making money. Well, are you actually trying to make money? Instead we get articles like these asking for some sort of fund for OSS (which do exist, but again, need to be competed for), asking for some collective solution to their individual problem rather than actually doing something about it themselves while other devs make money hand over fist, or at least enough to not get another job. [0] https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-saas#february-looking-for-a-marketing-co-founder-403-mrr https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-saas#february-looking-...
- rikroots 4y ago
  > I think it's mostly developers who don't really want to (or even understand the value of) marketing for their product who then cry about not making money. This is the truth that hurts. I get to work closely with some extremely good marketing colleagues in my day job; I'm still waiting for some of their knowledge/insights/drive to rub off on me, which I can then apply to marketing my own hobbyist endeavours. Fortunately I'm not expecting to make money from my JS library (or my poetry) so I'm not too disappointed. However ... > Instead we get articles like these asking for some sort of fund for OSS (which do exist, but again, need to be competed for) I did apply for a small grant from something called the Chrome UI fund[1] last December. I thought it would be nice to have some cash to cover hosting costs, incidentals, etc - peanut funding, if you like. Sadly, I've never received any communication about the application or even an acknowledgment that the people running the fund had received it. A polite "Thanks, but no" would have been nice. [1] - https://web.dev/ui-fund/ https://web.dev/ui-fund/
anonyme-honteux 4y ago
This is so much bullshit. Just because there are problems right now doesn't mean they couldn't possibly be fixed. In fact they can be for the good reason that Open Source is very cheap. Think about the price/benefits ratio of Wikipedia. What has ever been so close? We know it's cheap, we know it's valuable, we know it's an important good. The real reason is: why are we not investing more money in it?
TurboHaskal 4y ago
It's only your fault. You need to embrace reality, stop begging and start demanding money from the powerful that are exploiting your work. You will end up with less entitled ungrateful users, more money, and I might end up developing more interesting software at work instead of being forced to glue together some open source components maintained by idealistic kids beyond the poverty line.
throwaway4good 4y ago
What would Karl Marx says to open source developers?
- jerojero 4y ago
  Marx wrote a famous piece called "Fragment on Machines". It actually predates Capital volume 1. He talks about the mix of knowledge and labour to produce machines that are capable of transforming nature (doing labour). From here, Marx explores a world where labour can be produced entirely (or almost entirely) by machines, for him machines are capable of undoing capitalism. The so called post-scarcity society. I think the key part here is that software is actually capable of replacing large portions of labour; think about how much book keeping work is saved through Excel. But what happens when capital owners own all the machines, what happens to people? This is a fundamental problem that Marx explores through out his whole work. I think OSS is actually what machines should look like for Marx, available for everyone at the cost of production and upkeep of the machines which in our case is the cost of copying and storage of the bits that compose the software. But Marx through out his work also explores deeply the relationship between labour and capital, and obviously producing machines requires labour! I know you're probably joking, but I we can learn a lot about OSS from Marx. I mean, a big part of Stallman's philosophy behind the free software movement is inspired by marxist ideas.
  - throwaway4good 4y ago
    I am not sure I am joking. Because on the other hand open source is exploited by big monopolist corporations such as Microsoft and Google. GitHub sits on top of millions of hours worth of free labour and was sold for billions. Android open source effectively creates a mould around Google’s ad based monopoly business where other businesses creating mobile operating systems have to compete with something given away for “free”. Plus plenty of other examples.
silisili 4y ago
This article completely misses the point, IMO. I've contributed to multiple open source projects, to the point I'd wager millions of people per day use some code I've written. It's not for money, it's for giving. The model works best when you can give and take in equal parts. To me at least, it's almost a Wiki, where people can learn and also contribute what they know. Plus, it's great resume fodder, to the point it's paid itself off in dividends. Some people are lucky enough to actually get paid to do full time open source...kudos to them. But not being able to survive off expectations of making money to write open source does not mean open source is not sustainable. The past few decades have shown us just the opposite.
CaptArmchair 4y ago
I'm going to leave this in-depth report here by Nadia Eghbal about funding in Open Source: "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure", commissioned by the Ford Foundation. [1] Her conclusions go beyond "it's a money issue". They touch on the nature of open source as a public good and the skewed relationship between those who use open source and those who maintain it. To my mind, there's a third component, and that's the notion that open source developers themselves are willing to risk poverty to achieve their own particular vision. In a way, that makes them not all to different from other artists who have struggled historically with the same type of tension. What makes all the difference is how code - or art - is valued by those who use it. That is: real or perceived value. While Babel has become a bedrock of frontend development, I can't help but wonder if it would have held a similar spot if it was sold under a closed source license. And if a closed source solution would have sparked someone to build an open source alternative in their free time. [1] https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-reports/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/ https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report...
ivanhoe 4y ago
The problem is not in OSS, but that people now want to live from it. Open source development is primarily a hobby, something that you do for free because you enjoy it, or maybe for self-promotion or something. Obviously some projects get popular and the authors can then afford to dedicate their full time to them, but IMHO it's an unrealistic (and un-needed really) goal for every side-project one comes up with.
greatgib 4y ago
This does not take into account the value of contribution to these projects by external contributors. One of the main selling point of OSS is the collaboration value. If you develop a software for your needs, but the software in itself is just a tool and not your core business, you can share the cost of developing it with thousands of other individuals and companies.
wink 4y ago
I think it completely misses the point that a good portion of us do not want to make our hobbies our job. Yes, the pace is slower and reaction times are slower, but I'm not sure it HAS to be sustainable. Sure, if you're spending all your time on an open source project and want to live off that, it can suck - but is that actually the majority of people?

47 points by ankitmundada 4y ago

It seems that donation based model is not sustainable for OSS. Even the latest report of Open Collective (https://blog.opencollective.com/12m-for-open-source/ https://blog.opencollective.com/12m-for-open-source/) suggests that an OSS projects are receiving just ~4k USD per project in a year on an average. This is below the min-wage of many countires if you look at it at a contributor level. Isn't there any alternative possible? This seems like a huge opportunity if solved correctly.

keikobadthebad 4y ago
It won't get solved while there are no real downsides to the companies leeching it to ignore it.
- ankitmundada 4y ago
  Yes, companies probably need to be donating more, but I also think individual donors can also do their bit.
wmf 4y ago
There are several alternatives to donations although some of them are derided as "fake open source".
- cercatrova 4y ago
  That is because they are fake open source. It's not derision, it's a fact that they switch from OSS to proprietary software. Nothing wrong with that, I also use Windows and macOS, but let's call a spade a spade and not "open source."
- ankitmundada 4y ago
  Like what?
- Arnt 4y ago
  Some of those derisive people are terribly draining. Enough to be a factor in in abandoning an open source project and getting a job at Accenture instead. I might go to fosdem this winter. If I do, it'll be the first such event in almost 20 years: https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/openssl-hate https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/openssl-hate
feoren 4y ago
There are two alternatives possible. One is that we collectively decide to stop shaming software developers for having the audacity to want some level of ownership over the product of their work. We don't shame authors for wanting copyright on their books; we don't shame musicians, artists, designers, or aerospace engineers for asking for some copyright protection for their creative babies. Yet when a software developer does it: fuck that guy! He's trying to take control of what's running on your computer (or the internet server that you're sending requests to ...). Nobody throws a hissy fit when J.K. Rowling has (gasp!) copyright over the Harry Potter books that are sitting on your Kindle. It's your Kindle! Shouldn't you have the right to copy off the words in the books and re-sell it to other people for much less money, undercutting Rowling? How dare she try to get some legal protection that says you can't do that! It's fucking ridiculous when we talk about authors that way, but somehow it's OK to talk about software developers that way. Do you think "open source authors" would make a living from their books? It's already difficult enough for new authors to get any notice; how much worse would it be if prominent authors (who were already rich) came out and founded the "Free Books Foundation" that comes out and says every young author who's trying to sell her books for money is being a greedy asshole and we should fight against them and every author needs to spend a significant portion of their free time contributing to "open books" or they're assholes? Of-fucking-course it's not sustainable. That's because it's always been OK to want copyright on your creative work. I'll be the first to say patents are a huge problem right now and we might be better off without any patent law, but copyright is not the same. Yes, the terms are way too long, and the family of Marvin Gaye proves that "copyright trolls" are possible, but the fundamental concept of copyright is actually critical if we want creative people to ever get a paycheck. The other alternative is Universal Basic Income, so that making "below the minimum wage" doesn't mean "fuck you, you get to die sick and homeless in a tent on the side of the highway". Then people could actually just contribute to OSS because they want to.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  Any developer regardless of open sourcing their work or not automatically gets copyright for whatever they write. That is in fact how they're even able to assign a license in the first place. I also think you're misunderstanding the FSF. Nowhere do they say that selling software is bad, in fact they explicitly say that you can sell your open source software, and also note that it's free as in freedom, not beer. The real argument is that open source is not a business model. Just because someone writes OSS does not mean they will automatically make money, because again, it's a distribution model, not a business model. There are plenty of OSS that make money because they focus on the business and marketing side instead of only the developer side. That most devs don't want to do that and prefer to write code does not justify their crying when no one pays for their free product.

asplake 4y ago

And yet… here we are. A more accurate headline: “It’s hard to make a living off most open source projects”. As for the projects themselves, enough of them are doing just fine.

ankitmundada 4y ago
Probably they're. But majority of the projects are not. Most of them are not even asking for it. Check this - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ckaestne/pdf/icse20-donations.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ckaestne/pdf/icse20-donations.pdf Just 0.2% npm packages asked for donations in 2019.
- asplake 4y ago
  In other words, the vast majority of projects are sustained by something other than donations, and the article has an unsustainable definition of “unsustainable”.

tomdale 4y ago

It seems to me this accounting is missing the significant financial contribution many companies make to open source by way of paying employees to contribute, either part time or full time. Many of the arguments here are premised on the idea that the only valid model for open source funding is a donation model. But if a company believes they get more benefit by contributing via employment instead of patronage, I don’t think it’s fair to say they’re exploiting open source. (Disclaimer: I work at a BigCo where my role sometimes involves open source and standards bodies)

ankitmundada 4y ago
Indeed, but most of these projects are really big & popular projects that the organization depends upon. New/Upcoming projects will still be left out due to this. But we should also note that individual donations can make a huge difference too, if a propoer system is created around it.

socialismisok 4y ago

I'm a huge fan of open source (which, given my username and the fact that open source is basically socialist principles in practice should be no surprise), and it bums me out to no end that we haven't figured out how to keep the folks working on it fed, sheltered, and healthy. How much more open source would we have with a healthy safety net, basic income, and social housing? I'd guess a whole lot more.

vasco 4y ago
> and it bums me out to no end that we haven't figured out how to keep the folks working on it fed, sheltered, and healthy. Is this true? Do you personally know anyone that actively contributes to meaningful open source projects that can't support themselves through a job? > I'd guess a whole lot more I'd guess we'd get a lot of very useless projects, many forks of each other to just slap a different logo on a UI, and the general shenanigans you see people doing when there's open source competitions with prizes for contributions. For some very prolific people, society probably would be better off paying them for work on it full time, say antirez, but that's not going to be a lot of people in the whole world.
- krageon 4y ago
  If 100% of my work was on OSS, I would add probably 10x the value to everyone else's life than I bring at my job. I'm hardly alone in this - most jobs are useless. As such, it is logical for it to bum you out - if only the folks that are capable of making everyone's lives better could be able to do so while being fed, sheltered and cared for medically. It would make society as a whole better, even if it is just due to the fact that we would have to acknowledge that bullshit jobs are not worth more than actual human value.

ranger_danger 4y ago

> Open source is the very worst thing currently going on because it is so incredibly exploitative, it's far more exploitative than any actual company is of the workers who work at the company. > Even the people who are getting paid in open source are getting massively underpaid to do it compared to how much the people who are using their code are making, it's nothing compared to the power that is accreted by the people who have co-opted that work thanks to the open source model. And then mark zuckerberg gets to define how the internet works despite having paid for almost none of the software that his company actually needed to make that work. > It's like feudalism or serfdom, these people did the work and got nothing for it. It's like you took the worst aspects of capitalism for workers and the worst aspects of socialism for workers and put them together, that's open source. You get no power and you get no money. > It's exploitative whether the people chose to be exploited, just because someone chooses to let you exploit them does not meant that you didn't exploit them. And for the record that's how most exploitation works; convincing people to do something that turns out to be very bad for them and very good for you, and that's exactly what the open source movement has turned out to be. > I really don't see the "we post stuff on github under a gpl2 or lgpl or apache or mit license", all that is to me now is just exploitation. You can say that there's solutions but until someone demonstrates that those solutions work, it's the standard "real communism has never been tried" argument. AGPL is the only thing that I've seen so far that's an attempt to fix these fundamentally unfair compensation practices.

c0nducktr 4y ago
What are you quoting? It doesn't appear to be anything from the submitted post. If you just want to reply with your comments there is no need to use the less-than sign.

m463 4y ago

I think people - people in business selling software - try to apply their mental models to open source software. But sometimes these models just don't quite fit. maybe open source software doesn't actually need money - it just needs ways to attract people to give their time and attention. Why does it have to match traditional business models? It's like saying: hacker news isn't sustainable - we need to figure out how to pay people for their submissions and comments. I'm not saying we should ignore capitalism -- It works! But maybe all projects don't need to fit the same model to work well.

mikl 4y ago

> The struggle of open source sustainability is the millennium-old struggle of humanity to free itself from slavery, colonization, and exploitation. This kind of over-dramatisation is totally unwarranted. Unlike slavery, participating in open source is completely voluntary. Unlike colonization, no one is taking your ancestral lands from you. Unlike most kinds of exploitation, the “exploited” can end it any time they want to. No one forces them to continue working on their open source project. I fully agree that more people should donate to support open source, but this is not a violent or coercive situation. Money is not the only motivator in the world. Most open source maintainers are (evidently) not doing it for money, but are motivated by altruism, passion, recognition, etc.

mxkopy 4y ago
> Money is not the only motivator in the world. Money + law are the media through which the most well-defined & extensible social structures are expressed. In the U.S. (as example) it's nonstandard to work outside of this. Obviously they're not the same but the struggle of open source does seem to be one face of a much older struggle. How does someone engage in a sustainable, nonexploitative social contract. How do I trade my cool gizmos that have some benefit to society for food, without having to sell my soul or play some game. Etc.
- mikl 4y ago
  Everyone would like to get paid for doing their hobby, whether it’s music, sports or yes, programming. But very few have such superlative talent that they can make it as musicians or athletes. Getting paid for programming is comparatively easy, there’s lots of open jobs for all kinds of programming. We’re kinda privileged, really. When your engage in open source, you’re deliberately offering your labor for free, it’s right there in the license. So claiming that people are _exploiting_ you when they choose to accept _your offer_ of using the software _gratis_ is complete poppycock. There are some unhealthy dynamics in open source, but over-dramatising the problem with words like _exploitation_ is disingenuous, not helpful.
  - actionfromafar 4y ago

atoav 4y ago

Yeah sure, violent cultural imperialism, with forced relocations, forced re-education, children taken away, men killed is totally the same as me, a white middle european dude, deciding the software they wrote for themselves might serve others and putting it on github. I mean while I agree that the conditions for people writing open source software could be better (e.g. more government money for it), comparing this self chosen past time to slavery, colonialization and exploitation is ... quite bad? Colonialization and slavery have produced magnitudes more of human suffering.

aaa_aaa 4y ago
Why do you say `a white middle european dude`?
- 9dev 4y ago
  To highlight the privilege they have, such as not drowning in the Mediterranean due to being born too far in the south, or having access to highly payed jobs and free education, or not being sexually harassed for having a vagina..?
  - aaa_aaa 4y ago
    This is just unnecessary projection.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Because presumably parent commenter is one?
- atoav 4y ago
  Because this is my heritage? I grew up in a very wealthy, stable, safe society with social healthcare and social safety. On top of that: within that society I grew up as the kid of wealthy parents who did not have to learn a new language to survive and I do not have visual features that make it harder for me to survive. I am basically playing life on toddler-difficulty. Giving this background programming open source software is not something that is forced upon me by evil, exploitative corporate overlords, but a past time I chose to do, partly because I believe in the values of open source software and partly because I like and use open source software and giving back is the right thing to do. If I liked I could immidiately leave open source and still have the happiest of lifes. People which have been really exploited: 1. have a totally different starting point ("difficulty level") 2. have had no choice to do what they liked if they wanted to survive 3. had no rules that they could follow if they just wanted a happy life, the colonizers/exploiters make up the rules as they like. The exploited being on the wrong end of the stick has to buckle 4. have to hide their own culture, religion, believes and/or language if they wanted to survive So I highlighted my own position in history to underline how ridiculous the comparison is. And this is just about the comparison used, I actually agree with the general idea that open source maintainers need to watch for their own well being, should get better (and more predictable) compensation etc. But comparing this to have your children taken away, to have families torn apart, to all the attrocities of slavery is utterly over the top and should not stand uncorrected.

r_hoods_ghost 4y ago

This is why I think that open source / free software is the greatest trick that late stage capitalism ever pulled. It exploits the generosity and naivity of devs who have committed to a particular ideology that, while well motivated at the start, has nevertheless turned out to be extremely easily exploited by corporations who now essentially get an enormous amount of labour for free. What's more there is intense social pressure from large segments of the dev community to both contribute to open source and to publicly endorse and promote "open source values". Even the author refuses to acknowledge that the problem with open source is open source licensing. Dropping the non discrimination clause in open source licenses and demanding payment for labour from large companies, would be enough to solve all these issues. But that is anathema to the ideologues who dominate the conversation.

nivenkos 4y ago
It'd be much less so if the developers actually used the AGPL and GPLv3+ etc. Adding payment makes things complicated internationally, etc. though.
hutzlibu 4y ago
"Dropping the non discrimination clause in open source licenses and demanding payment for labour from large companies, would be enough to solve all these issues. " Yes indeed, it would solve all these issues by making companies not use that software anymore and rather have someone rewrite essential parts under a standard proprietary licence.
- krageon 4y ago
  Good riddance. Corporations getting rich on the backs of unpaid labour that is far more skilled than anything they'll ever have in-house is a travesty.
Ferret7446 4y ago
People being too generous for their own good was not invented in the 20th century. If a dev doesn't want to work (with or without pay as the case may be), they can just... not. That is not a fault of the license, which the dev themselves applied to their code, especially when the license explicitly states that the dev is not obligated to provide any support or additional work.

Ferret7446 4y ago

What a strange statement. FOSS development isn't a thing that you sustain. I write some code for myself and I decide to share it. I want to solve a problem, and I find that someone else already solved it and shared it. Sustainability doesn't even enter into the picture. I don't ask to be "sustained" when I work on a hobby any more than were I to read a book or play a game. At some point, perhaps when young programmers joined companies accustomed to using FOSS for everything, many of the community seems to have forgotten this, despite it being front and center on every FOSS license. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. You want it? You do it, or you pay someone to do it. You don't ask for FOSS devs to be sustained, which implies that other people are doing the paying for you.

jerojero 4y ago
Well... I don't think things are that simple. Is open source software (OSS) something that benefits society more than closed source software (CSS) ? That's a big question, I think a lot of people consider that yes OSS is better for society. A software that is accesible by many, even those that don't have the means to afford a paid alternative can change someone's life. But then the fact that this kind of work, although good, is not really sustainable in our modern society points out that maybe there are flaws in the system. In reality, it is in most cases more profitable to lock down your software; but although this brings you personally more benefits it does harm society so it seems as though a lot of the incentives in the system are misplaced, because the socio-economic system should probably allow for open source software to be more desirable to produce than closed-source one. So in this sense, why wouldn't we want for producing FOSS to be sustainable? It's a legitimate question and a legitimate critique imo. Again, only if you view FOSS as truly desirable. I think a lot of times people fall into the trap of not really understanding where a statement is coming from; it's important to think about what are the ideas behind one or another statement. If you're a very pragmatic people you will look at reality and construct from there, but if you're a more idealistic person then you're going to construct from where you'd like to be and not from where you are.

creshal 4y ago

Some people really don't understand the concept of pursuing a hobby for the sake of having a hobby, do they?

cercatrova 4y ago

Open source is not a business model. How many articles do we need decrying the lack of OSS devs making money? Like anything, one must market a product for it to have customers, regardless of being OSS or not. A great example is Plausible analytics (MIT licensed so not even copyleft, many might say they're just giving their software away for free) which reached 1.2 million dollars in annual recurring revenue in around 2 years with only a couple of founders. They posted an article where it shows how when it was just the solo developer, they were making a small, somewhat insignificant amount of money, but when they got a marketing co-founder, their growth exploded [0]. They literally went from $400 MRR to $100k MRR, an increase of 2500x in 2 years, all due to having someone market a product they built. I think it's mostly developers who don't really want to (or even understand the value of) marketing for their product who then cry about not making money. Well, are you actually trying to make money? Instead we get articles like these asking for some sort of fund for OSS (which do exist, but again, need to be competed for), asking for some collective solution to their individual problem rather than actually doing something about it themselves while other devs make money hand over fist, or at least enough to not get another job. [0] https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-saas#february-looking-for-a-marketing-co-founder-403-mrr https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-saas#february-looking-...

rikroots 4y ago
> I think it's mostly developers who don't really want to (or even understand the value of) marketing for their product who then cry about not making money. This is the truth that hurts. I get to work closely with some extremely good marketing colleagues in my day job; I'm still waiting for some of their knowledge/insights/drive to rub off on me, which I can then apply to marketing my own hobbyist endeavours. Fortunately I'm not expecting to make money from my JS library (or my poetry) so I'm not too disappointed. However ... > Instead we get articles like these asking for some sort of fund for OSS (which do exist, but again, need to be competed for) I did apply for a small grant from something called the Chrome UI fund[1] last December. I thought it would be nice to have some cash to cover hosting costs, incidentals, etc - peanut funding, if you like. Sadly, I've never received any communication about the application or even an acknowledgment that the people running the fund had received it. A polite "Thanks, but no" would have been nice. [1] - https://web.dev/ui-fund/ https://web.dev/ui-fund/

anonyme-honteux 4y ago

This is so much bullshit. Just because there are problems right now doesn't mean they couldn't possibly be fixed. In fact they can be for the good reason that Open Source is very cheap. Think about the price/benefits ratio of Wikipedia. What has ever been so close? We know it's cheap, we know it's valuable, we know it's an important good. The real reason is: why are we not investing more money in it?

TurboHaskal 4y ago

It's only your fault. You need to embrace reality, stop begging and start demanding money from the powerful that are exploiting your work. You will end up with less entitled ungrateful users, more money, and I might end up developing more interesting software at work instead of being forced to glue together some open source components maintained by idealistic kids beyond the poverty line.

throwaway4good 4y ago

What would Karl Marx says to open source developers?

jerojero 4y ago
Marx wrote a famous piece called "Fragment on Machines". It actually predates Capital volume 1. He talks about the mix of knowledge and labour to produce machines that are capable of transforming nature (doing labour). From here, Marx explores a world where labour can be produced entirely (or almost entirely) by machines, for him machines are capable of undoing capitalism. The so called post-scarcity society. I think the key part here is that software is actually capable of replacing large portions of labour; think about how much book keeping work is saved through Excel. But what happens when capital owners own all the machines, what happens to people? This is a fundamental problem that Marx explores through out his whole work. I think OSS is actually what machines should look like for Marx, available for everyone at the cost of production and upkeep of the machines which in our case is the cost of copying and storage of the bits that compose the software. But Marx through out his work also explores deeply the relationship between labour and capital, and obviously producing machines requires labour! I know you're probably joking, but I we can learn a lot about OSS from Marx. I mean, a big part of Stallman's philosophy behind the free software movement is inspired by marxist ideas.
- throwaway4good 4y ago
  I am not sure I am joking. Because on the other hand open source is exploited by big monopolist corporations such as Microsoft and Google. GitHub sits on top of millions of hours worth of free labour and was sold for billions. Android open source effectively creates a mould around Google’s ad based monopoly business where other businesses creating mobile operating systems have to compete with something given away for “free”. Plus plenty of other examples.

silisili 4y ago

This article completely misses the point, IMO. I've contributed to multiple open source projects, to the point I'd wager millions of people per day use some code I've written. It's not for money, it's for giving. The model works best when you can give and take in equal parts. To me at least, it's almost a Wiki, where people can learn and also contribute what they know. Plus, it's great resume fodder, to the point it's paid itself off in dividends. Some people are lucky enough to actually get paid to do full time open source...kudos to them. But not being able to survive off expectations of making money to write open source does not mean open source is not sustainable. The past few decades have shown us just the opposite.

CaptArmchair 4y ago

I'm going to leave this in-depth report here by Nadia Eghbal about funding in Open Source: "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure", commissioned by the Ford Foundation. [1] Her conclusions go beyond "it's a money issue". They touch on the nature of open source as a public good and the skewed relationship between those who use open source and those who maintain it. To my mind, there's a third component, and that's the notion that open source developers themselves are willing to risk poverty to achieve their own particular vision. In a way, that makes them not all to different from other artists who have struggled historically with the same type of tension. What makes all the difference is how code - or art - is valued by those who use it. That is: real or perceived value. While Babel has become a bedrock of frontend development, I can't help but wonder if it would have held a similar spot if it was sold under a closed source license. And if a closed source solution would have sparked someone to build an open source alternative in their free time. [1] https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-reports/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/ https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report...

ivanhoe 4y ago

The problem is not in OSS, but that people now want to live from it. Open source development is primarily a hobby, something that you do for free because you enjoy it, or maybe for self-promotion or something. Obviously some projects get popular and the authors can then afford to dedicate their full time to them, but IMHO it's an unrealistic (and un-needed really) goal for every side-project one comes up with.

greatgib 4y ago

This does not take into account the value of contribution to these projects by external contributors. One of the main selling point of OSS is the collaboration value. If you develop a software for your needs, but the software in itself is just a tool and not your core business, you can share the cost of developing it with thousands of other individuals and companies.

wink 4y ago

I think it completely misses the point that a good portion of us do not want to make our hobbies our job. Yes, the pace is slower and reaction times are slower, but I'm not sure it HAS to be sustainable. Sure, if you're spending all your time on an open source project and want to live off that, it can suck - but is that actually the majority of people?